Unthinkable: Who Survives When Disaster Strikes - and Why

by Amanda Ripley

  David Ropeik, coauthor of Risk: A Practical Guide for Deciding What’s Really Safe and What’s Really Dangerous in the World Around You, does not totally repress his own instincts. He allows his emotions to help him make decisions. “We’re always going to use our feelings. We’re never going to have all the facts. So we have to use emotions to kind of fill in the blanks,” Ropeik says. “But, and this is the challenge, that can be dangerous. If you go with how a risk feels, and that flies in the face of the facts, you could die.” So Ropeik tries to check himself whenever his feelings clash with known facts. For example, he is emotionally opposed to wearing a bike helmet. He feels strongly that he looks “goofy and stupid” in a helmet. But he forces himself to wear one anyway. He knows his emotions clash with the data, so he suppresses his feelings, just the way he suppresses the desire to eat a piece of chocolate cake (most of the time).

  The next time you hear about something that scares you, look for data. Be suspicious of absolute numbers—or no numbers at all. For example, new parents are now inundated with warnings about sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS), the name given to the unexplained death of a baby under age one. Given the enormous stakes, and the ready availability of preventive measures (like putting the baby to sleep on his or her back), these warnings make sense. But it would be much better if the scary pamphlets handed to new parents at the hospital put the risk into perspective. For instance, perhaps the warnings could include language like this: “SIDS is still not well-understood. But it is at an all-time low, partly because parents like you have been following basic precautions described in this pamphlet. Fewer than one baby per 1,000 dies this way (four times as many infants die from birth defects and low birthweight). So you don’t need to get up seven times in the middle of the night to check if the baby is breathing. Just follow these simple rules—and concentrate on sleeping, which will make you a much better parent, with near 100 percent certainty.”

  Of course, even when people really do understand the risks, that doesn’t mean they will make low-risk choices. Mileti, one of the nation’s foremost experts on hazards, lives along one of the biggest earthquake faults in North America. I ask him if this is wise. “No, it makes no sense,” he says. But, unlike 86 percent of Californians, Mileti has earthquake insurance. He also has several days’ worth of supplies. And instead of paying off his house, he has stashed his savings in the bank, so he’ll have cash if he needs it. He isn’t mired in denial. He’s made an informed gamble: until the megaearthquake he fully expects to occur one day, he gets to live in Palm Springs, California.

  Part Two

  Deliberation

  3

  Fear

  The Body and Mind of a Hostage

  THE DOMINICAN REPUBLIC’S embassy in Bogotá, Colombia, occupied a large but rather shabby building outside of the usual diplomatic enclave. It would take U.S. ambassador Diego Asencio, his driver, and four bodyguards at least half an hour to drive there. But the Dominican ambassador was celebrating his country’s independence day, and by tradition, every diplomat attended everyone else’s party. Besides, it was Asencio’s job to pan for treasure at cocktail parties. There was always the chance he would carry home some small rumor, floated theory, or unkind whisper that might prove valuable.

  At age forty-eight, Asencio was “used to the low lighting of comfortable offices,” as he would later put it. He had grown up in working-class Newark, New Jersey, the son of Spanish immigrants. Through charm, hard work, and fluent Spanish, he managed to tunnel his way into the squirearchy of diplomacy. He graduated from the Georgetown University School of Foreign Service in Washington, D.C. Then he worked in embassies in Mexico, Panama, Brazil, and Venezuela before going to Colombia. Around the State Department, Asencio was known as a gregarious, pipe-smoking character unafraid to offer his opinion on delicate matters. He liked dirty jokes, “the dirtier the better,” according to one newspaper account from the time. By February 27, 1980, the day of the party, he had been the U.S. Ambassador to Colombia for two and a half years.

  Asencio swept into the party around noon with a short agenda: greet the host, say hello to a few friends, and then gracefully exit in time for lunch. About sixty people had already arrived. The banter, as usual at such functions, was collegial but calculated. Asencio began making his rounds. Ambassadors from Israel, the Soviet Union, Egypt, and Switzerland, as well as the pope’s representative, exchanged kisses and handshakes and picked at the canapés. Around the time the Venezuelan ambassador pulled Asencio aside to debate a proposal affecting the local beef industry, Asencio sensed it was time to go. He started to glide toward the door and compose his good-byes.

  Just then, two well-dressed couples walked in through the front door, past Asencio’s armored Chrysler Imperial limousine and his bodyguards. The couples wore unusually serious expressions for such an affair, but attracted no special attention. There were bound to be a few professional party crashers in attendance—a tradition at diplomatic functions in Colombia.

  But the four young arrivals were members of M-19, a group of violent, nationalist rebels, and they had come to take the diplomats hostage. Lining up in the front of the room, they opened up their jackets, pulled pistols from their belts, and started firing at the ceiling. There was total quiet at first, as plaster fell to the floor. Then a few women started screaming. Men shouted. Despite his rather portly build, Asencio did not hesitate. He dove to the ground and crawled between a sofa and a wall. Others did nothing at all, silently watching the world collapse around them.

  From the ground, as the gunfire continued, Asencio looked up to see his host, the Dominican ambassador, run shrieking from the room—followed immediately by the countershriek of his wife, who yelled, “Mallol, act like a man!” and sent her husband spinning back inside. Meanwhile, another twelve young people who had been casually kicking a soccer ball around across the street ran into the embassy, pulling shotguns, carbines, and pistols from their gym bags and firing at Asencio’s bodyguards outside the door.

  The security men returned fire, but they were now badly outnumbered. As the sixteen terrorists barricaded themselves inside the embassy, the cacophony of screaming, swearing, and gunfire was overwhelming. Bullets shattered the tall window above Asencio, raining glass down onto his head. He could hear the thud of bullets slamming into the wall behind him. The terrorists held more than fifty captives—one of the largest groups of diplomatic hostages in history.

  Over the previous two months, there had been a dozen embassy seizures in Latin America alone. At that very moment, Iranian militants were occupying the U.S. embassy in Tehran. Asencio had read accounts of diplomats held hostage, and he himself had recently been involved in negotiations to free a Peace Corps officer held by Colombian guerrillas. Given all that he knew, he did not anticipate things going well for him. “My feeling was that there was absolutely no way I was going to survive,” he remembers. “I was for all intents and purposes, dead.”

  The Physiology of Fear

  What does it feel like to face death? What happens in our brains as the ground buckles under our feet? Fear guides our reactions in every station of the survival arc. But we’ll consider its effects here, in the beginning of the deliberation phase, because fear is typically at its peak once we’ve grasped the danger we face. Any deliberation that follows will happen through the prism of fear. People’s behavior in a disaster is inexplicable until we understand the effect of fear on the body and mind.

  The human fear response looks a lot like the fear response of other animals. So scientists understand fear better than, say, guilt or shame. “Fear is so fundamental,” says brain expert Joseph LeDoux. “There are key environmental triggers that will turn it on and well-worked-out responses that help you cope with it. These things have stuck around through zillions of years of evolution.”

  The first rule of fear is that it is primitive. Consider the fact that our hair stands on end in a terrifying situation. What purpose could that possibly serve? Well, none—for
us. But scientists believe it may be related to the flashing of feathers in birds or fin extensions in fish—all of which aid in the survival of those creatures. Over the long arc of history, fear has served us very well, and it still does, with some exceptions.

  Here is how fear moved through Asencio’s body: first, an unexpected sound registering 90 decibels or louder sets off an instinctive alarm in human beings. A rifle shot registers around 120 to 155 decibels. As soon as Asencio’s ears detected the booming gunshots, before he even realized what they were or that he was afraid, a signal traveled to his brain by way of the auditory nerve. When the signal reached his brainstem, neurons passed along the information to his amygdala, an ancient, almond-shaped mass of nuclei located deep within his brain’s temporal lobes that is central to the human fear circuit. In response, the amygdala set off a cascading series of changes throughout his body. In a flash, Asencio transformed into survival mode—without any conscious decision making on his part.

  If Asencio responded like most people, the chemistry of his blood literally changed so that it would be able to coagulate more easily. At the same time, his blood vessels constricted so that he would bleed less if he got hurt. His blood pressure and his heart rate shot up. And a slew of hormones—in particular cortisol and adrenaline—surged through his system, giving his gross-motor muscles a sort of bionic boost. (The hormones are so powerful that, after a life-or-death situation, many people report having an odd, chemical taste in their mouths.)

  But the next rule of fear is that for every gift it gives us, it takes one away. Like a country under attack, the human body has limited resources. The brain must decide what to prioritize and what to neglect. Our muscles become taut and ready. Our body creates its own natural painkillers. But our abilities to reason and perceive our surroundings deteriorate. Cortisol interferes with the part of the brain that handles complex thinking. We suddenly have trouble solving problems, even simple ones—like how to put on a life jacket or unbuckle a seat belt. All of our senses are profoundly altered. A few of us, like Elia Zedeño in the World Trade Center, even go temporarily blind, as we saw in Chapter 1.

  Not all of the diplomats dove for cover like Asencio. While the gun battle raged on, the Costa Rican consul general wandered the room, still clutching his drink, until one of his assailants pulled him down to the ground. Another ambassador, who had only arrived in Bogotá three weeks before, stood immobilized on the staircase where she’d been when the terrorists entered. Glass showered down on her from above, but still she didn’t move. Finally, one of the attackers screamed at her repeatedly: “Get down! You’ll get shot!” With that, the ambassador slumped into a crouch.

  The amygdala learns about danger in two ways. We have already seen the first way, which neuroscientist LeDoux calls the “low road”: Asencio’s ears sent a signal directly to his amygdala to trigger the sympathetic nervous system reaction. The low road is “a quick and dirty processing system,” as LeDoux writes in his excellent book, The Emotional Brain. But the sound of the gunshots also sent a signal that traveled through the cortex, the outer layer of gray matter involved in Asencio’s higher brain functions. The cortex recognized the sound as gunshots and sent a more nuanced message to the amygdala. This is the “high road.” It is a more accurate depiction of what happened, but it is also slower.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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