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car chases. “I was a threat to myself and others,” he remembers. “My voice would go up several octaves. My radio communications would become unintelligible, tunnel vision would take over, and my reasoning and common sense would go right out the window.” To try to tame this response, he started using breathing tactics he had learned in martial arts. Every day, he played a tape recording of a police siren for five or ten minutes. As the siren shrieked, he breathed deeply—in for four, hold for four, out for four. He wanted to make his breathing an automatic response to the siren. “It all goes back to the Pavlovian theory,” he says. “It’s not rocket science.” After about a month of this, he sounded like a different person over the radio. “I even have some of the radio tapes from some of my old pursuits, and you could tell, just listening to the tone of the voice and clarity, that I was much more under control. I wasn’t getting nearly as hyped up.”

There is a wonderful scientific study that shows how rhythmic breathing and mindfulness can actually alter the topography of the brain. A few years ago, an instructor at Harvard Medical School named Sara Lazar scanned the brains of twenty people who meditate for forty minutes a day. These weren’t Buddhist monks. Just regular people who had a long history of meditating. When she compared their brain images to those of nonmeditating people of similar ages and backgrounds, she found a highly significant difference. The meditators had 5 percent thicker brain tissue in the parts of the prefrontal cortex that are engaged during meditation—that is, the parts that handle emotion regulation, attention, and working memory, all of which help control stress.

Meditators, like deep-breathing cops, may have found a way to essentially evolve past the basic human fear response. In other words, they may have discovered a bridge in the brain—between their conscious and subconscious—that most people don’t know exists. What’s most interesting is that just knowing they have such powers might be valuable in itself.

Laughter, like breathing, reduces our emotional arousal level as well. It also has the benefit of making us feel more in control of the situation. Again and again, studies have shown that people perform better under stress if they think they can handle it. In studies of rats, scientists have taken this discovery one step further: the medial prefrontal cortex appears to detect whether a threat is under the rat’s control. If the brain concludes that the stressor is indeed under its control, the brain blocks some of the more devastating effects of extreme stress. Self-confidence, in other words, can save your life. Says Massad Ayoob, a veteran police officer and instructor: “The single strongest [weapon] is a mental plan of what you’ll do in a certain crisis. And an absolute commitment to do it, by God, if the crisis comes to pass.”

The Hostage-Taker

On February 27, 1980, Rosemberg Pabón, age thirty-one, put on a pinstriped suit and tucked a pistol into his waistband. Pabón, also known as Commandante Uno, had never been in a gunfight before. He’d never even been to Bogotá until now. The night before, when he met his M-19 accomplices for the first time, he was given one last chance to back out of this operation. But the camaraderie in the room had fortified him. “All the compañeros said really beautiful things—like they were proud to have been chosen, that they were doing it for a better country. So I heard that and I was filled with courage,” he remembers. “The only thing I thought was to ask God to help me not to be afraid.”

But Pabón was afraid, terribly so. That morning, the group waited at a hideout house nearby for the final go-ahead order. They would not leave until they heard that the American ambassador, Diego Asencio, had arrived at the party. “Without him, it wasn’t worth it to run the risk of the operation. He was the key.” The call came around 11:30 A.M. Asencio was there. Pabón, another man, and two women, dressed to look like diplomats, got into a car and headed for the embassy.