How your brain works in an emergency, in 9 minutes

We all have ideas about how we're going to behave in a crisis or emergency

It's almost never how things actually go. What you learn in a real disaster is that you have another personality, a disaster personality

and it's helpful to understand it better before you need it. So if you look at human behavior across all different kinds of disasters, across all of history, you see a huge spectrum of responses

Sometimes people start hysterically screaming. Other times, people shut down. They freeze

Believe it or not, people laugh in the face of a life or death situation

Maybe most often, people carry on doing whatever they were doing before

And sometimes people rise to the occasion and do incredible things. They're heroes who lead hundreds of people out of mayhem, who save lives at great personal risk

And it's really hard to predict, just looking at the person, how they're going to behave

For my book, The Unthinkable, I followed people who had survived really hellacious disasters of all kinds

And what you find is there's a pattern, even across very different contexts, from plane crashes to earthquakes

Almost always, people go through a period of denial, profound disbelief and delay

Then people go through a period of deliberation. People get really social

They do something that researchers call milling, where they discuss with each other what's

happening and what they should do next. And finally is the decisive moment where people either take action or flee or cooperate in

some way or most often shut down and do nothing at all

Denial. Just the other day, I was walking through DuPont Circle in Washington, D.C.

and I heard a gun go off around 4 o'clock in the afternoon on a random Tuesday

It was very close. I could tell it was like a block away. I looked around, and nobody reacted

Everybody in that neighborhood, where there aren't a lot of shootings, kept walking as if it didn't happen

People were on their phones they were talking to their friends they were drinking their coffee and I was like what And then I remembered that of course people don expect this to happen here so they acting like it didn happen There something called a normalcy bias

which you see in all kinds of disaster situations where people tend to think whatever is happening

is going to be fine. Our brains take whatever input we get and compare it to what we've

experienced before. So every firefighter has a story like this, where they come into a bar

or restaurant and there's smoke filling the ceiling and the fire alarms are going off

Nobody's moving. Everybody's still, you know, drinking their drinks and acting like it's not

happening. This is very, very typical, especially for people who either have no training for

emergencies, which is most of us, or who have never been in a life or death situation like that

Deliberation. One of the disasters I spent a long time studying was the evacuation of the

World Trade Center on 9-11, partly because we have incredible research and survey data

on the thousands of people who evacuated that day. And what you find is that on average

people took about six minutes before they even began evacuating. People took the time to gather

books they were reading, shut down their computers before they left. But most of all

the first thing people did was to talk to each other. And we've all experienced this, right? I

I mean, you've probably been in a situation where a smoke detector goes off

The first thing you do is you look around to see what everybody else is doing, right

That's a very natural reaction. But deliberation is really helpful in a lot of cases because it's kind of like the wisdom of the crowd

If you have people around you who know things that you don't know, then you can make better decisions

It's a good survival response. If the people around you know anything about how to get out of the building or what might be the actual threat

One of the things that people are often surprised by is how social disasters can be

Typically, people become much more polite and nicer than they are normally, which is the opposite of what we might expect

One of the reasons the evacuation took so long is that people who were evacuating from the upper floors would let the people coming in below them go first

On average the World Trade Center evacuation took about a minute per floor which was twice as long as safety engineers had predicted even though the buildings were only half full at the time And part of that was because of delay and denial but also because of deliberation

The decisive moment. This is where everything that's happened before in the denial and delay and deliberation phases comes home to roost

As an example, most serious plane crashes are actually survivable, which is surprising

But it turns out that most planes, if they crash, they end up on the ground and on fire

The whole trick is to get out really fast. But that delay and deliberation phases can really slow you down

There was a famous plane crash in Ten Reef, Canary Islands, years ago

And what they found is that even though people could have gotten off the plane

They actually died there from smoke inhalation from a fire, and they were found, just many of them, sitting in their seats

So there was a lot of research done about why had this happened. And what you find is that humans, like most mammals, tend to shut down in really frightening situations for which they have no training or prior experience

Researchers call negative panic. People do nothing. They shut down, which is actually a good survival response in certain situations, but not on a plane crash

So that decisive moment is the culmination of everything that's come before. But there was one gentleman on that plane who, before the plane even took off

he looked around and noticed where the exits were, which is what people who study plane crashes always do

And he knew exactly how many rows away that the exits were. And he kind of had some kind of mental model for how to get out of that plane

So when the crash occurred, he grabbed his wife's hand, who was at that point kind of frozen, paralyzed

And he said, we're getting out of here. and they got off and they survived. The people sitting around them did not

One of the tricky things about fear is that it's super helpful to you in small doses

But when you have too big of an injection of stress hormones like cortisol

you start to deteriorate. You lose eye-hand control. You lose your peripheral vision

It feels like time slows down. The brain is trying to help you under extreme stress

but unless you had some kind of really good realistic training it tends to become counterproductive like it too much stress So your eyes your brain will fixate on the perceived threat

which may or may not be the full threat. It's a really tricky, slippery slope

Any kind of disaster you're in, fear is useful, but not too much

So people who tend to do better in disasters are people who have had some training or some

rehearsal beforehand. So in the case of the gentleman on the 10 Reef flight, he had actually

been in a house fire as a kid. So he knew how quickly smoke can fill a space and that the real

threat in most fires is smoke. So that experience helped him push through the denial phase more

quickly. So that's the decisive moment where your past experience, who you're with, right

how long you're stuck in denial, all of those things really shape what you do or don't do

A lot of our survival instincts don't serve us very well in the modern world

The good news is you can actually evolve on purpose through realistic training

So the better you understand your environment and the risks that you face, and the more prepared you are for some of the problems you might encounter

especially denial and delay, the better you can push through those phases

and make an intelligent decision under stress. We are capable of incredible things

but we have to respect regular people enough to help them be agents of their own destiny

We have to trust them to do the right thing, but give them the information in advance

The biggest mistake I've seen in every disaster I've ever covered is that the people in charge do not trust the public

They think that the public is going to panic, to misbehave, to do stupid things

And so they don't tell them the full truth, which leads the public to do sometimes unwise things

That problem is bigger than most of the threats we face. The fear of panic has killed more people

than most disasters themselves. Want to dive deeper

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