Unthinkable_ Who Survives When Disaster Strikes - and Why - Amanda Ripley [42]
Sports psychologists were among the first to figure this out. Then, in the 1980s, a police academy instructor in St. Louis, Missouri, named Bruce Siddle began to take what they had learned and apply it to combat situations. He found that people perform best when their heart rates are between 115 and 145 beats per minute (resting heart rate is usually about 75 bpm). At this range, people tend to react quickly, see clearly, and manage complex motor skills (like driving).
But after about 145 bpm, people begin to deteriorate. Their voices begin to shake, probably because their blood has concentrated toward their core, shutting down the complex motor control of the larynx and leaving the face pale and the hands clumsy. Vision, hearing, and depth perception can also start to decline. If the stress intensifies, people will usually experience some amnesia after the trauma.
A young Israeli Blackhawk helicopter pilot told me that he learned this lesson on his first mission. This pilot (the Israeli military does not allow journalists to use the first or last names of its members) was awakened at 5:00 A.M. to respond to an emergency. The adrenaline yanked him out of his bed. He’d just completed six months of intense training in the elite unit. He headed for the helicopter. This call was not particularly dangerous, but now that the mission was real, he found that he was virtually useless. On the helicopter, he couldn’t seem to clear his head. “I sat down and looked around. I started doing what I was supposed to do, but very, very slowly. I was two steps behind,” he says. His body moved in slow motion, just like the people evacuating the Trade Center. At one point, instead of turning off one of the radios, he accidentally shut off the ignition to one of the engines. He’d overdosed on stress hormones. Luckily, he had a copilot with more experience. The mission was completed without incident.
But even veteran pilots can still experience a brain drain. Laurence Gonzales, in his book Deep Survival, quotes his father, an Army pilot in World War II, explaining what happens to the mind as it prepares to fly a fighter jet off an aircraft carrier: “When you walk across the ramp to your airplane, you lose half your IQ.”
Everybody is different, of course. The performance ranges will vary depending on the individual. But the heart rate of untrained people in life-or-death situations can instantly shoot up to 200 bpm—a stratospheric level that is hard to negotiate. The trick is to stretch out your zone through training and experience. Even a little preparation—like noticing where the exit is before things go awry—can go a long way. “If you give people an option, something to anchor onto when they don’t know what to do, that small help is huge. That is the difference,” says Ephimia Morphew-Lu, a human factors specialist at NASA until 2004.
Tunnel Vision
Sometimes the fix is astonishingly simple. In the 1970s, airplane pilots started to realize that tunnel vision was a serious problem in the cockpit. The more stressed they got, the less they saw. And the problem went beyond just vision; as stress increased, they tended to become mentally obsessed with one data point to the exclusion of all others.
On the evening of December 29, 1972, an Eastern Air Lines jet coming from New York City began its final approach to Miami International Airport. The flight had been uneventful, and the weather in Miami was clear, with unrestricted visibility. The landing should have been perfect. The plane carried 163 passengers, most of them returning from or leaving for holiday vacations.
But when the pilots tried to lower the landing gear, they didn’t get a green light indicating that the gear was fully down. At 11:34 P.M, the captain, who had more than three decades of experience, called the Miami control tower