Unthinkable: Who Survives When Disaster Strikes - and Why Page 9

  A Plane Crash Imagined

  In order to imagine what it might feel like to lose your senses under stress, I visited the Federal Aviation Administration’s training academy in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. In a field behind one of their labs, they have hoisted a section of a jet onto risers. One afternoon, I boarded the mock-up plane along with thirty flight-attendant supervisors. Inside, it looked just like a normal plane, and the flight attendants made jokes, pretending to be passengers. “Could I get a cocktail over here, please? I paid a lot of money for this seat!” But once smoke started pouring into the cabin, everyone got quiet.

  As most people do, I underestimated how quickly the smoke would fill the space, from ceiling to floor, like a black curtain unfurling in front of us. The smoke was nontoxic, but it still had the desired effect. Most people have no concept of how little they will be able to see in a fire, and how much harder the brain will have to work as a result. We would get a very mild preview.

  In less than twenty seconds, all we could see were the pin lights along the floor. As we stood to evacuate, there was a loud thump. In a crowd of experienced flight attendants, someone had hit his or her head on an overhead bin. Under a minor amount of stress, our brains were already performing clumsily. As we filed toward the exit slide, crouched low, holding on to the person in front of us, several of the flight attendants had to be comforted by their colleagues. Then we emerged into the light, and the mood brightened. The flight attendants cheered as their colleagues slid, one by one, to the ground.

  Next, we headed to the indoor pool for a water rescue. We wore regular clothing, just like passengers, and jumped into the pool—yanking a cord to inflate our life jackets as we entered the water. (In real crashes, people usually ignore instructions and inflate their life vests while they’re still on the plane—an understandable mistake, given the stress of the situation. But the inflated vest is an unwieldy, bloated affair that takes up valuable space in a plane and makes it hard to walk and see.) The first exercise involved getting picked up by a “helicopter” in a basket lowered from the ceiling. Once again, there was a lot of clapping and cheering.

  But then we moved on to the life-raft exercise. Just getting into the giant, yellow raft was an ordeal. We had to heave each other up and into the raft. In the tumult, one flight attendant got a black eye and had to sit out the rest of the simulation. Once inside the boat, the strong smell of vomit (from the chemically treated plastic of the raft) heightened the realism. Then we had to unfurl the raft’s unwieldy tarp over our heads to create a shelter against the frigid “waves” crashing down on top of us (courtesy of a merciless FAA trainer with a hose). In the dim light, a female flight attendant with a loud, low voice shouted out instructions from a rescue kit while the rest of us bailed water and held on to the tarp.

  It was hard to hear or think with the constant thud of the water hitting our precarious plastic shelter. Every thirty seconds or so, when a spray of ice-cold water leaked through, my fellow survivors would erupt in shrieks. At that moment, I remembered once being told by a military researcher that very cold or very hot environments tend to degrade human performance very, very quickly. The effect tends to be geometric. Sitting there for just five minutes in the wet, stinking huddle, I felt suddenly exhausted. I knew I’d be out of there in time for dinner. I knew my life wasn’t even remotely in danger, and I did not feel afraid. But still, I felt surprisingly drained. My brain must have been working harder than I consciously realized. At that moment, the idea of quietly surrendering in a real disaster didn’t seem quite so unimaginable.

  Down the Rabbit Hole

  In life-or-death situations, people gain certain powers and lose others. Asencio found he suddenly had crystal-clear vision. (In fact, his sight remained stronger for several months after the siege, leading his optometrist to temporarily lower his prescription.) Other people, a majority in most studies, get tunnel vision. Their field of sight shrinks by about 70 percent, so that in some cases they seem to be peering out of a keyhole, and they lose track of anything going on in their periphery. Most people also get a sort of tunnel hearing. Certain sounds become strangely muted; others are louder than life.

  Stress hormones are like hallucinogenic drugs. Almost no one gets through an ordeal like this without experiencing some kind of altered reality. In one study of shootings of civilians by police officers, 94 percent of officers experienced at least one distortion, according to criminologist David Klinger’s interviews with the officers involved. But very few knew what to expect beforehand. So their distortions distracted and even embarrassed some of them.

  One of the most fascinating distortions, reported in more than half of the police-shooting cases, is the strange slowing down of time. Time distortion is so common that scientists have a name for it: tachypsychia, derived from the Greek for “speed of the mind.” Drivers remember the bumper stickers of the car they rear-ended. Mugging victims remember how many chambers the robber’s gun had. Consider this officer’s memory from a gun battle, as told to police psychologist Alexis Artwohl: “I looked over, drawn to the sudden mayhem, and was puzzled to see beer cans slowly floating through the air past my face. What was even more puzzling was that they had the word Federal printed on the bottom. They turned out to be the shell casings ejected by the officer who was firing next to me.”

  Why does time seem to slow down in moments of terror? What is happening in our brain? And might it be saving our lives, whatever it is? When David Eagleman was in third grade, he and his older brother went exploring in a house under construction in their neighborhood. His father had explicitly told them not to play there, but the jungle gym of lumber was too tempting. As he scrambled across the roof, Eagleman lost his footing. He found himself falling twelve feet to the ground.

  But the descent felt nothing like he would have expected. “The thing is, the fall took forever,” he remembers. And instead of being afraid as he floated through space, Eagleman found that his brain was just busy trying to figure out what to do. He felt totally calm. “I had this whole series of thoughts that I can remember even now, two-thirds of a lifetime later.” Like Asencio, he rifled through his mental database in search of a script. But he could not find one that was of much help. First he considered grabbing for the edge of the roof, but then he realized that it was too late for that. Then, as he watched the red brick below get closer and closer, he suddenly thought of Alice in Wonderland. “I was thinking that this must be what it felt like when she fell down the rabbit hole,” he says. It was only after he landed, face-first and bloodied, that he felt fear. He jumped up and ran to a neighbor’s house.

  Eagleman grew up to be a neuroscientist. Today he works at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, where he spends a lot of time trying to re-create that slow-motion fall. “I’m trying to figure out how the brain represents time,” he says. We don’t think about it, but under normal circumstances, your brain is already “controlling” time. Your sense of touch, vision, and hearing all operate using different architectures. Imagine your brain as a clock store: Data comes in at slightly different times, so no two clocks tick at exactly the same pace. But your brain synchs everything up so you are not confused. How does the brain do this? And what is it doing differently when things seem to move in slow motion?

  Nobody really knows. So in 2006, Eagleman, then at the University of Texas, decided to try to figure it out through a rather unusual experiment. He designed a plan to scare people so badly that they might experience slow-motion time. The goal was to measure whether people actually saw things in slow motion—or whether it just seemed that way in their memories afterward. “We study vision by studying illusion, which is when the visual system gets things wrong,” he says. “I’m trying to do the same thing with temporal distortion.”

  After eight months, Eagleman got approval for the study from his university’s committee on human experimentation. (“It was an absolute miracle,” he says.) And one fine spring day, he took twenty-three volunteers to the to
p of a 150-foot tower in Dallas. It was blustery outside—all the better for Eagleman’s purposes. One by one, he strapped each subject into a harness, dangled each over the side of the tower, and then dropped each one—backward—into the air. It was important that they fall backward, Eagleman felt, for maximum fear factor. Plummeting toward the ground, the volunteers reached speeds of 70 mph before safely hitting the net below. Eagleman tried out the contraption himself. It was just like falling off the roof! “It is freaking scary. I felt like a changed man afterwards. Whew! Oh, boy,” he says. “It goes against every Darwinian instinct you have to not have anything to grab on to.”

  Now that he could trigger the fear response, Eagleman needed to measure the time distortion. So each volunteer was outfitted with a special watch. The screen flashed a number faster than the human eye could normally see it. As the students fell, they looked at the watch and tried to read the number. If the students could see it, Eagleman reasoned, then perhaps we humans actually do have superpowers under extreme stress: our brains can see better than normally, creating the sensation that time is actually slowing down.

  The results were humbling. “You’re not like Neo in the Matrix,” Eagleman says. All of the volunteers did indeed feel like they were moving in slow motion. “Everybody reports it was the longest three seconds of their lives,” Eagleman says. But none of them could see the number. Eagleman thinks this means that time distortion primarily exists in our memory. “Time in general is not slowing down. It’s just that in a fearful situation, you recruit other parts of the brain, like the amygdala, to lay down memories. And because they are laid down more richly, it seems as though it must have taken longer.” In other words, trauma creates such a searing impression on our brains that it feels, in retrospect, like it happened in slow motion.

  Eagleman is planning more free-fall experiments. Among other unexplained mysteries, he’s curious about why some people report time slowing down, while others feel like it speeds up. (Asencio, remember, felt both sensations at different times.) Eagleman is also perplexed by the way our hearing changes under extreme stress. In studies of police shootings, many officers say sounds became muted or disappear altogether. Sometimes, this can be problematic—when police involved in shootings have no recollection of firing their guns, for example. But it can also be ingenious: just when we need to focus, the brain shuts off any sound that might distract us.

  The ultimate question is whether any of these reflexes can be intentionally turned on—or off. If they could, imagine what we could do. We could hone our brains to become precision, instead of blunt, instruments, to know which abilities to enhance and suppress at just the right moment. To do, in other words, what we already do most of the time, but to do it all the time—even in acutely modern crises that we haven’t evolved to survive.

  The Making of a Gunfighter

  Jim Cirillo was a gunfighter. Among police officers and combat instructors, he was a legend, a retired New York City Police Department officer who, according to that legend, was in more gunfights than any cop, cowboy, or mafia kingpin in the history of gunpowder. We spoke in October 2006 for this book. He was generous with his time and wisdom, and he asked me to send him a signed copy of the book. Nine months later, Cirillo was killed in a car crash near his home in Upstate New York at the age of seventy-six. It was a sudden and tragic end to a long life. I am grateful to have had the chance to interview him, and I regret that I won’t be able to do it again.

  When we spoke, it was clear that Cirillo did not consider himself a legend. He declined to say how many shoot-outs he’d been in, though double-digit numbers have been printed elsewhere. “I hate to mention the number,” he said. “People start thinking there must be something wrong with you.” Actually, he said, he thought of himself as kind of cowardly. “I never even gave blood at the department,” he confessed. “I didn’t want them sticking needles in me.”

  When he joined the NYPD in 1954, Cirillo hoped to never have to shoot anyone. And he succeeded for over a decade, working as a firearms instructor. He fired his gun thousands of times, but never at a real person. Then in the late 1960s, a rash of violent corner-store robberies rocked the city. Police found one store owner shot execution style in his establishment. He had a concentration-camp number tattooed on his arm. “This poor bastard comes over here to get killed, right?” Cirillo says, still disgusted after all these years.

  Under pressure to do something, police commissioner Howard Leary started up a new special unit: the Stakeout Squad. The department asked Cirillo and the other instructors to volunteer. Given the risks, almost all of them, including Cirillo, declined. But after some goading from his partner, who insisted that the assignment would be prestigious, warm, and dry, Cirillo signed on.

  Two hours into his first stakeout, he realized he’d made a mistake. He and his partner were standing vigil over a large dairy store in Queens that had been held up by the same robbers several times. The officers settled in on top of the manager’s booth, and camouflaged their position with ads and coupons. Sure enough, four men walked in, looking nervous. Cirillo could just tell they were going to hold up the place. He knew he would have to do something. But the realization came with a shock of fear. “I felt like I was becoming unglued, like my arms were going to fall off, like I was going to slip down like a river of water,” he told me. “I knew I was a good shot, but I didn’t know what would happen if someone was shooting back at me.” Cirillo also felt, at the same time, ashamed of his own reaction. So when three of the robbers took out guns and held them to the heads of the cashier and manager, he forced himself to pop up above the wall of coupons.

  As he stood, the crotch piece on his bulletproof vest fell off, clattering to the floor. The robbers turned around and pointed their guns at him. What happened next was nothing short of a miracle, Cirillo said. His training took over. His pistol sights came into focus, nice and steady, just like at the shooting range. He found he could count the serrations on his front sight. Everything began to move in slow motion. But as he took aim, he saw one of the robbers wave something light in color. His conscious mind responded this way: “I’m saying to myself, ‘Oh, is he giving up? Is that a handkerchief?’” Suddenly, he heard a shot and saw a flash of fire spark out from his own gun barrel. “My subconscious was saving my ass.” He felt the revolver buck in his hand several times. And his conscious mind said, “Who the hell is shooting my gun?”

  When the smoke cleared, he found that three of the men had run off. (Two were arrested soon afterward, seeking medical attention for bullet wounds.) The fourth lay behind the cashier, dying from Cirillo’s gunshot. What he had thought might have been a white flag of surrender was actually a nickel-plated revolver, now cradled in the robber’s hands. The man had managed to fire one bullet, which was found embedded in a can of Planters Peanuts just in front of Cirillo’s position.

  Later, Cirillo learned that his partner, standing right beside him during the melee, had fired a shotgun six inches from his head. Cirillo didn’t see him, and he barely heard the shot. Between the two of them, they got off seven shots. But Cirillo’s ears did not ring afterward! It seemed that his brain had not only suppressed the sound of the shots; it had somehow sealed off his ear so that it suffered no physical effects.

  How did Cirillo perform so well, despite the fear coursing through his body? As an instructor, he had taken training very seriously. He had created subconscious muscle memories for holding his gun in one hand, two hands, every conceivable position, so that he did not need to think when the time came to fire.

  As he did more stakeouts, Cirillo started to appreciate his subconscious more and more. He realized that it worked best if he got out of its way; in other words, he needed to turn off his conscious mind to avoid distracting thoughts that would sap precious mental resources. So he started training himself with only positive imagery, to clear his mind of any self-doubting conscious thoughts. After five gunfights, Cirillo said, “I had it all figured out. It got fam
iliar, and it didn’t shake me.” On stakeouts, instead of feeling liquefied by fear, he felt vaguely exhilarated. “Sometimes I almost wished these guys would walk in.”

  Cirillo began training other officers with positive visualization exercises. Instead of telling them, “If you jerk the trigger, you will miss the target,” he would say: “As you focus on the sights while compressing the trigger smoothly, you will easily achieve a good shot.” After he retired, Cirillo traveled the country, teaching police officers to make their skills subconscious. “Your subconscious mind is the most fascinating tool in the world,” he said. “You can do things you could never do consciously.”

  The Survival Zone

  The body’s first defense is hardwired. The amygdala triggers an ancient survival dance, and it is hard to change. But we have an outstanding second defense: we can learn from experience. Among experts who train police, soldiers, and astronauts, nothing matters as much. “The actual threat is not nearly as important as the level of preparation,” police psychologist Artwohl and her coauthor, Loren W. Christensen, write in their book, Deadly Force Encounters. “The more prepared you are, the more in control you feel, and the less fear you will experience.”

  Of course, it’s easier to train professionals for a range of probable threats than it is to train regular people for any threat. But the larger point holds: fear is negotiable. So even civilians can benefit from some preparation. Whether or not their preparation is perfectly tailored to the actual incident, the preparation will have increased their confidence, thereby decreasing their fear and improving their performance. “A police officer facing a shooting is really going through the same process as someone who is being mugged or facing a car crash or a plane crash,” Artwohl told me. “How that person responds will have something to do with their genetics, but also the sum total of their life experiences—which is basically training.”