Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why

by Laurence Gonzales

We believe in free will and rational behavior. The difficulty with those assumptions comes when we see rational people doing irrational things.

it’s not what’s in your pack that separates the quick from the dead. It’s not even what’s in your mind. Corny as it

The first lesson is to remain calm, not to panic.

they were able to concentrate their attention on the matter at hand.

The first rule is: Face reality. Good survivors aren’t immune to fear. They know what’s happening, and it does “scare the living shit out of” them. It’s all a question of what you do next.

“high state of arousal,” nothing too complex was going to get through anyway.

if you let yourself get too serious, you will get too scared,

Fear is good. Too much fear is not.

emotions could trump reason and that to succeed we have to use the reins of reason on the horse of emotion.

Be aware that you’re not all there. You are in a profoundly altered state when it comes to perception, cognition, memory, and emotion.

Emotion is an instinctive response aimed at self-preservation.

The nervous system fires more energetically, the blood changes its chemistry so that it can coagulate more rapidly, muscle tone alters, digestion stops, and various chemicals flood the body to put it in a state of high readiness for whatever needs to be done.

adaptation, which is another word for survival.

how important it is not only to control emotions but to develop the appropriate secondary emotions.

Fear in the cockpit, as Yankovich put it, is a knife fight in a phone booth. You literally have to fight to move your frozen hand to correct the mistake that you see developing before your eyes. You are split.

“hostile takeover of consciousness by emotion”

The pilot’s rising curve of fear went off the charts in one direction, while the rising curve of his motivation toward the deck went off the charts in the other.

that quality which is perhaps the only one which may be said with certainty to make for success, self-control.”

addition, stress (or any strong emotion) erodes the ability to perceive.

Under extreme stress, the visual field actually narrows. (Police officers who have been shot report tunnel vision.) Stress causes most people to focus narrowly on the thing that they consider most important, and it may be the wrong thing.

This is exactly what was said by Keith Code in Twist of the Wrist.

the wilderness is novel and full of unfamiliar hazards. To survive in it, the body must learn and adapt.

being threatened manageable.

“Fear is like fire. It can cook for you. It can heat your house. Or it can burn you down.”

The most remarkable discovery of modern neuroscience is that the body controls the brain as much as the brain controls the body.

When a decision to act must be made instantly, it is made through a system of emotional bookmarks.

Homo sapiens (from the Latin sapere, to taste, as in “to taste the world”).

Fear of death, fear of height, fear of dark, fear of drowning, all combined to

make him descend deeper and deeper into himself and find what was there, to change it, to build it.

the training is only as good as the environment.

The emotions are another mechanism for defining self (actually creating the self) during the process of protecting what is within from what is without, both by avoiding or fighting what is bad and by seeking out what is good.

emotional system evolves continuously, taking experiences and situations and attaching emotional value to them in subtle gradations of risk and reward.

Moderate stress enhances learning.

The knowledge involved in that risk-reward loop does not involve reasoning. It comes to the child coded in feelings, which represent emotional experiences in a particular environment. If the environment changes, if it has unfamiliar or subtly different hazards, those adaptations may turn out to be inappropriate.

And if he’s had the right experiences, it will instantly direct correct action.

We think we believe what we know, but we only truly believe what we feel.

Rational (or conscious) thought always lags behind the emotional reaction.

“Choking is about thinking too much. Panic is about thinking too little.”

the concept of idleness as a haven of safety couldn’t compete with the feeling of motion as survival.

Using his reason to manage emotion and emotion to inform reason, he survived.

So a survivor expects the world to keep changing and keeps his senses always tuned to: What’s up? The survivor is continuously adapting.

But when he’d show us the cards, one by one, he’d watch our eyes. When we saw the card that we’d picked, our pupils would dilate, and he’d know which card we’d picked. The involuntary physical response is proof that there is an emotional component to the process of matching the model with the world.

“We construct an expected world because we can’t handle the complexity of the present one,

unconsciously consulted his mental model to rate risk and reward.

slaved to emotion, which triggers action.

Stress doesn’t take long to confuse you.

a closed attitude can kill you.

where the plan, a memory of the future, tries on reality to see if it fits.

Plans are an integral part of survival.

In an environment that has high objective hazards, the longer it takes to dislodge the imagined world in favor of the real one, the greater the risk.

We must plan. But we must be able to let go of the plan, too.