Unthinkable_ Who Survives When Disaster Strikes - and Why - Amanda Ripley [38]
Down the Rabbit Hole
In life-or-death situations, people gain certain powers and lose others. Asencio found he suddenly had crystal-clear vision. (In fact, his sight remained stronger for several months after the siege, leading his optometrist to temporarily lower his prescription.) Other people, a majority in most studies, get tunnel vision. Their field of sight shrinks by about 70 percent, so that in some cases they seem to be peering out of a keyhole, and they lose track of anything going on in their periphery. Most people also get a sort of tunnel hearing. Certain sounds become strangely muted; others are louder than life.
Stress hormones are like hallucinogenic drugs. Almost no one gets through an ordeal like this without experiencing some kind of altered reality. In one study of shootings of civilians by police officers, 94 percent of officers experienced at least one distortion, according to criminologist David Klinger’s interviews with the officers involved. But very few knew what to expect beforehand. So their distortions distracted and even embarrassed some of them.
One of the most fascinating distortions, reported in more than half of the police-shooting cases, is the strange slowing down of time. Time distortion is so common that scientists have a name for it: tachypsychia, derived from the Greek for “speed of the mind.” Drivers remember the bumper stickers of the car they rear-ended. Mugging victims remember how many chambers the robber’s gun had. Consider this officer’s memory from a gun battle, as told to police psychologist Alexis Artwohl: “I looked over, drawn to the sudden mayhem, and was puzzled to see beer cans slowly floating through the air past my face. What was even more puzzling was that they had the word Federal printed on the bottom. They turned out to be the shell casings ejected by the officer who was firing next to me.”
Why does time seem to slow down in moments of terror? What is happening in our brain? And might it be saving our lives, whatever it is? When David Eagleman was in third grade, he and his older brother went exploring in a house under construction in their neighborhood. His father had explicitly told them not to play there, but the jungle gym of lumber was too tempting. As he scrambled across the roof, Eagleman lost his footing. He found himself falling twelve feet to the ground.
But the descent felt nothing like he would have expected. “The thing is, the fall took forever,” he remembers. And instead of being afraid as he floated through space, Eagleman found that his brain was just busy trying to figure out what to do. He felt totally calm. “I had this whole series of thoughts that I can remember even now, two-thirds of a lifetime later.” Like Asencio, he rifled through his mental database in search of a script. But he could not find one that was of much help. First he considered grabbing for the edge of the roof, but then he realized that it was too late for that. Then, as he watched the red brick below get closer and closer, he suddenly thought of Alice in Wonderland. “I was thinking that this must be what it felt like when she fell down the rabbit hole,” he says. It was only after he landed, face-first and bloodied, that he felt fear. He jumped up and ran to a neighbor’s house.
Eagleman grew up to be a neuroscientist. Today he works at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, where he spends a lot of time trying to re-create that slow-motion fall. “I’m trying to figure out how the brain represents time,” he says. We don’t think about it, but under normal circumstances, your brain is already “controlling” time. Your sense of touch, vision, and hearing all operate using different architectures. Imagine your brain as a clock store: Data comes in at slightly different times, so no two clocks tick at exactly the same pace. But your brain synchs everything up so you are