Unthinkable_ Who Survives When Disaster Strikes - and Why - Amanda Ripley [35]
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