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mistake. “What we may be witnessing is a situation in which a previously adaptive response has now become maladaptive as a consequence of technological changes,” says Gallup, the expert on paralysis in animals. In more modern disasters, in which the threat is not actually another animal, paralysis may be a misfire. Our brains search, under extreme stress, for an appropriate survival response and choose the wrong one, like divers who rip their respirators out of their mouths deep underwater. Or like deer who freeze in the headlights of a car. Of the twenty-three people on board with Härstedt for the conference, only one other survived.

Some people, like some animals, are clearly more likely to freeze. The behavior is built into their fear response. No one knows exactly why. Genetics are undoubtedly important. Gallup has bred chickens that tend to stay frozen for longer periods of time and found that their offspring show the same behavior. This makes sense, says brain expert Joseph LeDoux. The amygdala, the part of the brain that handles fear, is made up of two key parts. The lateral nucleus handles input, and the central handles output. “You can imagine individual differences, for either genetic or experiential reasons, in the wiring of the lateral nucleus that makes one person more sensitive to input,” LeDoux says. “So the same terrifying stimulus might make the more sensitive person freeze.”

The more important point, perhaps, is that the brain is plastic. It can be trained to respond more appropriately. More fear, on the other hand, makes paralysis stronger. Animals injected with adrenaline are more likely to freeze, for example. Less fear, then, makes paralysis less likely. A rat with damage to its amygdala will not freeze at all—even if it encounters a cat. House pets also tend not to freeze when they are restrained, Gallup has found. They seem to think the exercise is a game. They might fight back, but they won’t freeze. They are not frightened enough. So it makes sense that if we can reduce our own fear and adrenaline, even a little bit, we might be able to override paralysis when we need to.

Breaking Out of the Stupor

On March 27, 1977, a Pan Am 747 awaiting takeoff at the Tenerife airport in the Canary Islands was sliced open without warning by a Dutch KLM jet that had come hurtling out of the fog at 160 mph. The collision left twisted metal, along with comic books and toothbrushes, strewn along a half-mile stretch of tarmac. Everyone on the KLM jet was killed instantly. But many of the Pan Am passengers had survived. They could live if they got up and walked off the fiery plane.

Floy Heck, then seventy, was sitting on the Pan Am jet between her husband and her friends, en route from their California retirement residence to a Mediterranean cruise. When the KLM jet sheared off the top of their plane, the impact did not feel too severe. The Hecks were thrown forward and to the right, but their safety belts held them down. Still, Floy Heck found that she could not speak or move. “My mind was almost blank. I didn’t even hear what was going on,” she told an Orange County Register reporter years later. But her husband, Paul Heck, sixty-five, reacted immediately. He unbuckled his seat belt and started toward the exit. “Follow me!” he told his wife. Hearing him, Floy snapped out of her daze and followed him through the smoke “like a zombie,” she said.

Just before they jumped out of a hole in the left side of the craft, Floy looked back at her friend Lorraine Larson, who was just sitting there, looking straight ahead, her mouth slightly open, hands folded in her lap. Like dozens of others, she would die not from the collision but from the fire that came afterward.

Unlike tall buildings, planes are meant to be emptied fast. All passengers are supposed to be able to get out within ninety seconds, even if only half the exits are available and bags are strewn in the aisles. As it turns out, the people on the Pan Am 747 had at least sixty seconds to flee before fire engulfed the plane. But 326 of the 396 people onboard