Unthinkable: Who Survives When Disaster Strikes - and Why (11 page)

The more time we have to respond to a threat, the more we can recruit the brain’s more sophisticated abilities. We can put the threat in context, consider our options, and act intelligently. But these higher functions are always slower and weaker than the primal response of the amygdala. As with risk, so with fear: emotions trump reason. “Emotions monopolize brain resources,” says LeDoux. “There’s a reason for that: If you’re faced with a bloodthirsty beast, you don’t want your attention to wane.”

In Asencio’s case, as the gunfight pounded on, he tried to breathe evenly. His brain had just enough time to think. The drama of the situation was powerful enough that he vaulted right over the traditional first phase of denial and moved on to deliberation. He had no one to mill with, back there behind the couch. So he did what most people do in this kind of crisis: he had a conversation with himself. And it didn’t go as he would have predicted. First, crouched on the floor, he consciously compared what he was feeling with what he would have expected to feel at such a time. “I was trying to take my own temperature,” he told me. To his surprise, his life did not flash before his eyes. Instead, he suddenly remembered how in Norman Mailer’s novel
The Naked and the Dead
men under fire had had trouble controlling their bowels. And, in the midst of the bedlam, he noted that this problem, thankfully, had not happened to him. His brain searched its memory for script to address this situation and successfully pulled up a relevant data point. But it turned out to be inaccurate. He actually thought to himself, “Mailer was wrong.”

Technically, Mailer was right. Under extreme duress, the body abandons certain nonessential functions like digestion, salivation, and sometimes bladder and sphincter control. One firefighter in a U.S. city (I promised the chief I wouldn’t reveal the location), spent ten years soiling his pants every time his station was called to an alarm. The other firefighters still remember the stench. Finally, this unfortunate man had a heart attack and switched careers. In a study of U.S. soldiers in World War II, 10 to 20 percent admitted they had defecated in their pants. The true percentage is probably much higher, since incontinence is not something most soldiers like to acknowledge. But it doesn’t happen to everyone, as Asencio discovered.

Asencio did experience another classic fear response, however: the slowing down of time. “Time and space became entirely disjointed,” he wrote later. “The action around me, which had seemed speeded up at first, now turned into slow motion. The scene was like a confused, nightmarish hallucination, a grotesque charade. Everything I saw seemed distorted; everyone, everything, was out of character.”

As he huddled behind the sofa, the gunfight escalated. A bullet grazed the head of one of the female hostage-takers. But she kept shooting, blood streaming down her face. Another guerrilla fighter, a seventeen-year-old high school student standing near the front door in a green sweatsuit, took a bullet to the head and crumpled to the ground. Asencio stared at the boy’s head, covered in blood, and felt oddly detached. “It was unreal,” he says. “Here was this young man, dead, right in front of me, and it just seemed surrealistic somehow.”

This curious sense of aloofness, called “dissociation,” can feel subtle. In a study of 115 police officers involved in serious shootings, 90 percent reported having some kind of dissociative symptom—from numbing to a loss of awareness to memory problems. At its most extreme, dissociation can take the form of an out-of-body experience. That’s when people describe feeling as if they were watching themselves from above. The exact same phenomenon is reported by patients with epilepsy, depression, migraine, or schizophrenia, which tells us that the sensation probably has something to do with a breakdown in the brain’s ability to integrate a flood of data. (In at least one case, scientists have even been able to induce an out-of-body experience by electronically stimulating part of a patient’s brain.) Extreme dissociation seems to be the brain’s last line of defense, and it is particularly common among victims of childhood sexual abuse. “It’s a way to survive,” says Hanoch Yerushalmi, an Israeli psychologist who has worked with many victims of trauma. “People are saying, ‘You have my body, but you don’t have my soul.’” Like all defense mechanisms, dissociation exacts a cost. A series of studies has found that the more intense the dissociation during the crisis, the harder the recovery will be for the person who survives.

Asencio thinks the fiercest part of the gunfight went on for at least thirty minutes. But to this day, he’s not really sure how long it lasted. “It seemed interminable to me,” he says. As the shots became more sporadic, he could hear the groans of the casualties scattered around him. Continuing his internal dialogue (which psychologists call “self-talk”), he decided he would behave with honor, if he possibly could. “I knew there was no way I could return to my wife and children, to my friends and colleagues in the Foreign Service after collapsing in a heap and saying, ‘I can’t cut it.’” With that decision made, Asencio felt slightly better.

People in life-or-death situations often think of their children or how others will perceive them after the crisis is over. Gasping for air in turbulent seas or groping their way out of a burning plane, they hear the voices of their family members in their heads. Sometimes the voices are even mocking. In
Guests of the Ayatollah,
a book about the 1979 Iran hostage crisis, writer Mark Bowden describes one Marine major’s conversation with himself as his helicopter curled into flames around him during a doomed rescue effort. The passage illustrates just how compelling these conjectures can be: “The pilot shut down the engines and sat for a moment, certain he was about to die. Then for some reason an image came into his mind of his fiancée’s father—a man who had always seemed none too impressed with his future pilot son-in-law—commenting during some future family meal about how the poor sap’s body had been found cooked like a holiday turkey in the front seat of his aircraft, and something about that horrifying image motivated him. His body would not be found like an overcooked Butterball; he had to at least try to escape.” He ejected from the window and ran, burning, from the wreckage.

In Colombia, the gunfire finally stopped altogether. The leader of the guerrillas gathered Asencio and the rest of the captives together. He was a serious young man with glasses who called himself “Commandante Uno.” He ticked off the group’s goals: they were seeking the release of 311 M-19 prisoners, $50 million in cash, and publicity for charges of brutality against the Colombian government. Listening to this list of fantasies, Asencio remained certain that his death was near. Somehow, that knowledge left him feeling strangely fearless. It was only days later, when it seemed possible that he might actually survive, that he became frightened again.

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?