Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales Flashcards
(281 cards)
1
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when that organization had evolved into a marvelous machine for turning young men into old memories. 120
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What the heck am I doing here? I couldn’t answer the question then, but I can now: I was chasing my father, 168
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My Irish Catholic German mother had so many babies—who could keep track of them all? I pretty much ran wild. 178
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4
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man on a snowmobile is warned not to go up a hill because it will probably produce a fatally large avalanche. 184
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5
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I began to wonder if there wasn’t some mysterious force hidden within us that produces such mad behavior. Most people find it hard to believe that reason doesn’t control our actions. We believe in free will and rational behavior. The difficulty with those assumptions comes when we see rational people doing irrational things. 190
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6
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The farther one goes The less one knows. —Tao Te Ching 207
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7
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but every survival situation is the same in its essence, 260
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8
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The first lesson is to remain calm, not to panic. Because emotions are called “hot cognitions,” 261
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9
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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. 263
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10
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Only 10 to 20 percent of 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. 268
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11
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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. 297
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12
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there are also the things you can control, and you’d better be controlling them all the time. 301
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13
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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. 307
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14
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survivors “laugh at threats…playing and laughing go together. Playing keeps the person in contact with what is happening around [him].” 316
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15
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takeoff is optional but landing is mandatory. 337
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16
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Lessons about survival, about what you need to know and what you don’t need to know. 341
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17
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About what you know that you don’t know you know and about what you don’t know that you’d better not think you know. 342
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18
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Plato understood that emotions could trump reason and that to succeed we have to use the reins of reason on the horse of emotion. 343
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19
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The intellect without the emotions is like the jockey without the horse. 345
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20
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Fear puts me in my place. It gives me the humility to see things as they are. 353
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21
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the system we call emotion (from the Latin verb emovere, “to move away”) works powerfully and quickly to motivate behavior. 359
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22
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Emotion is an instinctive response aimed at self-preservation. 368
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23
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The oldest medical and philosophical model, going back to the Greeks, was of a unified organism in which mind was part of and integral to the body. Plato, on the other hand, thought of mind and body as separate, with the soul going on after death. Aristotle brought them back together again. 372
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24
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neuroscientist, Damasio is as qualified as anyone to define the brain, and he calls it an “‘organ’ of information and government.” He put the word “organ” in quotes because it’s not exactly an organ either. 386
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information about the environment, information about the body, and information about the good or bad consequences of interactions between the two. 388
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Doing almost anything generates new links among neurons. 397
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Genes make new proteins in order to store information, and they make new proteins in order to bring that information back as a memory. This process is called “reconsolidation,” 398
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The Synaptic Self, put it, “the brain that does the remembering is not the brain that formed the initial memory. In order for the old memory to make sense in the current brain, the memory has to be updated.” 400
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This is one reason why memory is notoriously faulty. 401
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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. 407
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31
The jockey can’t win without the horse, and the horse can’t race alone. In the gate, they are two, and it’s dangerous. But when they run, they are one, and it’s positively godly. 409
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That horse can either work for us or against us. It can win the race or explode in the gate. So it is learning when to soothe and gentle it and when to let it run that marks the winning jockey, the true survivor. 415
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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. 425
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Adrenalin is a trade name for epinephrine, and adrenaline is a synonym for it, but neither is used much in scientific circles. Epinephrine and norepinephrine, which come from the adrenal glands, are in a class of compounds called catecholamines, which have a wide range of effects, including constricting blood vessels and exciting or inhibiting the firing of nerve cells and the contraction of smooth muscle fibers. But it is norepinephrine (not adrenaline or epinephrine) that is largely responsible for the jolt you feel in the heart when startled. 441
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the amygdala as “the centerpiece of the defense system.”) 451
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Fear in the cockpit, as Yankovich put it, is a knife fight in a phone booth. 456
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STRESS RELEASES cortisol into the blood. It invades the hippocampus and interferes with its work. (Long-term stress can kill hippocampal cells.) 482
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most people are incapable of performing any but the simplest tasks under stress. 484
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You see less, hear less, miss more cues from the environment, and make mistakes. Under extreme stress, the visual field actually narrows. 487
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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. 497
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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. 521
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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. 523
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Survival, then, is about being cool. It’s about laughing with an attitude of bold humility in the face of something terrifying. 546
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It seemed almost as if he had two brains and they were having an argument over his body. 592
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Freezing is a classic emotional response of all mammals. A bystander happened to be videotaping the crowd when a bomb went off at the Olympic games in Atlanta in 1996, and the freezing (and crouching) response of the people is a dramatic illustration of a primary emotion. 602
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William Faulkner wrote in Light in August, “Man knows so little about his fellows. In his eyes all men or women act upon what he believes would motivate him if he were mad enough to do what that other man or woman is doing.” 616
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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). 631
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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. 636
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There are only a few simple rules to the game but an estimated 10120 possible moves in any game of chess. 644
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James Gleick pointed out in his book Chaos, there are neither that many elementary particles in the universe nor have there been that many microseconds of time since its creation perhaps 13 billion (1.3 × 109) years ago. Logic doesn’t work well for such nonlinear systems as chess and life. 646
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The most remarkable discovery of modern neuroscience is that the body controls the brain as much as the brain controls the body. 664
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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. 671
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Claparède’s part: his patient could learn without memory or thought. It was as if her body could learn. 697
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her lack of memory had robbed her of the ability to adapt the response for other circumstances. 699
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reason is regarded as the highest function. People are named after it: Homo sapiens (from the Latin sapere, to taste, as in “to taste the world”). 720
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Those who can control that impulse to survive, live. Those who can’t, die. And that’s the simplest way to explain survival, 726
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the training is only as good as the environment. 786
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Everyone carries around a necessary measure of his environment and of the self. 795
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Joseph LeDoux put it, “People don’t come preassembled, but are glued together by life.” 806
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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. 807
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(Scientists estimate that the mature brain has 100 billion neurons and trillions of connections.) 809
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When two neurons fire together, they become wired together. 818
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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. 819
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Logic simply takes too long, often impossibly long, and in a child logic is not well developed enough at any rate. Instead, he rapidly and unconsciously pages through his atlas of emotional bookmarks 829
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His training and experience taught him that it was better to die for his country than to fail. 847
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Nothing in our learning tells us that a mountain is going to come apart before our eyes. It makes no sense. It hasn’t happened, therefore it cannot happen. 860
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We think we believe what we know, but we only truly believe what we feel. 862
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chocolate Lab, Lucy. Lucy sometimes reminds me of the amygdala: When anyone comes to the door, she barks before I even hear it. 866
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the same sensory information reaches the amygdala by a faster pathway. The amygdala screens that information for signs of danger. Like Lucy, the amygdala isn’t very bright, but if it detects a hazard, or anything remotely resembling one, before you’re even conscious of the stimulus, 870
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the amygdala is wrong a lot of the time: There is no danger. But in the long course of evolution, it has been a successful strategy. 875
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information from the senses takes a neural route that splits, one part reaching the amygdala first, the other arriving at the neocortex milliseconds later. Rational (or conscious) thought always lags behind the emotional reaction. 876
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some ability may remain for the neocortex to do the following: First, to recognize that there is an emotional response underway. Second, to read reality and perceive circumstances correctly. Third, to override or modulate the automatic reaction if it is an inappropriate one; and fourth, to select a correct course of action. 884
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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. They freeze. 892
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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. 900
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Malcolm Gladwell, writing in the New Yorker, put it succinctly: “Choking is about thinking too much. Panic is about thinking too little.” 906
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THE ILLINOIS RIVER in southwestern Oregon has thirty-five miles of class III to IV rapids with a class V, moss-covered gorge in the middle. That section is known as the Green Wall. 922
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The environment had changed, and he adapted. Using his reason to manage emotion and emotion to inform reason, he survived. 933
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a survivor expects the world to keep changing and keeps his senses always tuned to: What’s up? The survivor is continuously adapting. 940
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John F. Kennedy once remarked, “There’s always some son of a bitch who doesn’t get the word.” 944
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They were still operating on a model of the old environment. The results were fatal: 948
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That is the difficulty with logic: It’s step-by-step, linear. The world is not. 957
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the brain uses for handling complicated problems is to create mental models, stripped-down schematics of the world. A mental model may tell you the rules by which an environment behaves or the color and shape of a familiar object. 960
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The fact that you have a mental model of the red paperback copy of Moby-Dick allows you to screen out nearly everything you see until, at last, a red book blossoms in your field of vision. But if you’re wrong and it’s a blue hardback edition of Moby-Dick, chances are that you won’t find it even if the title comes into view. 965
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It’s the reason that many card tricks and magic acts work: You see what you expect to see. You see what makes sense, and what makes sense is what matches the mental model. 969
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You believe the magician does the trick, but in fact you do it yourself. 979
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Unless something is successfully transferred from working memory into long-term memory, it is lost. 995
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The limited nature of working memory (attention) and the executive function, along with the shorthand work of mental models, can cause surprising lapses in the way we process the world and make conscious or unconscious decisions. 999
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Normal Accidents, he wrote that “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.” 1014
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Mental models can be surprisingly strong and the abilities of working memory surprisingly fragile. 1020
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Stress doesn’t take long to confuse you. 1052
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MENTAL MODELS, emotional bookmarks, and the ability to keep the right things in working memory played a powerful role in determining who lived and who died in the collapse of the World Trade Center towers. 1059
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“Thirty-five percent of the observers failed to notice the woman with the umbrella, 1081
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It was an attitude open to an unfamiliar world, accepting of whatever was there. There was no model and there were no expectations. 1084
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The order “Tell me what you see” produces curiosity. The order “Count the passes” produces a closed system, a narrowing of attention directed at a particular task, which fills up working memory. 1084
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Magic confirms the idea that you see what you expect to see, and that under the right circumstances, working memory can’t be distracted from its task. 1088
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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. 1090
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(56 percent) didn’t notice the gorilla. 1093
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Everyone says that the mind plays tricks, but deep down, most people don’t believe it. 1098
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Some people update their models better than others. They’re called survivors. 1114
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Sometimes an idea can drive action as powerfully as an emotion. 1129
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Complexity, M. Mitchell Waldrop points out that “All complex adaptive systems anticipate the future…. Every living creature has an implicit prediction encoded in its genes…every complex adaptive system is constantly making predictions based on its various internal models of the world…. 1133
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To the brain, the future is as real as the past. The difficulty begins when reality doesn’t match the plan. 1137
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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. 1140
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we all make powerful models of the future. The world we imagine seems as real as the ones we’ve experienced. We suffuse the model with the emotional values of past realities. 1150
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the longer it takes to dislodge the imagined world in favor of the real one, the greater the risk. 1153
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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. 1154
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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. 1158
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Tao Te Ching says: The rigid person is a disciple of death; The soft, supple, and delicate are lovers of life. 1159
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in a classical drama, the tension comes from the fact that the hero is farthest from his goal when he triumphs. 1170
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They saw what they wanted to see and disregarded what they knew: 1184
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people tend to take any information as confirmation of their mental models. 1187
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suddenly they all felt their hair stand up. Rob knew about St. Elmo’s fire, as sailors call it. 1201
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(lightning can travel as fast as 54 yards per microsecond). 1210
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When the World Trade Center collapsed, a man tried to swim from New Jersey to Manhattan to help. He was picked up by a ferryboat captain. 1215
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they were all wearing what the YOSAR (Yosemite search and rescue) crew call “death cloth”—cotton. 1221
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we’re always Homo but sometimes not so sapiens. People are emotional creatures, which is to say, physical creatures. 1232
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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. 1233
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Once an emotional reaction is underway, there can be an overwhelming impulse to act. 1238
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Nature doesn’t adjust to our level of skill. 1242
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Zen teaches openness. Survival instructors refer to that quality of openness as “humility.” 1245
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It’s nothing personal, then, when the brain plays tricks. Nothing personal, either, when you die, as Marcus Aurelius, the Roman emperor and Stoic philosopher, said. 1250
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Mike’s Sky Rancho, a famous Baja motorcycle hangout high in the mountains, with precious little electricity, no phone at all, and an ancient swimming pool that looked like a poisoned waterhole. 1270
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if we don’t look out for each other, we’re no better than coyotes. 1277
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The word “experienced” often refers to someone who’s gotten away with doing the wrong thing more frequently than you have. 1351
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Charles Perrow who coined the term “system accidents” in the 1980s, 1446
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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. 1459
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efforts to make those systems safer, especially by technological means, made the systems more complex and therefore more prone to accidents. 1460
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most of the time, nothing serious happens, which makes it more difficult for the operators of the system (climbers, in this case). They begin to believe that the orderly behavior they see is the only possible state of the system. Then, at the critical boundaries in time and space, the components and forces interact in unexpected ways, with catastrophic results. 1465
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When a system is tightly coupled, the effects spread. In a loosely coupled system, effects do not spread to other parts of the system. 1483
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I Ching says. The cause is in the nature of the system. It’s self-organizing. 1487
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Classical physics ignored all that and used idealized systems to explain the world. But that left most of the real world unexplained. 1492
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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. 1499
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Chaos theory views such systems, which seem chaotic, as actually arising out of a simple, orderly set of mathematical functions. 1508
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second law of thermodynamics, which says that everything is heading toward more disorder? 1515
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Like chaos theory, complexity theory postulated “upheaval and change and enormous consequences flowing from trivial-seeming events—and yet with a deep law hidden beneath.” 1518
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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). 1542
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Large accidents, while rare, are normal. Efforts to prevent them always fail. 1547
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NASA will investigate and explain all the details of how it happened, but knowing those details will not prevent the next accident. Indeed, the safety precautions they take may make it more likely. 1550
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doing bold things isn’t about engineering risk to zero. 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.” 1558
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The power law applies: The bigger the accident, the less likely it is. 1566
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I saw how easy it was to cross that invisible dividing line between what has been adapted for us and what demands that we adapt to it. 1587
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Our instructor had drummed a phrase into our heads: When in doubt, don’t.” 1612
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a theory called “risk homeostasis.” The theory says that people accept a given level of risk. 1613
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If you perceive conditions as less risky, you’ll take more risk. If conditions seem more risky, you’ll take less risk. 1614
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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. 1616
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Experience is nothing more than the engine that drives adaptation, 1625
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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. 1626
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There are three main difficulties with descent: attitude; an emotion involving goal seeking; 1638
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humor. The deescalating emotional response. 1641
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The trap lay in the fact that they were only halfway to their real goal. They were celebrating when they had the worst part of the climb ahead of them. 1641
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it is part of the natural cycle of human emotion to let down your guard once you feel you’ve reached a goal. 1642
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Their focus had been sharp in the goal-seeking phase. Now it grew blurry. 1648
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Stress can trump all the other effects. 1652
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Last, there is the fact that descending is technically more difficult than ascending. 1654
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Descent, like the act of walking, is a controlled fall. 1656
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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. 1658
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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.” 1688
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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. 1691
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Dan Meyer, director of the North Carolina chapter of Outward Bound, first published the Accident Matrix in 1979 in the Journal of Experiential Education. Jed Williamson refined it. Contributing causes of accidents are arranged in the Matrix under three general categories: Conditions, Acts, and Judgments, which combine in a dynamic and synergistic sequence to generate accidents. 1701
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“Conditions” refers to any potential forces that can hurt you, such as those resulting from a slip on a steep icy slope. The main “Act” that set the sequence in motion was to pull the protection and move while roped together. The “Judgment” was the belief that the climbers could self-arrest, which in the Matrix might be phrased as “overconfidence” or “exceeding their abilities.” In other accidents, “Conditions” might be falling rocks, swift and/or cold water, or weather. 1705
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Peter Leschak, the firefighter, put it, “Sounds like a no-brainer, but in the heat of battle, simple concepts can wander off into the smoke and be forgotten.” 1710
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meta-knowledge: the ability to assess the quality of our own knowledge. It’s easy to assume that perception and reason faithfully render reality. But as Plato suggested and modern neuroscience has proved, we live in a sort of dreamworld, which only imperfectly matches reality. 1716
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Experienced climbers may be reluctant to challenge others with experience, and the same is true in any other pursuit. Going into a risky operation, doctors won’t challenge doctors. 1739
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The design of the human condition makes it easy for us to conceal the obvious from ourselves, especially under strain and pressure. 1746
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trying to land the model instead of the plane. 1749
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Be here now. It’s a good survival rule. It means to pay attention and keep an up-to-date mental model. 1764
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The second rule was: Everything takes eight times as long as it’s supposed to. That was the friction rule, which wilderness travelers will do well to heed. 1765
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There is a tendency to make a plan and then to worship the plan, 1766
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the harder we try, the more complex our plan for reducing friction, the worse things get. 1771
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It all looks so…inviting. And I began thinking how easy it is to die. 1813
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Tao Te Ching puts it: Heaven and earth are inhumane; they view the myriad creatures as straw dogs. 1818
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many drowning victims he’d studied, 75 percent were visitors and 90 percent were white males in their forties or fifties. 1822
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One of the things that kills us in the wilderness, in nature, is that we just don’t understand the forces we engage. We don’t understand the energy because we no longer have to live with it. 1836
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The environment we’re used to is designed to sustain us. 1839
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Epictetus wrote, “Be silent; for there is great danger that you will immediately vomit up what you have not digested.” 1846
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“come to grief because they have not paid attention to facts about the world that would ultimately defeat their plans…. 1852
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we miscalculate the scale of the places we elect to explore. 1865
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we head off on “a mad march…without sufficient information about the terrain.” But information is one thing. Believing it is another. 1866
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For most people it’s unthinkable to imagine what appears to be a solid mountain coming apart. But all mountains are in a state of continuous collapse. 1891
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The exiguous nature of everyday experience creates habits of mind that shape perceptions, so you don’t see the mountain crumbling. Human life is so brief in comparison to the mountain’s. You live in a compressed time frame that does not match many phenomena you encounter in nature. 1895
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The best way to become a believer, short of dying, is to sit very quietly and contemplate those things. 1903
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The forces we engage are relentless. Gravity is on duty all the time. 1938
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the rule of thumb is that you can survive three minutes without air, three days without water, and three weeks without food. 1942
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Ski resorts, for example, create the illusion of safety in the midst of wilderness. People approach them as if they were amusement parks, with little idea of where they are and what forces they may encounter. 1945
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KNOWLEDGE OF the sort you need does not begin with information, it begins with experience and perception. But there is a dark and twisty road from experience and perception to correct action. 1985
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“If you’re not afraid, then you don’t appreciate the situation.” 2011
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I do more…prevention than actual life-saving.” 2037
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early learning may be one of the most reliable kinds, forming deep knowledge and cool cognitions in high-energy states. It is learning that lasts a lifetime. 2044
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Does anything happen to me? I take what comes… —Marcus Aurelius 2055
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Mismatching the abilities of people in the outdoors is a sure way to get into trouble. People routinely fail to realize that they have to travel at the speed of the slowest member, not the fastest. 2073
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PSYCHOLOGISTS WHO study the behavior of people who get lost report that very few ever backtrack. (The eyes look forward into real or imagined worlds.) 2103
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Edward Cornell, one of the scientists who study the behavior of people who become lost, is a professor of psychology at the University of Alberta in Edmonton. “Being lost is a universal human condition,” he told me. “But there is a very fuzzy area between being lost and not lost.” 2110
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Place cells and other cells involved in navigation are constantly being reprogrammed. It’s called “remapping.” 2143
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Blind people often get around just fine because they have excellent mental maps. 2149
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Rats who have had the lateral nucleus of the amygdala destroyed lose their drive to get to a particular place. 2153
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The fact of not having a mental map, of trying to create one in an environment where the sensory input made no sense, is interpreted as an emergency and triggers a physical (i.e., emotional) response. 2167
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Admitting that you are lost is difficult because having no mental map, being no place, is like having no self: It’s impossible to conceive, because one of the main jobs of the organism is to adjust itself to place. 2182
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anytime you find yourself thinking it’s easier to go around a mountain than over one, you know there’s trouble upstairs. 2188
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Generally, they would be wiser and safer to stay put and get as comfortable and warm as possible, but many feel compelled to push on, urged by subconscious feelings.” 2209
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What had begun as a small error in navigation had progressed, step by innocent step, to a grim struggle for survival. 2220
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SYROTUCK ANALYZED 229 search and rescue cases (11 percent of them fatal) and concluded that almost three quarters of those who died perished within the first forty-eight hours of becoming lost. Those who die can do so surprisingly quickly, and hypothermia is usually the official cause. 2221
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Until that day in Glacier, I would not have believed how easily I could get lost or how quickly I could lose my ability to reason. 2241
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“If you ask hikers on a trail to point out where they are on a map at any given moment,” Hill said, “they are usually wrong.” In daily life, people operate on the necessary illusion that they know where they are. Most of the time, they don’t. 2244
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a red light should go off. You’re trying to make reality conform to your expectations rather than seeing what’s there. In the sport of orienteering, they call that ‘bending the map.’” 2252
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(Psychologists have observed that one of the most basic human needs, beginning at birth, is to be gazed upon by another. Mothers throughout the world have been observed spending long periods staring into the eyes of their babies with a characteristic tilt of the head. To be seen is to be real, and without another to gaze upon us, we are nothing. Part of the terror of being lost stems from the idea of never being seen again.) 2262
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“woods shock,” 2276
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It refers to a state of confusion that can beset people in the wilderness. 2277
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“‘Woods shock’ is a term for the fear associated with complete loss of spatial orientation,” 2278
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woods shock can now be seen as an emotional survival response associated with the failure of the mental map to match the environment. Thrashing does not save a drowning person either, but it’s just as natural. Those who can float quietly have a better chance. 2281
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Being lost, then, is not a location; it is a transformation. It is a failure of the mind. It can happen in the woods or it can happen in life. 2288
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The research suggests five general stages in the process a person goes through when lost. In the first, you deny that you’re disoriented and press on with growing urgency, attempting to make your mental map fit what you see. In the next stage, as you realize that you’re genuinely lost, the urgency blossoms into a full-scale survival emergency. Clear thought becomes impossible and action becomes frantic, unproductive, even dangerous. In the third stage (usually following injury or exhaustion), you expend the chemicals of emotion and form a strategy for finding some place that matches the mental map. (It is a misguided strategy, for there is no such place now: You are lost.) In the fourth stage, you deteriorate both rationally and emotionally, as the strategy fails to resolve the conflict. In the final stage, as you run out of options and energy, you must become resigned to your plight. Like it or not, you must make a new mental map of where you are. You must become Robinson Crusoe or you will die. To survive, you must find yourself. Then it won’t matter where you are. 2291
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The stages of getting lost resemble the five stages of dying described by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, the psychologist who wrote On Death and Dying: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. 2310
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There are great survivors and helpless victims on the curve of human ability. Most of us are neither. Most of us fall somewhere in between and may perform poorly at first, then find the inner resources to return to correct action and clear thought. 2326
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tell me about flying, “A good landing is any landing that you can walk away from.” 2328
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That final stage in the process of being lost can prove to be either a beginning or an end. Some give up and die. Others stop denying and begin surviving. 2334
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One of the toughest steps a survivor has to take is to discard the hope of rescue, just as he discards the old world he left behind and accepts the new one. 2339
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that’s what my father did in the Nazi prison camp: He made it his world. Dougal Robertson, who was cast away at sea for thirty-eight days, advised thinking of it this way: “Rescue will come as a welcome interruption of…the survival voyage.” 2341
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do not try to bend the map. They remap the world they’re in. 2361
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the Zen concept of the beginner’s mind, the mind that remains open and ready despite years of training. “In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities,” said Zen master Shunryu Suzuki. “In the expert’s mind there are few.” 2372
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She didn’t spend time bemoaning her fate. She looked to herself, took responsibility, made a plan. 2389
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if she went downhill, she’d find water. He’d said that rivers usually led to civilization. 2392
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But expecting someone else to take responsibility for your well-being can be fatal. 2394
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Louis Pasteur said, “Luck favors the prepared mind.” 2403
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They were rule followers, and it killed them. 2410
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Survivors aren’t fearless. They use fear: they turn it into anger and focus. 2420
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Like so many retired pilots, my father wore soft shoes, talked softly, and walked slowly. 2454
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Apathy is a typical reaction to any sort of disaster, 2473
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Once fatigue sets in, though, it is almost impossible to recover from it under survival conditions. It is not just a matter of being tired. It’s more like a spiritual collapse, and recovery requires more than food and rest. 2479
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In survival situations, people greatly underestimate the need for rest. 2488
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Faith is a very important thing in your will to survive.” As Peter Leschak put it, “Whether a deity is actually listening or not, there is value in formally announcing your needs, desires, worries, sins, and goals in a focused, prayerful attitude. Only when you are aware can you take action.” 2498
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(Chance is nothing more than opportunity, and it is all around at every turn; the trick lies in recognizing it.) 2502
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Helping someone else is the best way to ensure your own survival. It takes you out of yourself. It helps you to rise above your fears. Now you’re a rescuer, not a victim. 2507
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And seeing how your leadership and skill buoy others up gives you more focus and energy to persevere. The cycle reinforces itself: You buoy them up, and their response buoys you up. Many people who survive alone report that they were doing it for someone else (a wife, boyfriend, mother, son) back home. 2508
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They have a well-defined purpose. Purpose is a big part of survival, but it must be accompanied by work. Grace without good works is not salvation. 2523
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Plan the flight and fly the plan. But don’t fall in love with the plan. Be open to a changing world and let go of the plan when necessary so that you can make a new plan. Then, as the world and the plan both go through their book of changes, you will always be ready to do the next right thing. 2525
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People are animals with animal instincts, but they lack many of the other survival mechanisms animals possess, 2527
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Culture creates a collective survival mechanism for the species. People survive better in numbers. They survive because they use cognition to organize, say, for a hunt, and to make things, even as cognition inhibits their animalness, including strength. 2529
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The Tao Te Ching is broken into two parts, “Integrity,” and “The Way,” which can be thought of as the two halves of surviving anything. 2536
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An imbalance of the brain’s functions leads us into trouble, and a triumph of balance gets us out. 2538
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You have to learn to take a bunch of junk and accept it with a sense of humor.” 2546
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Byron Kerns’s Mountain Shepherd Survival School is of the modern, technical sort. Mark Morey’s Vermont Wilderness Survival School in Brattleboro, Vermont, is based on ancient native skills. 2563
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The man had skills, equipment, and experience. It was his attitude that killed him, his inability to balance emotion and reason. 2597
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I could not change the world; I could only change myself. To see and know that world, then, was the key to surviving in it. I had to accept the world in which I found myself. I had to calm down and begin living. 2613
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“Don’t get comfortable,” he advised. “Get confident.” 2622
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Like making art, making fire is a deeply human act. Through it, we know our world in a way that no animal ever will. 2636
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In Australia the Aborigines have a “labyrinth of invisible pathways,” 2655
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It was aboriginal neuroscience, using implicit, not explicit, memory circuits to embed the map in the unconscious mind. 2666
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Peter Leschak speaks of “Standard Fire Order #10: Stay alert, keep calm, think clearly, act decisively.” According to this directive, the best way to meet an emergency is with sharp senses (to gather information), a clear mind (to analyze the information), and bold action; add to these humor (to handle strong emotions). Steven Callahan was able to do all of those things. 2695
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Survival starts before the accident. 2705
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certain people, when afraid, experience “activation of the amygdala [which] will lead working memory to receive a greater number of inputs, and inputs of a greater variety, than in the presence of emotionally neutral stimuli.” 2713
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Turning fear into focus is the first act of a survivor. 2722
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in the heat of a crisis, the only thought you can allow yourself concerns your next correct action. 2725
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At least 75 percent of people caught in a catastrophe either freeze or simply wander in a daze, according to some psychologists. 2727
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The next step was to take bold action while exercising great caution, which is but one of the many delicate balancing acts necessary for survival. 2733
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He had just saved his life by risking it, which is the essential task of every organism. No risk, no reward. No risk, no life. 2735
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A sense of humor “is not a luxury,” Leach writes, “it is a vital organ for survival.” 2746
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The Tao Te Ching says: He who is brave in daring will be killed, He who is brave in not daring will survive. 2759
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To take delight in small achievements, to celebrate early victories, is another hallmark of the survivor. 2766
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completely converted himself from victim to survivor. 2768
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Nature loves to strip the unwary of their gear. 2818
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Struggling to achieve that essential state of grace and poise, she began praying to keep herself focused. Survival psychologists have long observed that successful survivors pray, even when they don’t believe in a god. 2843
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He was doing the opposite of going inside himself, where survival begins. 2851
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he expects all advantage and all harm from himself.” He doesn’t blame others, nor turn to them. He takes responsibility for himself. Epictetus, one of the great Stoic thinkers, 2854
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Kübler-Ross’s stages: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. 2858
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Some people subconsciously believe that “to prepare for disaster is to encourage it. ‘Don’t even think about it’—for fear that it may come to pass.” 2861
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The world won’t adapt to me. I must adapt to it. 2870
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To experience humility is the true survivor’s correct response to catastrophe. 2870
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She was not going to give up, and that marked her, at last, as a survivor. 2914
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a commitment to someone outside themselves. 2919
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Stockdale wrote, “In difficult situations, the leader with the heart, not the soft heart, not the bleeding heart, but the Old Testament heart, the hard heart, comes into his own.” Survival means accepting reality, and accepting reality takes a hard heart. But it is a strange kind of coldness, for it has empathy at its center. 2930
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Privacy is life, but so is community. 2942
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“It is not uncommon for castaways who have been many days at sea and suffered both physically and emotionally to lapse into what has been called ‘a sort of collective confabulation,’ in which the survivors exist in a shared fantasy world. 2964
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A crucial moment for all survivors comes when they become convinced that they will survive. 2990
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In the stages of dying, the last step is acceptance. In survival, it is total commitment. 2997
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Dostoevsky wrote in Memoirs from the House of the Dead, “Man is a creature who can get used to anything, 3019
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Survival is a simple test. There’s only one right answer, but cheating is allowed. 3020
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Leadership, order, and routine are all important elements of survival. 3030
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John Leach uses the term “active-passiveness,” meaning “the ability to accept the situation one is in but without giving in to it….” 3036
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Survival depends on utility, but it also depends on joy, for joy is the organism telling itself that it is all right. 3044
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Nearly all survivors report hearing what they call “the voice.” It tells them what to do. It is the speaking, rational side of the brain, the one that processes language, the wellspring of reason. 3052
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Hunger is one of the most powerful of all emotions. The survival experts call it “food stress.” Although the body can go perhaps three weeks without food, the emotional drive is immense and becomes an obsession, a drive as strong as any fight or flight response. It can’t be ignored. 3070
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