Unthinkable: Who Survives When Disaster Strikes - and Why (12 page)

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 top 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 familiar, 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.”

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.”