Unthinkable_ Who Survives When Disaster Strikes - and Why - Amanda Ripley [99]
At the time of the Tenerife crash, psychologist Daniel Johnson was working on safety research for McDonnell Douglas. He became fascinated by this paralysis behavior, which had been observed in other plane crashes as well. Floy and Paul Heck are both deceased now. But a few months after the accident, Johnson interviewed them both. He made an important discovery. Before the crash, Paul had done something highly unusual. During the long delay before takeoff, Heck had studied the 747’s safety diagram. He even walked around the aircraft with his wife, pointing out the nearest exits. He had been in a theater fire as an eight-year-old boy, and ever since, he had always checked for the exits in an unfamiliar environment. Maybe this is a coincidence. But it is also possible that when the planes collided, Heck’s brain had the data it needed to take action.
The National Transportation Safety Board has found that passengers who read the safety information card are less likely to get hurt in an emergency. In a plane crash at Pago Pago three years before the Tenerife accident, all but 5 of the 101 passengers died. All the survivors reported that they had read the safety information cards and listened to the briefing. They exited over the wing, while other passengers went toward other, more dangerous but traditional exits and died.
After preparation, the next best hope is leadership. That’s one reason that well-trained flight attendants now shriek at passengers in evacuations—to break into their stupor, just as Paul Heck did for his wife. Otherwise, the amygdala works like a positive feedback loop: fear leads to more fear. Cortisol and other stress hormones go back to the amygdala and make the fear stronger. The more intense the fear, the less likely the hippocampus and other parts of the brain can intervene and readjust the response. “The amygdala will keep firing away,” says brain expert LeDoux. “Unless you have some way to overcome that, you’re going to be sort of locked in.”
The easiest way to get a paralyzed animal to snap out of its daze is to make a loud noise, Gallup found. The sound of a door slamming shut will do the trick. An animal will start suddenly and try to flee. Sometimes this would happen in the lab by accident: if a researcher sneezed or a car backfired. “Any sudden change will terminate the response,” he says. Otherwise, animals can stay in their trance for hours. They can even die that way. (Gallup has found that about 30 to 40 percent of mice actually die while paralyzed, presumably of cardiac arrest.) The paralysis response is so powerful that “playing dead” can turn into being dead.
Paralysis seems to happen on the steepest slope of the survival arc—when almost all hope is lost, when escape seems impossible, and when the situation is unfamiliar to the extreme. Sometimes it works. But paralysis remains mostly a mystery. Aside from Gallup, very few people have researched it seriously, which is a shame. In a way, the paralysis response is so good that it has had us all fooled. Victims appear motionless, overwhelmed, and useless, so researchers move on to the next subject. But there, trapped in a still life, might be one of the most interesting and problematic defense mechanisms in the animal kingdom.
8
Heroism
A Suicide Attempt on the Potomac River
THE SNOW STARTED out lovely, blurring the edges of Washington’s hard buildings and bleaching the memorials storybook white. But by midafternoon on January 13, 1982, it had turned unforgiving. Great groaning piles of snow fell from the sky like mud. Government employees were liberated early, stacking the city’s streets with traffic. Normally, it took Roger Olian, a sheet-metal worker at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital, half an hour to get home. On this day, after driving for two hours, he was only halfway there. It would have been faster to walk.
By the time he got to the Fourteenth Street Bridge, which crosses over the Potomac