Twenty Years Later

by Charlie Donlea

“behavioral inaction,” a symptom described by the survival experts who had consulted on the episode. Also called “dislocation of expectation,” it was the mind’s response to a traumatic situation. The brain attempts to correlate the current situation with a known experience from the past. As the frontal lobe loops in repetitive circles, trying but failing to find a similar situation to work from, the body freezes and waits for directions from the brain.