Unthinkable_ Who Survives When Disaster Strikes - and Why - Amanda Ripley [55]
One day, soldiers may routinely pop pills to help them deal with extreme fear. Synthetic neuropeptide Y may be handed out to soldiers with their boots. The hormone oxytocin, released in mothers after they give birth and also available synthetically, has been shown to calm the brain’s fear hub and promote trust. In one study, men who sniffed oxytocin before undergoing a brain scan exhibited less amygdala activity than they did without oxytocin.
But before we get too carried away with the pharmaceuticals, it’s worth mentioning that dissociation is not always a bad thing. During the worst moments of the Survival School, all of the students—even the Special Forces soldiers—experienced dissociative symptoms. Some dissociated more than people taking hallucinogenic drugs. As Zedeño learned during her escape from the World Trade Center, dissociating can be a highly adaptive response to trauma. Jim Cirillo, a master gunslinger, dissociated as he shot a man for the first time. In Chapter 7, we’ll see how an extreme form of dissociation might actually be an ancient survival mechanism.
There are different kinds of resilience. If all you need to do is walk down the stairs, moderate dissociation might be a perfectly fine response. If, however, you need to manipulate equipment or solve problems, you might have more trouble. “Military folks have to actively engage in their environments to go find an enemy or do something. So the tendency to pull away impairs their performance,” Morgan explains. When we dissociate, the parts of our brains that handle spatial mapping, working memory, and concentration start to fail. If you are, say, a Special Forces soldier in a hostage rescue unit—tasked with entering buildings undetected, navigating in low light, and shooting the hostage-takers, not the hostages—losing these particular skills is problematic.
Before, during, and after the mock captivity, Special Forces soldiers reported fewer and less-intense dissociative symptoms than everyone else. The correlation was clear: the less a soldier dissociated—especially under normal conditions—the more neuropeptide Y he produced, and the better he performed.
Strangely, Special Forces soldiers also reported more trauma in their backgrounds overall. They reported a greater incidence of childhood abuse, for example. This was unexpected. Normally prior trauma predicts worse performance under stress. Among Special Forces soldiers, however, previous trauma hadn’t left them any less able to handle future trauma. In fact, it seemed to have left them more capable. How could this be? It was a sort of paradox. In one group of people, trauma led to an unraveling. In another, it seemed to instill coping mechanisms.
Every year, about nine hundred soldiers apply to join the Army Special Forces. They are weeded out through a three-week assessment program that tests physical endurance, problem solving, and leadership abilities under stress. It is more physically demanding than Survival School, but a little less psychologically stressful. Only about a third of the candidates actually finish the course.
Was it the training itself—or the confidence that comes with knowing you are a Special Forces soldier—that gave these guys the extra boost in performance? To find out, Morgan decided to study men before they got selected. When the candidates arrived at the course, Morgan gave them his questionnaire. He wanted to know which ones had dissociated the week before they came to the course. As with the Survival School participants, about a third of the Special Forces candidates reported experiencing some kind of dissociation before their arrival. Morgan has tested 774 men so far, and the results are stunning: anyone who reported dissociating during normal times turned out to be significantly less likely to pass the course. If someone responded positively