Unthinkable_ Who Survives When Disaster Strikes - and Why - Amanda Ripley [54]
Survival School is so realistic, it’s actually frightening. When Morgan took the soldiers’ blood, he found that their stress levels exceeded previously recorded averages taken in extreme situations. The soldiers had, for example, more cortisol in their system than people who are about to jump out of an airplane for the first time. On average, Survival School participants lose fifteen pounds during the course.
Right away, Morgan noticed big differences between the soldiers. The Army Special Forces soldiers, also known as Green Berets, consistently outperformed the other, general infantry soldiers. “They seemed to remain more mentally clear,” says Morgan. “They didn’t get as stupid as fast as the rest of us under stress.” That’s not surprising. Special Forces are an elite population; less than a third of those who try to join get selected.
What was more surprising was how different the Special Forces soldiers were chemically. When Morgan analyzed their blood samples, he found that the Special Forces soldiers produced significantly more of something called “neuropeptide Y,” a compound that helps you stay focused on a task under stress, among other things. Even twenty-four hours after a mock interrogation, the Special Forces soldiers had returned to normal levels of neuropeptide Y, while the other soldiers remained depleted. (In civilian life, people with anxiety disorders or depression tend to have lower levels of neuropeptide Y.) The difference was so marked that Morgan could literally tell whether someone was a member of the Special Forces unit just by looking at their blood results. So then the question was, which came first? Were Special Forces soldiers just inherently different? Or did their training make them that way?
Let’s pause to acknowledge that Special Forces soldiers are not normal. They seem to have certain immunities to extreme stress but, on average, Special Forces soldiers don’t tend to be the he-man types, either; they tend to be the ones with the beards who speak Arabic and can melt into a foreign population. “They like the challenge and the thrill but not in a thrill-seeking way. They’re pretty quiet and meticulous and focused as a group,” Morgan says. “If you’ve ever seen that movie Black Hawk Down, it really does portray Green Berets accurately. They really are different kinds of animals.”
But it was surprising how predictably—and even biologically—different they appeared to be from other soldiers. In fact, Morgan discovered, he didn’t even have to take their blood to tell the difference. It turned out a simple questionnaire could predict who would produce more neuropeptide Y.
He asked the soldiers questions from a standard psychological test measuring dissociative symptoms. For example, thinking back over the past few days, he asked, have you ever experienced any of the following symptoms?
1. Things seemed to move in slow motion.
2. Things seemed unreal, as if in a dream.
3. You had a feeling of separation from what was happening, as if you were watching a movie or a play.
That’s just a sampling of the questions, of course. If you answered yes to all of the questions above, it doesn’t necessarily mean you will perform poorly in a crisis. It depends, as is so often the case, on the crisis.
Over the past several years, Morgan has administered the questionnaire to more than two thousand soldiers before they began Survival School. He wanted to see which ones had a habit of dissociating—even under normal conditions. On average, about 30 percent scored high on the test. Even without extreme stress, about a third said they had felt some kind of detachment from reality. This is higher