Unthinkable_ Who Survives When Disaster Strikes - and Why - Amanda Ripley [120]
Without training, the brain falls back on its most basic fear responses in a crisis. “You put a kid in a car, take him out on an interstate at 60 mph during a snowstorm and the car goes out of control, I can tell you what his brain is going to do,” says Langford. “It is going to totally disintegrate. There is no programming. So what does he do? Freezes. Closes his eyes. Does all the wrong things. Young people can respond in a nanosecond. The problem is, most of the time they do the wrong thing.”
After lunch, we go out back to the track and get into a gray Corolla with racing stripes. I am behind the wheel and Langford is in the passenger seat. The sun is baking the course. We start out by doing a simple slalom course around orange cones, practicing braking and turning. First, I go too slowly, erring on the side of not humiliating myself. Langford starts working on my confidence. “Feel the rhythm of the car. That’s it! You got it! Make it dance!” And after a few rounds, it works. I’m going faster, having more fun, and even boldly knocking over a few cones now and then.
Then we move to the skid pad, which is essentially a wet, slippery piece of asphalt. At Langford’s direction, I drive onto the skid pad at about 20 mph. Then Langford yanks up on the parking brake in the middle of the car and, at the same time, leans over and yanks the steering wheel toward him. The reflex of most drivers at this point is to slam on the brakes and turn the car in the exact wrong direction. That’s because their brains are programmed to look toward the threat. “Whatever you’re looking at, the brain has a tendency to direct the hands toward it,” Langford says. This is problematic on a highway. When people see an oncoming car swerving into their lane, they slam on the brakes and…steer directly toward it.
Langford calls this phenomenon “potholism”: the more drivers stare at potholes, the more likely they are to drive into them. The hands follow the eyes. One of his clients was a woman who had seen a terrible accident. A car in front of her had hit a pedestrian, killing the man. From then on, the woman had become hypervigilant behind the wheel. She looked obsessively for pedestrians, and when she found them, she kept her eye on them. Soon she came to the sickening realization that she was steering directly toward the pedestrians. She hired Langford because she was afraid she was going to kill someone. He worked with her to help her learn to redirect her focus—away from watching pedestrians and toward controlling her car.
On the skid pad, the goal is to experience a skid enough times that your brain knows what to do: squeeze the brakes and steer where you want the car to go. After a while, I can pull the car out of each skid without any trouble, almost gracefully. I leave with an appreciation for the automobile. Like the brain, it is an amazing machine, fluid and adaptable, if the driver knows how to work it.
In Defiance of Dread
Terrorism is another hazard, like any other, except that it demands even more initiative from regular people. Civilians are the involuntary draftees, after all. We should not forget this after 9/11, says Stephen Flynn, a homeland security expert and former U.S. Coast Guard officer. “There were two narratives after 9/11. One narrative was, ‘There are bad people coming to kill us, and we have to take the battle to them.’” That was the narrative deployed by President Bush as he sent American soldiers to fight overseas and told the American people to stay calm and keep shopping.
“The other narrative,” Flynn says, “is the United Flight 93 narrative.” There was one plane on 9/11 on which regular people were well informed. The passengers on Flight 93 had time to learn that the plane would be used as a missile if they did nothing. And what did they do? They pushed through the denial phase fast. Then they deliberated, whispering behind their seat backs and gathering information over their phones. They operated as a group. Then, in the decisive moment, they charged into the cockpit and changed the course of history.