Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why

by Laurence Gonzales

All accidents are the same. All hazards—physical, economic, or otherwise—share common features. All of our mistakes are from a family of mistakes, and we can learn from them all. And our ultimate survival—in life, in love, in business—evolves by common rules on a shared landscape.

I cried out to ask (and try to answer) the question: Why do smart people do such stupid things?

Before I even knew it, I already embarked on a search for some universal laws—the Rules of Life. MY INTEREST in survival began early, when I was a child and learned what my father had done in the war. That he had lived while so many others had died seemed to me to have so much meaning.
Those who survive are just as baffling. I knew, for example, that an experienced hunter might perish while lost in the woods for a single night, whereas a four-year-old might survive. When five people are set adrift at sea and only two come back, what makes the difference? Who survived Nazi prison camps? Why did Scott’s crew perish in Antarctica while, against all odds, Shackleton’s crew survived and even thrived in the same circumstances? Why was a seventeen-year-old girl able to walk out of the Peruvian jungle, while the adults who were lost with her sat down and died? It was maddening to find survival so unpredictable, because after all, science seeks predictability. But as I raked the ashes of catastrophe, I began to see the outlines of an explanation.

Everyone has finite resources going into a catastrophe. It is in managing those resources and taking advantage of every bit of luck that comes along that survivors have been able to bring out their stories. There is no telling how many people behave and adapt as perfect, textbook survivors, only to die owing to extreme objective hazards that even the best behavior cannot overcome. In other words, you may do everything right and still die. Likewise, you may do everything wrong and live, as so many do every day.

Here’s what survivors do:

Perceive, believe (look, see, believe).

Even in the initial crisis, survivors’ perceptions and cognitive functions keep working. They notice the details and may even find some humorous or beautiful. If there is any denial, it is counterbalanced by a solid belief in the clear evidence of their senses. They immediately begin to recognize, acknowledge, and even accept the reality of their situation. “I’ve broken my leg, that’s it. I’m dead,” as Joe Simpson (chapter 13) put it. They may initially blame forces outside themselves, too; but very quickly they dismiss that tactic and recognize that everything, good and bad, emanates from within. They see opportunity, even good, in their situation. They move through denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance very rapidly. They “go inside.”

Stay calm (use humor, use fear to focus).

In the initial crisis, survivors are making use of fear, not being ruled by it. Their fear often feels like and turns into anger, and that motivates them and makes them sharper. They understand at a deep level about being cool and are ever on guard against the mutiny of too much emotion. They keep their sense of humor and therefore keep calm.

Think/analyze/plan (get organized; set up small, manageable tasks).

Survivors quickly organize, set up routines, and institute discipline. In successful group survival situations, a leader emerges often from the least likely candidate. They push away thoughts that their situation is hopeless. A rational voice emerges and is often actually heard, which takes control of the situation. Survivors perceive that experience as being split into two people and they “obey” the rational one. It begins with the paradox of seeing reality- how hopeless it would seem to an outside observer- but acting with the expectation of success.

Take correct, decisive action (be bold and cautious while carrying out tasks).

Survivors are able to transform thought into action. They are willing to take risks to save themselves and others. They are able to break down very large jobs into small, manageable tasks. They set attainable goals and develop short-term plans to reach them. They are meticulous about doing those tasks well. They deal with what is within their power from moment to moment. They leave the rest behind.

Celebrate your successes (take joy in completing tasks).

Survivors take great joy from even their smallest successes. That is an important step in creating an ongoing feeling of motivation and preventing the descent into hopelessness. It also provides relief from the unspeakable stress of a true survival situation.

Count your blessings (be grateful—you’re alive).

This is how survivors become rescuers instead of victims. There is always someone else they are helping more than themselves, even if that someone is not present. One survivor I spoke to, Yossi Ghinsberg, who was lost for weeks in the Bolivian jungle, hallucinated about a beautiful companion with whom he slept each night as he traveled. Everything he did, he did for her.

Play (sing, play mind games, recite poetry, count anything, do mathematical problems in your head).

Since the brain and its wiring appear to be the determining factor in survival, this is an argument for expanding and refining it. The more you have learned and experienced of art, music, poetry, literature, philosophy, mathematics, and so on, the more resources you will have to fall back on. Just as survivors use patterns and rhythm to move forward in the survival voyage, they use the deeper activities of the intellect to stimulate, calm, and entertain the mind. Counting becomes important, too, and reciting poetry or even a mantra can calm the frantic mind. Movement becomes dance. One survivor who had to walk a long way counted his steps, one hundred at a time, and dedicated each hundred to another person he cared about.
Stockdale cites “love of poetry” as an important quality for enduring. “You thirst to remember,” he wrote. “The clutter of all the trivia evaporates from your consciousness and with care you can make deep excursions into past recollections…. Verses were hoarded and gone over each day…. [T]he person who came into this experiment with reams of already memorized poetry was the bearer of great gifts.
Survivors often cling to talismans. They search for meaning, and the more you know already, the deeper the meaning. They engage the crisis almost as a game. They discover the flow of the expert performer, in whom emotion and thought balance each other in producing action. “Careful, careful,” they say. But they act joyfully and decisively. Playing also leads to invention, and invention may lead to a new technique, strategy, or a piece of equipment that could save you.

See the beauty (remember: it’s a vision quest).

Survivors are attuned to the wonder of the world. The appreciation of beauty, the feeling of awe, opens the senses. When you see something beautiful, your pupils actually dilate. This appreciation not only relieves stress and creates strong motivation, but it allows you to take in new information more effectively.

Believe that you will succeed (develop a deep conviction that you’ll live).

All of the practices just described lead to this point: Survivors consolidate their personalities and fix their determination. Survivors admonish themselves to make no more mistakes, to be very careful, and to do their very best. They become convinced that they will prevail if they do those things.

Surrender (let go of your fear of dying; “put away the pain”).

Survivors manage pain well. Lauren Elder (chapter 13), who walked out of the Sierra Nevada after surviving a plane crash, wrote that she “stored away the information: My arm is broken.” That sort of thinking is what John Leach calls “resignation without giving up. It is survival by surrender.” Joe Simpson recognized that he would probably die. But it had ceased to bother him, and so he went ahead and crawled off the mountain anyway.

Do whatever is necessary (be determined; have the will and the skill).

Survivors have meta-knowledge: They know their abilities and do not over-or underestimate them. They believe that anything is possible and act accordingly. Play leads to invention, which leads to trying something that might have seemed impossible. When the plane in which Lauren Elder was flying hit the top of a ridge above 12,000 feet, it would have seemed impossible that she could get off alive. She did it anyway, including having to down-climb vertical rock races with a broken arm.

Survivors don’t expect or even hope to be rescued. They are coldly rational about using the world, obtaining what they need, doing what they have to do.

Never give up (let nothing break your spirit).

There is always one more thing that you can do. Survivors are not easily frustrated. They are not discouraged by setbacks. They accept that the environment (or the business climate or their health) is constantly changing. They pick themselves up and start the entire process over again, breaking it down into manageable bits. Survivors always have a clear reason for going on. They keep their spirits up by developing an alternate world made up of rich memories to which they can escape. They mine their memory for whatever will keep them occupied. They come to embrace the world in which they find themselves and see opportunity in adversity. In the aftermath, survivors learn from and are grateful for the experiences they’ve had.

A panicked mind is a useless mind.

The farther one goes The less one knows. —Tao Te Ching

ONE “LOOK OUT, HERE COMES RAY CHARLES”

The first lesson is to remain calm, not to panic.
Because emotions are called “hot cognitions,” this is known as “being cool.” “Cool” as a slang expression goes back to the 1800s, but its contemporary sense originated with African American jazz musicians in the 1940s. Jazz was “cool” compared with the hot, emotional bebop it had begun to overshadow. Some researchers suggest that African American jazz musicians refused to let themselves get hot (get angry) in the face of racism. Instead, they remained outwardly calm and channeled emotion into music as a survival strategy in a hostile environment. They turned fear and anger into focus, and “focus” is just a metaphorical way of saying that they were able to concentrate their attention on the matter at hand.
Only 10 to 20 percent of untrained people can stay calm and think in the midst of a survival emergency. They are the ones who can perceive their situation clearly; they can plan and take correct action, all of which are key elements of survival. Confronted with a changing environment, they rapidly adapt.
my lifelong fascination with that boundary region between life and death, that place where, to stay alive, you have to remain calm and alert. The reason it’s a boundary region is that not everyone can do it. Some fail. Some die.
Shit does just happen sometimes, as the bumper sticker says. There are things you can’t control, so you’d better know how you’re going to react to them.

The first rule is: Face reality. Good survivors aren’t immune to fear. They know what’s happening, and it does “scare the living shit out of” them. It’s all a question of what you do next.

In a true survival situation, you are by definition looking death in the face, and if you can’t find something droll and even something wondrous and inspiring in it, you are already in a world of hurt.
Al Siebert, a psychologist and author of The Survivor Personality, writes that survivors “laugh at threats…playing and laughing go together. Playing keeps the person in contact with what is happening around [him].” To deal with reality you must first recognize it as such.
if you let yourself get too serious, you will get too scared, and once that devil is out of the bottle, you’re on a runaway horse. Fear is good. Too much fear is not.
Plato understood that emotions could trump reason and that to succeed we have to use the reins of reason on the horse of emotion. That turns out to be remarkably close to what modern research has begun to show us, and it works both ways: The intellect without the emotions is like the jockey without the horse.

“When you walk across the ramp to your airplane, you lose half your IQ.”

very important to their survival but that is scientifically sound: Be aware that you’re not all there. You are in a profoundly altered state when it comes to perception, cognition, memory, and emotion. He was trying to keep them calm while letting them face reality. He’d seen people die. He knew the power of the horse, and these were his precious jet jockeys.
Emotion is an instinctive response aimed at self-preservation. It involves numerous bodily changes that are preparations for action. The nervous system fires more energetically, the blood changes its chemistry so that it can coagulate more rapidly, muscle tone alters, digestion stops, and various chemicals flood the body to put it in a state of high readiness for whatever needs to be done. All of that happens outside of conscious control. Reason is tentative, slow, and fallible, while emotion is sure, quick, and unhesitating.

The Brain

To the neuroscientist, the brain is no longer seen as separate but is now considered an integral part of the body, no less so than heart, lungs, and liver. Moreover, many researchers now regard what we experience as mind and consciousness as a side effect (albeit a useful one in evolutionary terms) of the brain’s synaptic functioning. Certainly they all agree that the brain is as affected by the body as the body is by the brain. In fact, the brain is created in part by the body (the other main influence being the environment) in the sense that what the brain does or is capable of doing comes from its synaptic connections, and those connections are forged through what the brain comes to know of the body and the environment. Thinking is a bodily function, as are emotions and feelings.
As Antonio R. Damasio points out in his best-selling book on the brain, Descartes’ Error, “I think, therefore I am” has become “I am, therefore I think.”
The brain is the only organ that has no clear function. It makes you breathe, but it’s not part of the respiratory system. It controls blood pressure and circulation, but it’s not part of the circulatory system either. The concept of body has no meaning without the brain and its extensive network of projections that reach to nearly every cell.
The brain provides a continuously changing kaleidoscope of images concerning the state of the environment and the state of the body. It receives images from receptors in the body and from the sense organs that take in the outside world. (The images can be smells, sights, sounds, or feelings). At the same time, the brain provides a stream of outputs that shape the body’s reactions to the environment and to itself, from adjusting blood pressure to mating. So the brain reads the state of the body and makes fine adjustments, even while it reads the environment and directs the body in reacting to it. In addition, that process continually reshapes the brain by making new connections. All of this is aimed at one thing only: adaptation, which is another word for survival.
The brain does that job mostly through unconscious learning. It learns, or adapts, by strengthening the electrochemical transmissions among neurons and creating new sites at which neurons can communicate with each other. Axons (the fibers that send signals) grow and form new branches and synapses. Memory is the result. Doing almost anything generates new links among neurons.
The human organism, then, is like a jockey on a thoroughbred in the gate. The jockey is reason and the horse is emotion, a complex of systems bred over eons of evolution and shaped by experience, which exist for your survival. They are so powerful, they can make you do things you’d never think to do, and they can allow you to do things you’d never believe yourself capable of doing.
Of course, no one can lift a 500-pound rock. Then again, Eberle did it. When I was reporting on airline accidents in the 1980s, an investigator told me of finding dead pilots who had ripped the huge control columns out of jumbo jets while trying to pull up the nose of a crippled plane.
It’s about gentling the beast, keeping it cool; and when it’s time to run, it’s about letting it flow, about having emotion and reason in perfect balance. That’s what characterizes elite performers, from Tiger Woods to Neil Armstrong.
There are primary emotions and secondary emotions. Primary emotions are the ones you’re born with, such as the drive to obtain food or the reaction of reaching out to grab something if you feel yourself falling. But the emotional system of bodily responses can be hooked up to anything.
The connection, once made, is so profound that taking the necessary action requires no thought or will; it works automatically. The proof that it’s a secondary and not a primary emotion is that the new recruits didn’t have the same reaction, and they died by the score as a result.
Remarque’s observation, and the neuroscience that has confirmed it, can illuminate the way accidents happen. If an experienced river runner is pitched into the water, he will turn on his back and float with his toes out of the water, riding on the buoyancy of his life vest. An inexperienced one, like a drowning swimmer, will reach up to wave or try to grab something. Raising his arms causes his feet to sink.

FEAR IS but one emotion. The instinct to reproduce is another, and it initiates a remarkably similar set of visceral responses, though with striking differences involving the sex organs and glands. Anyone who has ever fallen in love, fallen hard, knows what Yankovich means when he says, “Your IQ rolls back to that of an ape.” Emotion takes over from the thinking part of the brain, the neocortex, to effect an instinctive set of responses necessary for survival, in this case reproduction.

The net result of all the chemicals that come streaming through your system once the amygdala has detected danger is that the heart rate rises, breathing speeds up, more sugar is dumped into the metabolic system, and the distribution of oxygen and nutrients shifts so that you have the strength to run or fight. You’re on afterburner. The knot in the stomach Yankovich mentioned results from that redistribution (as well as from contractions of the smooth muscle in the stomach), in which the flow of blood to the digestive system is reduced so that it can be used elsewhere to meet the emergency.
Even as the hormones produced under stress disrupt perception, thinking, and the formation and retrieval of memories, they set a potentially dangerous trap by exciting the amygdala. They help to dampen explicit (conscious) memory even while creating and recalling implicit (unconscious) memories with greater efficiency. As the fear rises, you become more unable to deal with it because you’re not even aware of the learning that’s propelling you. LeDoux refers to this as a “hostile takeover of consciousness by emotion” as the “amygdala comes to dominate working memory.”

Cherry-Garrard wrote that they “displayed that quality which is perhaps the only one which may be said with certainty to make for success, self-control.” How well you exercise that control often decides the outcome of survival situations. Whether it means making a split-second decision while scuba-or skydiving or keeping your head while stranded in the wilderness, it is the most important skill to take along.

STRESS RELEASES cortisol into the blood. That steroid invades the hippocampus and interferes with its work. (Long-term stress can kill hippocampal cells.) The amygdala has powerful connections to the sensory cortices, which means that the entire memory system, both input and output, are affected. As a result, most people are incapable of performing any but the simplest tasks under stress. They can’t remember the most basic things. In addition, stress (or any strong emotion) erodes the ability to perceive. Cortisol and other hormones released under stress interfere with the working of the prefrontal cortex. That is where perceptions are processed and decisions are made. You see less, hear less, miss more cues from the environment, and make mistakes. Under extreme stress, the visual field actually narrows. (Police officers who have been shot report tunnel vision.) Stress causes most people to focus narrowly on the thing that they consider most important, and it may be the wrong thing.

Emotions are survival mechanisms, but they don’t always work for the individual. They work across a large number of trials to keep the species alive. The individual may live or die, but over a few million years, more mammals lived than died by letting emotion take over, and so emotion was selected.
To deal with reality you must first recognize it as such, and as Siebert and others have pointed out, play puts a person in touch with his environment, while laughter makes the feeling of being threatened manageable.

Moods are contagious, and the emotional states involved with smiling, humor, and laughter are among the most contagious of all.

Laughter doesn’t take conscious thought. It’s automatic, and one person laughing or smiling induces the same reaction in others. Laughter stimulates the left prefrontal cortex, an area in the brain that helps us to feel good and to be motivated. That stimulation alleviates anxiety and frustration. There is evidence that laughter can send chemical signals to actively inhibit the firing of nerves in the amygdala, thereby dampening fear. Laughter, then, can help to temper negative emotions.

It is not a lack of fear that separates elite performers from the rest of us. They’re afraid, too, but they’re not overwhelmed by it. They manage fear. They use it to focus on taking correct action. Mike Tyson’s trainer, Cus D’Amato, said, “Fear is like fire. It can cook for you. It can heat your house. Or it can burn you down.”

Survival, then, is about being cool. It’s about laughing with an attitude of bold humility in the face of something terrifying. It’s about knowing the deepest processes of the brain, even if, as nonscientists, we can explain them only through the darkest humor imaginable.

TWO MEMORIES OF THE FUTURE

The thrill of the hunt, like so many moods, was contagious.
There’s a common confusion about the words “emotion” and “feeling.” William James, the father of psychology, was the first to point out that we do not run because we’re afraid of bears, we’re afraid of bears because we run. The emotion comes first—it’s the bodily response (freezing, flight, sexual arousal). The feeling follows (fear, anger, love). The fear associated with being in an earthquake may produce some chemical reactions that are similar to those produced during sexual arousal. But the two experiences are quite different. “The earth moved” can have different meanings in different circumstances. That’s why risky behavior can be fun. Fear can be fun. It can make you feel more alive, because it is an integral part of saving your own life. And if the context is one that you perceive as safe, then it’s easy to make the decision to take the risk. Your body can make it for you.

Think of chess masters and how they play. Let’s imagine that life is a board game. Some people like to play checkers, some people like to play chess. And those of us who go into the wilderness and engage in dangerous sports are playing chess with Mother Nature.

Logic doesn’t work well for such nonlinear systems as chess and life.
The most remarkable discovery of modern neuroscience is that the body controls the brain as much as the brain controls the body. Most decisions are not made using logic, which we all recognize at least at an unconscious level. LeDoux writes, “Unconscious operations of the brain is…the rule rather than the exception throughout the evolutionary history of the animal kingdom” and “include almost everything the brain does.”
When a decision to act must be made instantly, it is made through a system of emotional bookmarks. The emotional system reacts to circumstances, finds bookmarks that flag similar experiences in your past and your response to them, and allows you to recall the feelings, good or bad, of the outcomes of your actions. Those gut feelings give you an instant reading on how to behave. If a previous experience was bad, you avoid that option. When it was good, “it becomes a beacon of incentive,” to use Damasio’s words.
That instant physical feedback, those feelings that are located through emotional bookmarks, will more or less force a decision unless checked by higher consciousness.
Damasio wrote, “When the bad outcome connected with a given response…comes into mind, however fleetingly, you experience an unpleasant gut feeling.” Using that system, you can choose very quickly and may be unable to explain your choice afterward. The best and worst decisions are made that way. You don’t have to think about it. It just feels right.

There are no fake emotions.

Because the system is designed to work without the assistance of logic or reason, there’s now an answer to the question: What were they thinking? They weren’t. The whole point of the system is that you don’t have to think.
It was a momentous discovery on Claparède’s part: his patient could learn without memory or thought. It was as if her body could learn. It hinted at a whole hidden system within her.
Voluntary actions on the right side of the body begin in the motor cortex in the left hemisphere of the brain and go through the pyramidal tract, a great bunch of axons that issues from it. If you have a stroke that destroys the motor cortex, you’ll be paralyzed on the right side of your body. Everything will stop working, including your facial muscles. If someone tells you to smile, you’ll produce a grotesque, lopsided grimace. But if you hear something funny that causes you to laugh involuntarily, you’ll produce a normal, symmetrical smile. The reason is that emotional reactions are controlled through the anterior cingulate, the medial temporal lobe, and the basal ganglia, which were not destroyed by the hypothetical stroke. That effect can be reproduced in patients with brain damage. There are at least two separate brain systems that can generate behavior. The way they work, the way you capture experiences and turn them into learning (memories), can influence your ability to survive.
Most of the mystifying accidents that happen in the course of risky recreation, the seemingly illogical decisions, actions, and outcomes, can be explained by the same interplay of emotions and cognition that shapes all human behavior. What the scuba divers did made perfect sense from the point of view of the organism’s survival: The impulse to get air is automatic and can be overpoweringly strong. Those who can control that impulse to survive, live. Those who can’t, die. And that’s the simplest way to explain survival, whether the venue is night carrier landings or being lost in the jungle.

THREE A MAP OF THE WORLD

The emotions are another mechanism for defining self (actually creating the self) during the process of protecting what is within from what is without, both by avoiding or fighting what is bad and by seeking out what is good. As Joseph LeDoux put it, “People don’t come preassembled, but are glued together by life.” Like the immune system, the emotional system evolves continuously, taking experiences and situations and attaching emotional value to them in subtle gradations of risk and reward.
Moderate stress enhances learning. When two neurons fire together, they become wired together. When a strong and weak neuron—call them Al and Betty—stimulate a third neuron—call it Charlie—at the same time, the weak one, Betty, gains the ability to stimulate Charlie to fire. That’s why the ringing of a bell could cause Pavlov’s dog to salivate even when there was no food present. Scientists, with their ever playful juggling of three or four languages at once, call that long-term potentiation (LTP). So risk is an integral part of life and learning. A baby who doesn’t walk, for example, will never risk falling. But in exchange for taking that risk, he gains the much greater survival advantage of being bipedal and having his hands free. That’s another reason play becomes important to most people.
We think we believe what we know, but we only truly believe what we feel.

Rational (or conscious) thought always lags behind the emotional reaction. Anyone can demonstrate this at home: Everyone has been startled by someone. It’s a powerful response, marked by the familiar rocket rush of adrenaline (actually catecholamines), increased heart rate, flushing, and panting. Then, as soon as you realize the person is someone you know, the response deescalates. But it takes a while to metabolize all those chemicals. It’s a powerful emergency reaction and completely illogical, because you know the person and are not in any danger. But the reason you can’t think of that logically before reacting is because the visual signals reach the amygdala first.

Elite performers, as they’re sometimes called, seek out the extreme situations that make them perform well and feel more alive. At the other end of the scale are people who don’t want any excitement at all. It takes all kinds. But it’s easy to demonstrate that many people (estimates run as high as 90 percent), when put under stress, are unable to think clearly or solve simple problems. They get rattled. They panic.

Implicit and Explicit Learning

When you learn something complex, such as flying, snowboarding, or playing tennis or golf, at first you must think through each move. That is called explicit learning, and it’s stored in explicit memory, the kind you can talk about, the kind that allows you to remember a recipe for lasagna. But as you gain more experience, you begin to do the task less consciously. You develop flow, touch, timing—a feel for it. It becomes second nature, a thing of beauty. That’s known as implicit learning.
The two neurological systems of explicit and implicit learning are quite separate. Implicit memories are unconscious. Implicit learning is like a natural smile: It comes by way of a different neural pathway from the one that carries explicit memory. LeDoux reports that his mother, who has Alzheimer’s disease, cannot remember ordinary events but can still play the accordion, because although her hippocampus is likely damaged by the disease, the memory of how to play accordion comes from an as yet undamaged part of the brain. Implicit memories are not stored in or necessarily even available to the analytical, reasoning part of the brain.
Malcolm Gladwell, writing in the New Yorker, put it succinctly: “Choking is about thinking too much. Panic is about thinking too little.”

FOUR A GORILLA IN OUR MIDST

AS COMPLEX as the brain is, the world is more so. The brain cannot process and organize all the data that arrive. It cannot come up with a reasonable course of action if everything is given equal weight and perceived at equal intensity. That is the difficulty with logic: It’s step-by-step, linear. The world is not.
My father used to perform a card trick for me and my brothers. Anyone can do it. He’d shuffle a deck and ask us to pick a card, not show it to him, and replace it anywhere in the deck. Then he’d let us shuffle the deck so that it would seem impossible for him to find the card. But when he’d show us the cards, one by one, he’d watch our eyes. When we saw the card that we’d picked, our pupils would dilate, and he’d know which card we’d picked. The involuntary physical response is proof that there is an emotional component to the process of matching the model with the world.

Every model of the world comes with its own underlying assumptions based on experience, memories, secondary emotions, and emotional bookmarks, all of which influence what we expect to happen and what we plan to do about it. Then the magician switches realities, and while you stick with the model that is closest to your familiar reality, he reveals the new reality. The disconnect is what’s surprising. You believe the magician does the trick, but in fact you do it yourself. Magic is astonishing only to the extent that you ignore how the brain works.

“an executive function.” That area of the brain, located mostly in the frontal lobes, is responsible for making decisions and voluntary movements, as well as directing what sensory input we’re paying attention to. It’s why we can still carry on a conversation in a room where many people are talking and music is playing.
Working memory can hold only a few things at once, perhaps half a dozen or so, and when something new commands attention, those things are forgotten. Working memory can also retrieve information from long-term memory. The fact that you can read this long sentence is the result of your working memory’s ability to hold the beginning, middle, and end all at once and to retrieve definitions and associations from long-term memory and use them to make sense of the words. It is also the result of the fact that you have created mental models of the words. You don’t read each letter to decode the word, as a child who is learning to read must. But if you come across words that are too similar, such as psychology and physiology, you may have to pause.
“We construct an expected world because we can’t handle the complexity of the present one, and then process the information that fits the expected world, and find reasons to exclude the information that might contradict it. Unexpected or unlikely interactions are ignored when we make our construction.”

Perceptions do not incorporate the world in a literal way. If you try to imagine the face of your mother, there is no photograph of your mother waiting in your brain. Rather, fragments of the image, including its emotional content, are stored in a dormant form scattered across numerous neural networks. When you call forth your mother’s face, they all light up simultaneously in what Antonio Damasio calls a trick of timing to create an illusion that you’re seeing your mother’s face, or something like it. The way we store what we know about the world is much the same. Mental models are distributed across the brain.

Psychologists who study survivors of shipwrecks, plane crashes, natural disasters, and prison camps conclude that the most successful are open to the changing nature of their environment. They are curious to know what’s up.

While everyone is familiar with doing something stupid, it’s not stupidity. Focusing attention takes energy, and even then it can be fragmentary. (The word “focus,” being a metaphor of a lens, can be misleading, since sometimes what’s needed is a wider field of view.) The rest of the time, emotions and mental models of ourselves and our environment must work automatically to create behavior. Most people who engage in risky recreation live in low-risk environments designed specifically so that the consequences of inattention are trivial. But if they take that inattention into the wild, the cost can be high. Actually, the cost can be high anywhere. Recent research demonstrates that talking on a cell phone while driving, whether hands-free or not, causes inattentional blindness, the psychological term for the phenomen of failing to see the gorilla.

FIVE THE ANATOMY OF AN ACT OF GOD

Memories are not emotion, and emotion is not memory, but the two work together. Mental models, which are stored in memory, are not emotions either. But they can be engaged with emotion, motivation, cognition, and memory. And since memories can exist in either the past or the future, to the brain it’s the same thing. You bookmark the future in order to get there. It’s a magic trick: You can slide through time to a world that does not yet exist.
an environment that has high objective hazards, the longer it takes to dislodge the imagined world in favor of the real one, the greater the risk. In nature, adaptation is important; the plan is not. It’s a Zen thing. We must plan. But we must be able to let go of the plan, too.

PSYCHOLOGISTS WHO study survival say that people who are rule followers don’t do as well as those who are of independent mind and spirit. When a patient is told that he has six months to live, he has two choices: to accept the news and die, or to rebel and live. People who survive cancer in the face of such a diagnosis are notorious. The medical staff observes that they are “bad patients,” unruly, troublesome. They don’t follow directions. They question everything. They’re annoying. They’re survivors.

The Tao Te Ching says: The rigid person is a disciple of death; The soft, supple, and delicate are lovers of life.
Researchers point out that people tend to take any information as confirmation of their mental models. We are by nature optimists, if optimism means that we believe we see the world as it is. And under the influence of a plan, it’s easy to see what we want to see.
Trivial events begin to shape an accident long before it happens.

IF YOU distill all of the psychology, cognitive science, and neuroscience of the last hundred years or so, what you find is that we’re always Homo but sometimes not so sapiens. People are emotional creatures, which is to say, physical creatures. Joseph LeDoux concluded that, “people normally do all sorts of things for reasons that they are not consciously aware of…and that one of the main jobs of consciousness is to keep our life tied together into a coherent story, a self-concept.” In other words, everyone is the hero in his own movie.

So it should come as no surprise that, in many cases, basic survival mechanisms, which have been hardwired into us and sculpted by experience, turn out to be not only the most powerful motivators of behavior but to operate at their peak efficiency out of reach of the conscious decision-making powers, which makes it easy for reason to be overwhelmed. Once an emotional reaction is underway, we can be swept away by an irresistible impulse to act.
But there are many ways of revising the script and adapting in hazardous situations. Training is one of them.
All elite performers train hard, and when you follow in their path, you’d better train hard, too, or be exceptionally alert. That’s the main difficulty with neophytes who go into the wilderness: We face the same challenges the experts face. Nature doesn’t adjust to our level of skill.

The practice of Zen teaches that it is impossible to add anything more to a cup that is already full. If you pour in more tea, it simply spills over and is wasted. The same is true of the mind. A closed attitude, an attitude that says, “I already know,” may cause you to miss important information. Zen teaches openness. Survival instructors refer to that quality of openness as “humility.” In my experience, elite performers, such as high-angle rescue professionals, who risk their lives to save others, have an exceptional balance of boldness and humility.

The word “experienced” often refers to someone who’s gotten away with doing the wrong thing more frequently than you have.
A rope is simple, yet capable of surprisingly complex behavior. It can transmit all the force imparted to it from an infinite number of points along its length. It can double and double again. It can transmit force along its length and deliver it somewhere else. It can stretch, shrink, vibrate, and break. It is such an elegant equation.
And as James Gleick writes in Chaos, “Strange things happened near the boundaries.”

In recent years, those who study accidents in outdoor recreation have begun to recognize that all accidents are alike in fundamental ways. If you find yourself in enough trouble to be staring death in the face, you’ve gotten there by a well-worn path. Your first reaction might be: How could this have happened? What rotten luck!

The events that we call “accidents” do not just happen. There is not some vector of pain that causes them. People have to assemble the systems that make them happen. Even then, nothing may happen for a long time.
Perrow’s Normal Accidents, first published in 1984, is a work of seminal importance because of its unusual thesis: That in certain kinds of systems, large accidents, though rare, are both inevitable and normal. The accidents are a characteristic of the system itself, he says. His book was even more controversial because he found that efforts to make those systems safer, especially by technological means, made the systems more complex and therefore more prone to accidents.
In system accidents, unexpected interactions of forces and components arise naturally out of the complexity of the system. Such accidents are made up of conditions, judgments, and acts or events that would be inconsequential by themselves. Unless they are coupled in just the right way and with just the right timing, they pass unnoticed.
Perrow used technical terms to describe those systems. He called them “tightly coupled.” He said that they must be capable of producing unintended complex interactions among components and forces. In his view, unless the system is both tightly coupled and able to produce such interactions, no system accident can happen (though other failures happen all the time). The parts and forces and their potential interactions might be hidden and are difficult to imagine beforehand.
When a system is tightly coupled, the effects spread. In a loosely coupled system, effects do not spread to other parts of the system. Falling dominoes are a familiar illustration of how tight coupling works. Move the dominoes farther apart and knock one over: only one will fall.

Chaos Theory

The idea of chaos theory is that what appears to be a very complex, turbulent system (the weather, for example) can begin with simple components (water, air, earth), operating under a few simple rules (heat and gravity). One of the characteristics of such a system is that a small change in the initial conditions, often too small to measure, can lead to radically different behavior. Run the equations two, four, eight times, and they may seem to be giving similar results. But the harder you drive the system, the more iterations result and the more unpredictable it becomes.

Edward Lorenz, a meteorologist at MIT, was modeling weather systems on a computer in the early 1960s when he accidentally discovered that a tiny change in the initial state (1 part in 1,000) was enough to produce totally different weather patterns. That became known as the Butterfly Effect, “the notion that a butterfly stirring the air today in Peking can transform storm systems next month in New York,” as Gleick wrote in Chaos.
Chaos theory views such systems, which seem chaotic, as actually arising out of a simple, orderly set of mathematical functions. They may also produce effects that are the same at all scales. A cloud looks the same whether viewed up close or far away. So does a coastline. And much of what we call art appeals to the senses because of its so-called fractal nature.
But the Sand Pile Effect expresses a tremendous amount about the way all of nature works. And it explains as well why Perrow came to regard accidents as a normal characteristic of certain systems. The systems he called complex and tightly coupled are actually self-organizing systems. The accidents are the collapses, if you will, in big technological sand piles, such as nuclear reactors and jet airliners. They all operate continuously in failure mode. Most failures—collapses—are small ones, such as a broken switch, a burned-out light, a busted rubber gasket, the glitches that we dismiss as normal. And they are normal. But like the temblors in an earthquake zone, they are also the quiet harbingers of the larger collapses that must eventually happen.
Small collapses are common on the sand pile. Large-scale ones are rare. But collapses of all sizes do happen with an inevitability that can be described mathematically as inversely proportional to some power of the size (with earthquakes it’s the 3/2 power, which curiously is the same power as the one used to determine the time that planets take to go around the sun: the square root of the cube of the size of the orbit). Similarly, fender benders are common, while sixty-car fatal pileups are rare. But they both happen. Murder is common; six-state murder sprees are rare. Mountaineering falls are common; nine people falling into a crevasse with three fatalities is rare. That so-called power law is found extensively in nature. It’s a more precise way of saying what Perrow was saying: Large accidents, while rare, are normal. Efforts to prevent them always fail.

“Shit happens, and if we just want to restrict ourselves to things where shit can’t happen…we’re not going to do anything very interesting.”

Peter M. Leschak is a wildland firefighter and a gifted writer. In Ghosts of the Fireground, he writes of waiting too long to get out of a fire that was overtaking him. “I’d perhaps been too well trained,” he says. “I was a victim of a common fire service mind-set: Can do!…A crew is ever anxious for the action and the novelty…. Our instructor had drummed a phrase into our heads: When in doubt, don’t.”

He’s talking about a theory called “risk homeostasis.” The theory says that people accept a given level of risk. While it’s different for each person, you tend to keep the risk you’re willing to take at about the same level. If you perceive conditions as less risky, you’ll take more risk. If conditions seem more risky, you’ll take less risk.
The theory has been demonstrated again and again. When antilock brakes were introduced, authorities expected the accident rate to go down, but it went up. People perceived that driving was safer with antilock brakes, so they drove more aggressively. With the introduction of radar in commercial shipping, it was expected that ships would collide less frequently. The opposite proved to be true. Radar simply allowed the owners to require the captains to drive the ships harder. Technological advances intended to improve safety may have the opposite effect.

Experience is nothing more than the engine that drives adaptation, so it’s always important to ask: Adaptation to what? You need to know if your particular experience has produced the sort of adaptation that will contribute to survival in the particular environment you choose. And when the environment changes, you have to be aware that your own experience might be inappropriate.

As Scott Sagan puts it in The Limits of Safety, “things that have never happened before happen all the time.” Unfortunately, as Perrow comments, “It is normal for us to die, but we only do it once.” Which is too bad, for it might be the ultimate learning experience.
Al Siebert, a psychologist, writes in The Survivor Personality that the survivor (a category including people who avoid accidents) “does not impose pre-existing patterns on new information, but rather allows new information to reshape [his mental models]. The person who has the best chance of handling a situation well is usually the one with the best…mental pictures or images of what is occurring outside of the body.”
Everyone, to one degree or another, sees not the real world but the ever-changing state of the self in an ever-changing invention of the world. We live in a continuous reinterpretation of sensory input and memories, and they are contained in presets that can, at any given moment, light up neural networks in a shifting kaleidoscope of energy, which we come to think of as reality. It is all part of the dynamic dance of adaptation that accounts for our survival as an organism and the survival of the species.

THE RULES OF ADVENTURE AT THIS POINT you may be looking back over this book and thinking: That’s all well and good, but what do I do now? How do I avoid getting into a survival situation; and if something should happen, how do I get out again? This book is not meant to tell people what to do but rather to be a search for a deeper understanding that will allow them to know what to do when the time comes—and it always comes, in some form, for all of us.

One piece of advice is to take the training that’s available.

Perceive, believe, then act.

Avoiding accidents, avoiding survival situations, is all about being smart. Horace Barlow, a neurobiologist, says that intelligence is a matter of “guessing well.” Guessing well involves a natural tendency people have: to predict. Training is an attempt to make predictions more accurate in a given environment. But as the environment changes (and it always does), what you need is versatility, the ability to perceive what’s really happening and adapt to it. So the training and prediction may not always be your best friend.

Kum Do teaches students to avoid the “Four Poisons of the Mind”—fear, confusion, hesitation, and surprise.

I recognized that our constant tendency to anticipate and predict may sometimes put us at a disadvantage. In Kum Do, the student must not anticipate his opponent’s moves or allow his natural instinct for prediction to run free, for that could lead to surprise, which could lead to momentary confusion and then sudden death. Instead, he must watch, clear and calm, and then act decisively at the correct moment.

STOP

Some instructors at survival schools use the acronym STOP—stop, think, observe, plan. (It ought to be stop, observe, think, plan, and act, but that wouldn’t make such a cute acronym.) Those instructors intend to teach you how to react during a survival situation, but the same skills can help you to avoid one.
It’s important to have a plan and a backup plan or a bailout plan. What-if sessions can help to develop backup plans and should precede any hazardous activity. But you must hold onto the plan with a gentle grip and be willing to let it go. Rigid people are dangerous people.

Survival is adaptation, and adaptation is change, but it is change based on a true reading of the environment. Sometimes sticking to the plan is best and improvising causes trouble.

Those who avoid accidents are those who see the world clearly, see it changing, and change their behavior accordingly.

As Mark Morey, my survival instructor from Vermont, told me, “We come from cities and learn to expect things to stay the same. But they don’t. And it kills us, quickly or slowly.”

Avoid impulsive behavior; don’t hurry.

Catecholamines are a double-edged sword. They provide power when you need that burst of energy. (I know a man who lifted a full-size Chrysler four-door sedan off his daughter’s leg after a car accident.)
What separates the living from the dead is an ability to see the error and adapt, a determination to get back on the path. Even the most unforgiving environments allow a few sins if you adjust your behavior and take correct action in a timely fashion.

Know your stuff.

Marcus Aurelius, the Roman emperor and general, wrote: “Of each particular thing, ask: ‘What is it in itself, in its own construction?’” A deep knowledge of the world around you may save your life. People who don’t understand the nature of water, for example, may tie a rope around themselves, as they do too frequently before entering swift water—to save someone, to retrieve something, to cross to the other bank. And then they die, because the system created by water and rope pulls them under and holds them there.

Get the information.

Commune with the dead.

If you could collect the dead around you and sit by the campfire and listen to their tales, you might find yourself in the best survival school of all. Since you can’t, read the accident reports in your chosen field of recreation. Accidents in North American Mountaineering; the National Speleological Society’s newsletter; River Safety Report; and numerous other publications (such as the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report) and Web sites not only provide reading that is by turns gripping, hilarious, and heart-wrenching, but also tell you the mistakes other people have made. Then you can be on the lookout for similar situations and perhaps avoid them. (Wasn’t this the cave where those scuba divers drowned…?)

Be humble.

A Navy Seal commander told Al Siebert, the psychologist who studies survival, that “the Rambo types are the first to go.” Don’t think that just because you’re good at one thing, it makes you good at other things.
Those who gain experience while retaining firm hold on a beginner’s state of mind become long-term survivors.
We have a saying: “There are old pilots and bold pilots, but there are no old, bold pilots.” That’s true in all hazardous pursuits.

When in doubt, bail out.

This is a tough one. You’ve paid for airfare. You’ve waited all year for this trip. You’ve bought all your equipment. It’s hard to admit that things aren’t going to go your way. At times like that, it’s good to ask yourself if it’s worth dying for.
But as Boone Bracket used to say, “I’d much rather be on the ground wishing I were in the air than in the air wishing I were on the ground.”
Some people get caught up in thinking, “I just spent all my money to get here and I’m not going to let some storm ruin it for me,” Leeman said. “At that moment, you need to be able to look within yourself and say, ‘It’s not going to happen this year, either.’ Otherwise, you run the risk of going for it and having unfortunate consequences. It’s a matter of looking at yourself and assessing your own abilities and where you are mentally, and then realizing that it’s better to turn back and get a chance to do it again than to go for it and not come back at all.” We are a society of high achievers, but in the wilderness, such motivation can be deadly sometimes. “Be realistic about your goals and your time frame,” Leeman advised. “Then be content with being outdoors. If you can get to the summit, that’s just the icing.”

WHEN TROUBLE comes, in whatever form, the same rules apply and a few others, too. You have to have that Positive Mental Attitude. Blaming others is a national pastime with the frivolous lawsuits to prove it. That’s not a survivor’s attitude, but Steve Callahan’s observation that he had a view of heaven from a seat in hell was. He was looking at the glass as half full.

Regarding self pity, Stockdale reflected on the value of having read the Book of Job: “When the Lord appeared in the whirlwind, he said ‘Now, Job, you have to shape up! Life is not fair…’ This was a great comfort to me in prison. It answered the question ‘Why me?’ It cast aside any thoughts of being punished for past actions.” But that attitude won’t magically appear when you need it. It has to develop throughout life as a way of looking at the world, and it’s worth working on, since it sets you up for success in any situation. It sets you up to be a rescuer, not a victim.

In reading about cases in which people survived seemingly impossible circumstances, however, I found an eerie uniformity. Decades and sometimes even centuries apart, separated by culture, geography, race, language, and tradition, they all went through the same patterns of thought and behavior. I eventually distilled those observations down to twelve points that seemed to stand out concerning how survivors think and behave in the clutch of mortal danger. Some are the same as the steps for staying out of trouble.

The outcome of a survival situation depends largely on your mental, emotional, and physical condition and activities. Everyone who meets catastrophe or challenge and survives it through his or her own actions goes through an initial transformation from victim to survivor, and also follows a well-defined pattern of mental and emotional checks, controls, actions, and transformations.

Those activities, such as the split of the rational from the emotional self and the sudden, almost blinding insight that one is going to live, are far more important in predicting survival than any particular skill, training, or equipment.

The perfect adventure shouldn’t be that much more hazardous in a real sense than ordinary life, for that invisible rope that holds us here can always break. We can live a life of bored caution and die of cancer. Better to take the adventure, minimize the risks, get the information, and then go forward in the knowledge that we’ve done everything we can.

To live life is to risk it. And when you feel the rush of air and catch the stink of hot breath in your face, you enter the secret order of those who have seen their own death close up. It makes us live that much more intensely. So intense is it for some that it seals their fate; once they’ve tasted it, they just can’t stop. And in their cases, perhaps we have to accept that the light that burns brightest burns half as long. But I believe that if you do it right, you can have it all.

I adhere to what my daughter Amelia calls the Gutter Theory of Life. It goes like this: You don’t want to be lying in the gutter, having been run down by a bus, the last bit of your life ebbing away, and be thinking, “I should have taken that rafting trip…” or, “I should have learned to surf…” or “I should have flown upside down—with smoke!”