Unthinkable_ Who Survives When Disaster Strikes - and Why - Amanda Ripley [27]
Of course, too much dread can be as problematic as too little. Coming less than a month after Katrina, and striking many of the same places, Hurricane Rita hit a profound resonance in the cultural psyche. For a brief period, the worst-case scenario was easy to imagine. Though only 1.25 million people were told to evacuate, 2.5 million did so. A carefully planned evacuation quickly devolved into mass frustration. One-hundred-mile-long traffic jams clogged the freeways around Houston. A spokesman for the State Transportation Department, Mike Cox, told reporters that no one had predicted how many Texans would be so frightened by Katrina. “Not one of our fifteen thousand employees is a psychologist,” he said, nicely summarizing the big problem.
The Man Without Dread
It’s tempting to throw our hands up and conclude that people are simply irrational, a lost cause. But dread is not so easily dismissed. In some cases, it sends us reeling, making life less safe and less productive. But other times, like so many of our disaster reflexes, it is the wisdom of ages imbedded right there in our heads.
Neurologist Antonio Damasio encountered a baffling patient in the 1970s at the University of Iowa College of Medicine. The patient, whom he calls Elliot to protect his identity, was an accomplished businessman, father, and husband until he developed a brain tumor. The tumor, which was the size of a small orange when it was discovered, was successfully removed through surgery. And Elliot appeared cured: he could talk, move around, and remember things just as he had before. He took an IQ test and scored in the superior range.
Elliot was rationalism personified. He knew, as Damasio puts it, but he didn’t feel. Ah, finally a human with 20/20 risk perception, right? Wrong. Elliot seemed normal in so many ways. But the more Damasio talked with him, the more the neurologist realized that something was missing. Elliot relayed the story of his life like a historian describing a long-ago tragedy. Listening to him talk, Damasio found himself getting more upset than Elliot. And Elliot’s life was a mess. He could not seem to function in the world. He had trouble making decisions and tended to fixate on details that didn’t really matter. He couldn’t plan the day, much less the week. He got fired from his job and then divorced. He lost his life savings in a dubious business venture that his friends had warned him was doomed.
Damasio studied Elliot’s brain and saw that the tumor had damaged both frontal lobes—and especially the right frontal lobe. Everything else was intact. Then Damasio found twelve other patients with prefrontal damage similar to Elliot’s. Every single patient exhibited the same combination of indecision and emotional flatness.
The more Damasio learned, the more he came to appreciate so-called irrational sentiments. Emotions and feelings were not impediments to reason; they were integral. “Reason may not be as pure as most of us think it is or wish it were,” he wrote. “At their best, feelings point us in the proper direction, take us to the appropriate place in a decision-making space, where we may put the instruments of logic to good use.”
Once we factor in emotion, then, the human risk equation is actually more sophisticated, not less. Damasio’s discoveries convinced me that the way for people to get better at judging risk is not to avoid emotion—or wish it away—but to capitalize upon it. Dread, properly tapped, can save our lives.
Secure Your Own Mask First
Dennis Mileti has been studying how to warn people against threats like hurricanes and earthquakes for more than thirty years. He knows how to do it, he says. That’s not the problem. The problem is getting people—in particular governments—to take his advice.
Today Mileti lives in the California desert. He is retired from his longtime teaching post at the University of Colorado at Boulder, but