Unthinkable: Who Survives When Disaster Strikes - and Why Read online

  People who knew where the stairwells were in the World Trade Center were less likely to get injured or have long-term health problems. That’s partly because they had the training they needed to take action under extreme stress. And, later, they could take comfort in their own competence. The same is true with police officers or firefighters. If they have the skills they need, they not only have a higher chance of survival; they fare better psychologically after the crisis. They’ve saved themselves once; they can do it again.

  It makes intuitive sense that the more you expose yourself to safe stress, the less sensitive you would be to its effects. Just as athletes have a “zone,” in which they achieve maximum performance, so do regular people. Each individual’s zone is shaped a little differently, as we will see in the next chapter. But everyone’s zone looks like a bell curve: at first, stress makes us perform better; but too much starts to yield diminishing returns. Beyond a critical inflection point, we begin to unravel altogether.

  Sports psychologists were among the first to figure this out. Then, in the 1980s, a police academy instructor in St. Louis, Missouri, named Bruce Siddle began to take what they had learned and apply it to combat situations. He found that people perform best when their heart rates are between 115 and 145 beats per minute (resting heart rate is usually about 75 bpm). At this range, people tend to react quickly, see clearly, and manage complex motor skills (like driving).

  But after about 145 bpm, people begin to deteriorate. Their voices begin to shake, probably because their blood has concentrated toward their core, shutting down the complex motor control of the larynx and leaving the face pale and the hands clumsy. Vision, hearing, and depth perception can also start to decline. If the stress intensifies, people will usually experience some amnesia after the trauma.

  A young Israeli Blackhawk helicopter pilot told me that he learned this lesson on his first mission. This pilot (the Israeli military does not allow journalists to use the first or last names of its members) was awakened at 5:00 A.M. to respond to an emergency. The adrenaline yanked him out of his bed. He’d just completed six months of intense training in the elite unit. He headed for the helicopter. This call was not particularly dangerous, but now that the mission was real, he found that he was virtually useless. On the helicopter, he couldn’t seem to clear his head. “I sat down and looked around. I started doing what I was supposed to do, but very, very slowly. I was two steps behind,” he says. His body moved in slow motion, just like the people evacuating the Trade Center. At one point, instead of turning off one of the radios, he accidentally shut off the ignition to one of the engines. He’d overdosed on stress hormones. Luckily, he had a copilot with more experience. The mission was completed without incident.

  But even veteran pilots can still experience a brain drain. Laurence Gonzales, in his book Deep Survival, quotes his father, an Army pilot in World War II, explaining what happens to the mind as it prepares to fly a fighter jet off an aircraft carrier: “When you walk across the ramp to your airplane, you lose half your IQ.”

  Everybody is different, of course. The performance ranges will vary depending on the individual. But the heart rate of untrained people in life-or-death situations can instantly shoot up to 200 bpm—a stratospheric level that is hard to negotiate. The trick is to stretch out your zone through training and experience. Even a little preparation—like noticing where the exit is before things go awry—can go a long way. “If you give people an option, something to anchor onto when they don’t know what to do, that small help is huge. That is the difference,” says Ephimia Morphew-Lu, a human factors specialist at NASA until 2004.

  Tunnel Vision

  Sometimes the fix is astonishingly simple. In the 1970s, airplane pilots started to realize that tunnel vision was a serious problem in the cockpit. The more stressed they got, the less they saw. And the problem went beyond just vision; as stress increased, they tended to become mentally obsessed with one data point to the exclusion of all others.

  On the evening of December 29, 1972, an Eastern Air Lines jet coming from New York City began its final approach to Miami International Airport. The flight had been uneventful, and the weather in Miami was clear, with unrestricted visibility. The landing should have been perfect. The plane carried 163 passengers, most of them returning from or leaving for holiday vacations.

  But when the pilots tried to lower the landing gear, they didn’t get a green light indicating that the gear was fully down. At 11:34 P.M, the captain, who had more than three decades of experience, called the Miami control tower to explain that he would have to circle while they worked on getting the green light. The plane climbed to two thousand feet and began a wide U-turn over the airport.

  For the next eight minutes, the flight crew tried to figure out what was wrong. Why wouldn’t the light go on? The captain ordered two different people to try to visually confirm that the gear was down, but they couldn’t see anything in the dark. The first officer pulled out the nose-gear light to inspect it, but had problems putting it back in. All the while, the captain offered advice and issued orders. The entire cockpit crew was focused on getting that green light on.

  At 11:40, a half-second alarm tone went off in the cockpit, indicating that the plane had deviated from its altitude. The transcript from the cockpit voice recorder shows that no one said anything about the alarm. It was as if they hadn’t heard it at all. The crew continued to speculate about possible reasons for the light problem. But then, two minutes later, the first officer noticed another problem.

  “We did something to the altitude,” he said.

  “What?” the captain said.

  The first officer backtracked: “We’re still at 2,000, right?”

  Then the captain said, “Hey, what’s happening here?”

  Another warning sound began to beep, more insistently this time. Two seconds later, the plane crashed into the Everglades, nineteen miles from the airport.

  Investigators would find that the plane had been in fine working order—except for the lightbulbs in the landing-gear indicator, which had burned out. While the flight crew worried about the light, the plane had dipped toward the earth. When it sliced into the soggy marshland, it disintegrated on impact. The wreckage was scattered over an area 1,600 feet long and 330 feet wide. A total of 101 people died.

  The crash, and several other unnervingly similar accidents in the 1970s, convinced aviation researchers that pilots needed to be trained to avoid such myopia—or what is known in the industry as “task saturation.” “This happens to everybody under stress,” says Rogers V. Shaw II, who trains pilots for the FAA. “If there’s not enough training, you get channelized on one thing, and you forget the whole big picture.”

  Today, Shaw trains pilots to proactively scan their instrument panels, over and over again, to counteract the tendency to fixate on one problem. He also teaches pilots to make sure one member of the flight crew remains focused on flying the plane at all times. And he hammers home the importance of open communication and dissent. “In the early ’70s, the captain was God,” says Shaw. “Now a lot of people send their captains to charm school, if you want to call it, so that they can create a climate where everybody feels that, if they see something they don’t like, they can discuss it.”

  It would be a mistake to say tunnel vision is no longer a problem in cockpits. But it is a more manageable problem. On July 19, 1989, a United flight en route from Denver to Chicago suffered a catastrophic engine failure while cruising at thirty-seven thousand feet. The plane became almost impossible to control. But the flight crew, working together, managed to spontaneously invent ways to rein in the bucking plane. Forty-five minutes later, they crash-landed the plane in Sioux City, Iowa. Of the 296 people aboard, 184 survived. The plane’s captain, Alfred C. Haynes, credits luck and the crew’s training for the high survival rate. Immediately after hearing the initial explosion, Haynes checked to make sure someone was tasked with flying the plane, according to an account he wrote after
the crash. When he saw that his first officer was focused on doing just that, he turned to investigating the cause of the explosion. “There were 103 years of flying experience in that cockpit when we faced our end…but not one minute of those 103 years had been spent operating an aircraft the way we were trying to fly it,” Haynes wrote. “If we had not worked together, with everybody coming up with ideas…I do not think we would have made it to Sioux City.”

  Police officers, like pilots, are sometimes trained to repeatedly scan their horizon to avoid fixation. (Police have also learned to exploit tunnel vision in others by intentionally stepping to the side to get into a suspect’s blind spot.) Just knowing enough to identify certain stress reactions can improve people’s performance. But most regular people don’t know to expect tunnel vision—even though they experience it every day. You have suffered from a mild version of tunnel vision yourself, maybe even on your way to work today. When you talk on your cell phone while driving, your range of sight narrows significantly, according to a 2002 University of Rhode Island study. The distraction is so strong that your case of tunnel vision continues well after the phone conversation has ended. The brain is built to focus on one thing at a time, whether in a traffic jam or during an emergency landing. We have built technology for multitasking, but the brain has not changed.

  Bulking Up the Brain

  The best way to negotiate stress is through repeated, realistic training. The military used to train soldiers to shoot bull’s-eye targets, and it didn’t work very well. Now soldiers train using highly realistic targets and video games, as retired Lieutenant Colonel Dave Grossman explains in his book, On Combat. Advanced police training now relies on actual gunfights—using gunpowder-propelled, paint-filled plastic bullets that actually sting when they hit you. Self-defense courses use “model muggings,” in which a pretend assailant, wearing heavy padding, relentlessly attacks the student. Fire drills work the same way, especially for children, who tend to get the best training for disasters in our society. “Kids remember ‘stop, drop, and roll’ because we make them rehearse it—not because we make them say it,” says Richard Gist, a psychologist who works for the Kansas City, Missouri, Fire Department. The trick is to embed the behavior in the subconscious, so that it is automatic, almost like the rest of the fear response.

  The idea that we can negotiate our fear response is a fairly radical one. For most of history, human beings have assumed a bright line between instinct and learning. But the past decade of brain research has proven that we are actually a magnificent work in progress. The brain literally changes in structure and function throughout our lives, depending on what we do. Blind people who read Braille increase the size of the brain region that processes touch. A small but charming 2004 study published in Nature found that people who learned how to juggle actually increased the gray matter in their brains in certain locations. When they stopped juggling, the new gray matter vanished. A similar structural change appears to occur in people who learn a second language. Just like a novice cab driver in New York City, the brain starts out slow and inefficient and finds shortcuts as time goes on. This way, we can compensate for our own weaknesses. Even if our fear response is ancient, we can continually upgrade it for modernity.

  Some reflexes cannot be entirely overridden, of course. The human startle response, for example, is something we possess from the womb. The first 150 milliseconds of the startle response begin with a very small but reliable reaction. We blink. Like almost all of the fear responses, blinking serves a useful purpose—by potentially protecting our eyes from harm. (In laboratory experiments, people blink even more rapidly when they see unpleasant images.) Meanwhile, our head and upper body automatically lean forward, and the arms bend at the elbow—positioning the body to fight, cower, or flee. Instantly, the hands begin to tighten into fists—generating about twenty-five pounds of pressure in adults.

  For years, police academy instructors tried to train officers not to flinch. In 1992, a Canadian police officer and trainer named Darren Laur decided to see if the training was working. He ran eighty-five police officers through an experiment in which they were unexpectedly confronted by a knife-wielding attacker. Laur videotaped all of the confrontations. What he saw was disconcerting: a majority of the officers completely ignored their training. They collapsed into a crouch, brought both their hands up to protect their head, and backed away from the attacker. They flinched, in other words.

  After watching the tapes, Laur realized it made more sense to train around the flinch, instead of against it. Shooting instructors have learned the same lesson. Above roughly 145 bpm, most people’s movements become symmetrical: whatever one hand does, so does the other. If they are startled, that automatic fist-tightening response will happen in both hands, and they will almost certainly fire their guns at anything in front of them. Today, many police officers are trained to never keep their fingers on their gun triggers. That way, the flinch has fewer consequences.

  Combat Lamaze

  On 9/11, Manuel Chea, a systems administrator on the forty-ninth floor of Tower 1, did everything right. As soon as the building stopped swaying, he jumped up from his cubicle and ran to the closest stairwell. It was an automatic reaction. As he left, he noticed that some of his colleagues were collecting things to take with them. “I was probably the fastest one to leave,” he says. An hour later, he was outside.

  When I asked him why he had moved so swiftly, Chea offered several theories. He knew where the stairway was because he used it all the time to go to the cafeteria. He was familiar with the escape route, a huge advantage. Also, he had experience with fire. The previous year, his house in Queens, New York, had burned to the ground. He had escaped, blinded by smoke. As a child in Peru, he had been in a serious earthquake. Then, later, he’d been in several smaller quakes in Los Angeles. He was basically a disaster expert.

  Most of us, I think it’s fair to say, have no obvious way to train for life-or-death situations that may never happen. Other than fire drills, which are usually not very realistic anyway, there aren’t many opportunities to get to know your disaster personality in a safe environment. There should be disaster amusement parks filled with simulation rides. Ride in a funnel cloud! Feel the g-forces of an earthquake! Survive a tsunami! And sign this waiver!

  But for now, there are simpler ways to train the fear response. One of the most surprising tactics, taught in all seriousness to some of the scariest, gun-wielding men in the world, is breathing. Over and over again, when I ask combat trainers how people can master their fear, this is what they talk about. Of course, they call it “combat breathing” or “tactical breathing” when they teach it to Green Berets and FBI agents. But it’s the same basic concept taught in yoga and Lamaze classes. One version taught to police works like this: breathe in for four counts; hold for four counts; breathe out for four counts; hold for four; start again. That’s it.

  Keith Nelson Borders was shot ten times in six shoot-outs as a police officer in Oklahoma and then Nevada from 1994 to 2005. Every time he got shot, he breathed deeply and methodically, and he swears by the strategy. “It keeps you very calm. You don’t start to hyperventilate or panic. Everything just kind of goes in slow motion for you,” says Nelson, who is now retired at age forty due to injuries. “You say, OK, here’s what’s going on, I can handle this. I got shot in the head, and I’m still alive, things are working, so it’s not that bad.”

  How could something so simple be so powerful? The breath is one of the few actions that reside in both our somatic nervous system (which we can consciously control) and our autonomic system (which includes our heartbeat and other actions we cannot easily access). So the breath is a bridge between the two, as combat instructor Dave Grossman explains. By consciously slowing down the breath, we can de-escalate the primal fear response that otherwise takes over.

  Charles Humes, a police officer in Toledo, Ohio, has devised a clever way to combine breathing with realistic training. As a young officer, he foun
d he lost control of his body and mind in high-speed car chases. “I was a threat to myself and others,” he remembers. “My voice would go up several octaves. My radio communications would become unintelligible, tunnel vision would take over, and my reasoning and common sense would go right out the window.” To try to tame this response, he started using breathing tactics he had learned in martial arts. Every day, he played a tape recording of a police siren for five or ten minutes. As the siren shrieked, he breathed deeply—in for four, hold for four, out for four. He wanted to make his breathing an automatic response to the siren. “It all goes back to the Pavlovian theory,” he says. “It’s not rocket science.” After about a month of this, he sounded like a different person over the radio. “I even have some of the radio tapes from some of my old pursuits, and you could tell, just listening to the tone of the voice and clarity, that I was much more under control. I wasn’t getting nearly as hyped up.”

  There is a wonderful scientific study that shows how rhythmic breathing and mindfulness can actually alter the topography of the brain. A few years ago, an instructor at Harvard Medical School named Sara Lazar scanned the brains of twenty people who meditate for forty minutes a day. These weren’t Buddhist monks. Just regular people who had a long history of meditating. When she compared their brain images to those of nonmeditating people of similar ages and backgrounds, she found a highly significant difference. The meditators had 5 percent thicker brain tissue in the parts of the prefrontal cortex that are engaged during meditation—that is, the parts that handle emotion regulation, attention, and working memory, all of which help control stress.