Unthinkable_ Who Survives When Disaster Strikes - and Why - Amanda Ripley [92]
As Violand lay under his desk, his arm flung across his face, Cho started firing. “He began methodically and calmly shooting people. It sounded rhythmic, like he took his time between each shot, moving from person to person. After every shot, I thought, ‘OK, the next one is for me.’ Shot after shot went off. I tried to look as lifeless as possible. Sometimes after a shot, I would hear a quick moan, or a slow one, or a grunt, or a quiet yell from one of the girls.”
Like most disaster victims, Violand has no sense of how long the ordeal lasted. “I couldn’t tell you if it was five minutes or two hours,” he told me when we spoke five weeks after the shootings. But eventually, Cho left the room, and the shots continued, at a distance. With the same certainty he’d had when he’d fallen to the floor, Violand knew Cho would come back. He doesn’t know how he knew; he’d never been in any situation like this before. He wasn’t a hunter or a soldier. He was a twenty-year-old from Potomac, Maryland, a posh suburb of Washington, D.C. He had long, fashionably messy brown hair and played in a band. But this voice inside his head seemed to have experienced all of this before.
Hypnosis
Under certain conditions, on burning planes, sinking ships, or even impromptu battlefields, many people cease moving altogether. The decisive moment arrives, and they do nothing. They shut down, becoming suddenly limp and still. This stillness descends involuntarily, and it is one of the most important and intriguing behaviors in the disaster repertoire. It happens far more often than, say, panic. (Some researchers actually call this paralysis “negative panic,” since it is in some ways the opposite of panic.) It is also vastly more common than the subject of the next chapter, heroism. If you are curious about what you might do in a disaster, this chapter might be the most illuminating part of this book. Because if it is the most common behavior in the survival arc, paralysis is also among the most misunderstood.
In the early 1980s, a young assistant psychology professor named Gordon Gallup Jr. was raising chickens in his laboratory at Tulane University for use in basic learning experiments. Then one day an undergraduate student poked his head in the lab and asked Gallup a question that would redirect his research for the next twenty-five years: “Hey, have you ever seen a hypnotized chicken?”
Gallup invited him in. The young man showed him a trick he’d learned as a child: he grabbed the chicken and held its head down on the table. At first, the chicken fought back, a hysterical blur of feathers and squawks. Gallup got a little nervous. But then, five or ten seconds later, the chicken became suddenly calm and quiet. The student lifted his hand off the bird and it stayed there, unmoving but still breathing. “Lo and behold, the chicken appeared to be hypnotized,” Gallup remembers. “It was in what appeared to be a catatonic state. I could not believe my eyes.”
From there, Gallup went directly to the library to research “animal hypnosis.” It turned out to have been a fascination of humans for several hundred years. Medieval monks used to “bewitch” blackbirds, owls, eagles, and peacocks this way. One of the first academic references to the topic was made in 1646, in a paper by a Jesuit priest and scholar. But it remained primarily a parlor trick. In the nineteenth century, boys in the south of France used to bewitch turkeys to irritate local farmers. The little hooligans would stick the turkeys’ heads under their wings and swing them to and fro a few times, and then leave them in the poultry yard, a still life in terror.
Gallup found that paralysis could be induced in all kinds of creatures—in every single one he tested, in fact. “In a nutshell, it’s been documented in crustaceans, amphibians, frogs, lizards, snakes, birds, even mammals—wild boars to cows to primates to rats to rabbits.” Every