• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1437 0

are sometimes trained to repeatedly scan their horizon to avoid fixation. (Police have also learned to exploit tunnel vision in others by intentionally stepping to the side to get into a suspect’s blind spot.) Just knowing enough to identify certain stress reactions can improve people’s performance. But most regular people don’t know to expect tunnel vision—even though they experience it every day. You have suffered from a mild version of tunnel vision yourself, maybe even on your way to work today. When you talk on your cell phone while driving, your range of sight narrows significantly, according to a 2002 University of Rhode Island study. The distraction is so strong that your case of tunnel vision continues well after the phone conversation has ended. The brain is built to focus on one thing at a time, whether in a traffic jam or during an emergency landing. We have built technology for multitasking, but the brain has not changed.

Bulking Up the Brain

The best way to negotiate stress is through repeated, realistic training. The military used to train soldiers to shoot bull’s-eye targets, and it didn’t work very well. Now soldiers train using highly realistic targets and video games, as retired Lieutenant Colonel Dave Grossman explains in his book, On Combat. Advanced police training now relies on actual gunfights—using gunpowder-propelled, paint-filled plastic bullets that actually sting when they hit you. Self-defense courses use “model muggings,” in which a pretend assailant, wearing heavy padding, relentlessly attacks the student. Fire drills work the same way, especially for children, who tend to get the best training for disasters in our society. “Kids remember ‘stop, drop, and roll’ because we make them rehearse it—not because we make them say it,” says Richard Gist, a psychologist who works for the Kansas City, Missouri, Fire Department. The trick is to embed the behavior in the subconscious, so that it is automatic, almost like the rest of the fear response.

The idea that we can negotiate our fear response is a fairly radical one. For most of history, human beings have assumed a bright line between instinct and learning. But the past decade of brain research has proven that we are actually a magnificent work in progress. The brain literally changes in structure and function throughout our lives, depending on what we do. Blind people who read Braille increase the size of the brain region that processes touch. A small but charming 2004 study published in Nature found that people who learned how to juggle actually increased the gray matter in their brains in certain locations. When they stopped juggling, the new gray matter vanished. A similar structural change appears to occur in people who learn a second language. Just like a novice cab driver in New York City, the brain starts out slow and inefficient and finds shortcuts as time goes on. This way, we can compensate for our own weaknesses. Even if our fear response is ancient, we can continually upgrade it for modernity.

Some reflexes cannot be entirely overridden, of course. The human startle response, for example, is something we possess from the womb. The first 150 milliseconds of the startle response begin with a very small but reliable reaction. We blink. Like almost all of the fear responses, blinking serves a useful purpose—by potentially protecting our eyes from harm. (In laboratory experiments, people blink even more rapidly when they see unpleasant images.) Meanwhile, our head and upper body automatically lean forward, and the arms bend at the elbow—positioning the body to fight, cower, or flee. Instantly, the hands begin to tighten into fists—generating about twenty-five pounds of pressure in adults.

For years, police academy instructors tried to train officers not to flinch. In 1992, a Canadian police officer and trainer named Darren Laur decided to see if the training was working. He ran eighty-five police officers through an experiment in which they were unexpectedly confronted by a knife-wielding attacker. Laur videotaped all of the confrontations.