Unthinkable_ Who Survives When Disaster Strikes - and Why - Amanda Ripley [61]
As for the other tests, my level of overall cognitive functioning ranked in the ninety-fifth percentile for the general population in my age group. That is also a good predictor of resilience. My concentration and memory scores were also very high, even though it hardly seems obvious to me in real life. Both skills also correlate with resilience.
I’d done better than I had expected. It was a good reminder that our presumptions about how we might behave in a disaster are not necessarily reliable. “If I had to put money on it, I’d probably say that your hippocampus is operating pretty darn well!” Gilbertson wrote in an e-mail. The inclusion of the word darn reminded me all over again that Gilbertson is fundamentally a very nice guy. Maybe he had been unable to tell me the truth about my teeny hippocampus. Maybe I was part of a whole new psychological experiment. Either way, I was grateful.
From Israel to New Hampshire, I’d observed an impressive spectrum of human performance. There are people who have been damaged by trauma, and people who seem to have been susceptible to the damage before the trauma began. I met unusually resilient characters like Nisso Shacham, the Israeli police commander, who get energized and focused under extreme duress. Then there were the troubled Vietnam veterans who found themselves reliving nightmares again and again, as their brains struggled to put what they were seeing and hearing in context.
The evidence for biological resilience was strong. But if the topography of our brain and the chemistry of our blood have such significant effects on our ability to deal with fear, then how many choices does that leave us to do better? Do we all walk into disasters with a probability attached to our names? Surely other things matter more—like our lifetimes of experience and the people fighting for survival right next to us.
Taking an MRI exam is a lonely experience. We quietly offer up our brains, lying passively under a magnetic eye, trying not to move. But disasters don’t happen to us when we’re alone. Disasters happen to groups of strangers, coworkers, friends, and family who persuade, bolster, and distract each other. I have yet to meet anyone who made it out of the World Trade Center on 9/11 without having memorable interactions with at least one other person. Which parts of their brains lit up when they had those conversations? How did their behavior change after they exchanged bits of information and helped each other up off the ground? Disasters, by definition, do not happen to individuals. The only way to fully understand our behavior, then, is to look around at the people beside us.
5
Groupthink
Role Playing at the Beverly Hills Supper Club Fire
THE BEVERLY HILLS Supper Club sat up on a bluff five miles south of Cincinnati, regal and unexpected, like an exiled queen. Pale statues were profiled on the long driveway. The labyrinth of dining rooms, ballrooms, fountains, and gardens covered one and a half acres. The architect had visited Las Vegas for inspiration, and it showed. The lobby was a collage of mirrors and tiger-striped fabrics. There used to be illegal gambling here too. Back in the 1930s, six men with submachine guns forced a car full of club employees off the road and made off with $10,000.
By the 1970s, the Beverly Hills had become the Midwest’s Tavern on the Green. There were bar mitzvahs and fashion shows in the private dining rooms, and Frank Sinatra, Ray Charles, Jerry Lewis, and Milton Berle had all played in the ballrooms. “An atmosphere of refinement,” proclaimed an advertisement. “Show Place of the Middle West.” It was the kind of place women bought a new dress to go to.
Darla McCollister was about ten years old when she first went to the Beverly Hills. Her