There are several facets of survival behavior, that if succumbed to, can, and most likely will lead to injury, or demise. I cover two of the important ones in this installment.
Panic
In describing survival events, Laurence Gonzales, author of ‘Deep Survival, Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why’ describes panic, but not as we may picture it. “..in many cases, people just panicked. When we say “panic” we normally think of people screaming and running around, but that is not the only kind of panic. There is another kind of panic in which you just don’t do anything, and that is a very common form.” Panic often manifests itself as a failure to act. Just sit down and not do anything.
Individuals with less life experience to draw from may look at these moments and having no experience to draw from, won’t know how to behave. This can lead to inappropriate behavior, and further confuse and complicate the situation. People run down into sinking ships and drown. Others, struggling to get their carry-on luggage from the overhead compartment will asphyxiate as the burning plane fills with smoke. These are documented events, and illustrate the type of irrational behavior that has been observed in these types of emergencies.
Denial is not a river in Egypt
The brain problem-solves in a linear fashion. A general statement, I know. Our brain can’t truly multi-task, as in perform two tasks at the same time, independent of each other. We generally do better when we can follow a single train of thought, through to fruition. We can stop, move to another problem solving scenario, switch back, etc.
When we problem-solve, we move from one possibility to another, until we find the most desirable solution and then execute our decision.
After we apply our solution, we observe it’s affect on the problem. We’ll ‘record’ or remember the result and how it felt, good or bad. Did it resolve the problem? Yes, it felt good. Or, no; it didn’t work, it felt bad. I tried something else, it worked, it felt good, and so I logged the results. We’ll do that the next time the problem is similar. This isn’t a conscious process, it’s just how are brain works to problem solve.
So in dealing with life as it comes at us, we develop and add to this library of experiences and emotional responses.
When deciding how to deal with a situation, we mentally go through this library, find what fits best, and apply that resolution against the problem.
But what happens when we have no experience in our library that guides us? At this point of ‘no results found’ in our search for a resolution, we have to stop and use logic to solve the problem. Logic is good but forces you down different paths of reason until you find a resolution, and in the grand blueprint of things, logic is a time-hog compared to the system of emotional bookmarks created by experience. In linear fashion, we look for possible solutions and find none. I’ll try this. Nope, doesn’t work. O.K., I’ll try this. Nope. What about this? Negative results, and so on.
In many life-threatening emergencies, time is a luxury; the disaster at The World Trade Center, September 11th, 2001, with the loss of 2, 998 lives. Also, the sinking of the M/V Estonia in the Baltic Sea, September 28, 1994, 852 lives lost.
Many people died immediately. Even if they could have reacted appropriately, they simply did not have time.
But many perished because they could not process the reality of the emergency; that something as big and immovable as the World Trade Center Towers could be attacked or completely collapse to street level.
The reality that the M/V Estonia, a 515′ long ferry that had been carrying passengers, cargo and vehicles between Germany and Norway, could sink and was doing so at an alarming rate, the crew unable to save her or get the passengers off safely. The enormous weight of these realities was too large for many to comprehend. So large that they could not recall any past experience that would apply in resolution of the problem of self-rescue. And logic didn’t apply; logic worked against the possibility of either of these events even happening. Although the World Trade Center in New York had been attacked before in 1993, and large ships sink every year, when it happens to us, initially we can’t believe it.
According to John Leach of the University of Lancaster / UK, in a catastrophic emergency such as these, 15-25% of us will be stunned or bewildered, and for most this is a transient behavior,, it doesn’t stick around. We then gather our wits and move on, actively seeking a solution to the problem.
But another percentage of us will not move past the stage of confusion or bewilderment, we will freeze up or act irrationally, unable to do anything. “This can’t be happening to me, can’t be happening at all.”
Conversely, many lives have been saved because people took what they saw, heard, felt, smelled, and tasted at face value; assumed an emergency and to the best of their ability, went away from danger.
They went down the stairs of the World Trade Center to the street; up the ladder or out the door to the outside of the M/V Estonia and into the life-rafts. I’ve said before in the classes that I teach there are no statistics to illustrate how many lives have been saved because we heeded a warning or symptom, or a gut feeling.
When we stand there looking at the weather report planning a flight, looking out the window at the horizontally-petrified windsock and say, “No, not today, it just doesn’t feel right.” When we’re backing our boat trailer down the ramp, and there’s that nagging feeling that the weather just doesn’t look right, and we decide to drive back up the ramp and go home.
You may have had similar experiences, and right now, as you read this you’re re-experiencing that warm and fuzzy of knowing you made the right decision.
Or perhaps at one time you didn’t heed a warning, didn’t take the forecast at face value. You went anyway, and regretted it. If you’ve experienced that, you may recall that feeling in the pit of your stomach as you read this. This is the saved experience in your library that you will refer to when searching for an appropriate behavior when a similar situation presents itself in the future. That is that ‘emotional bookmark’, or ‘somatic marker’ as described by Antonio Damasio, noted by Laurence Gonzales in ‘Deep Survival’.
Next week I’ll wrap this up with the final installment, and begin an investigation into The Seven Steps of Survival.
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