Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales Flashcards
when that organization had evolved into a marvelous machine for turning young men into old memories. 120
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
What the heck am I doing here? I couldn’t answer the question then, but I can now: I was chasing my father, 168
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
My Irish Catholic German mother had so many babies—who could keep track of them all? I pretty much ran wild. 178
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
man on a snowmobile is warned not to go up a hill because it will probably produce a fatally large avalanche. 184
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
I began to wonder if there wasn’t some mysterious force hidden within us that produces such mad behavior. Most people find it hard to believe that reason doesn’t control our actions. We believe in free will and rational behavior. The difficulty with those assumptions comes when we see rational people doing irrational things. 190
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
The farther one goes The less one knows. —Tao Te Ching 207
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
but every survival situation is the same in its essence, 260
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
The first lesson is to remain calm, not to panic. Because emotions are called “hot cognitions,” 261
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
researchers suggest that African American jazz musicians refused to let themselves get hot (get angry) in the face of racism. Instead, they remained outwardly calm and channeled emotion into music as a survival strategy in a hostile environment. 263
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
Only 10 to 20 percent of people can stay calm and think in the midst of a survival emergency. They are the ones who can perceive their situation clearly; they can plan and take correct action, all of which are key elements of survival. Confronted with a changing environment, they rapidly adapt. 268
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
Shit does just happen sometimes, as the bumper sticker says. There are things you can’t control, so you’d better know how you’re going to react to them. 297
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
there are also the things you can control, and you’d better be controlling them all the time. 301
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
Face reality. Good survivors aren’t immune to fear. They know what’s happening, and it does “scare the living shit out of” them. It’s all a question of what you do next. 307
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
survivors “laugh at threats…playing and laughing go together. Playing keeps the person in contact with what is happening around [him].” 316
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
takeoff is optional but landing is mandatory. 337
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
Lessons about survival, about what you need to know and what you don’t need to know. 341
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
About what you know that you don’t know you know and about what you don’t know that you’d better not think you know. 342
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
Plato understood that emotions could trump reason and that to succeed we have to use the reins of reason on the horse of emotion. 343
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
The intellect without the emotions is like the jockey without the horse. 345
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
Fear puts me in my place. It gives me the humility to see things as they are. 353
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
the system we call emotion (from the Latin verb emovere, “to move away”) works powerfully and quickly to motivate behavior. 359
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
Emotion is an instinctive response aimed at self-preservation. 368
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
The oldest medical and philosophical model, going back to the Greeks, was of a unified organism in which mind was part of and integral to the body. Plato, on the other hand, thought of mind and body as separate, with the soul going on after death. Aristotle brought them back together again. 372
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
neuroscientist, Damasio is as qualified as anyone to define the brain, and he calls it an “‘organ’ of information and government.” He put the word “organ” in quotes because it’s not exactly an organ either. 386
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
information about the environment, information about the body, and information about the good or bad consequences of interactions between the two. 388
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
Doing almost anything generates new links among neurons. 397
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
Genes make new proteins in order to store information, and they make new proteins in order to bring that information back as a memory. This process is called “reconsolidation,” 398
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
The Synaptic Self, put it, “the brain that does the remembering is not the brain that formed the initial memory. In order for the old memory to make sense in the current brain, the memory has to be updated.” 400
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
This is one reason why memory is notoriously faulty. 401
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
The jockey is reason and the horse is emotion, a complex of systems bred over eons of evolution and shaped by experience, which exist for your survival. 407
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
The jockey can’t win without the horse, and the horse can’t race alone. In the gate, they are two, and it’s dangerous. But when they run, they are one, and it’s positively godly. 409
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
That horse can either work for us or against us. It can win the race or explode in the gate. So it is learning when to soothe and gentle it and when to let it run that marks the winning jockey, the true survivor. 415
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
If an experienced river runner is pitched into the water, he will turn on his back and float with his toes out of the water, riding on the buoyancy of his life vest. An inexperienced one, like a drowning swimmer, will reach up to wave or try to grab something. Raising his arms causes his feet to sink. 425
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
Adrenalin is a trade name for epinephrine, and adrenaline is a synonym for it, but neither is used much in scientific circles. Epinephrine and norepinephrine, which come from the adrenal glands, are in a class of compounds called catecholamines, which have a wide range of effects, including constricting blood vessels and exciting or inhibiting the firing of nerve cells and the contraction of smooth muscle fibers. But it is norepinephrine (not adrenaline or epinephrine) that is largely responsible for the jolt you feel in the heart when startled. 441
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
the amygdala as “the centerpiece of the defense system.”) 451
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
Fear in the cockpit, as Yankovich put it, is a knife fight in a phone booth. 456
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
STRESS RELEASES cortisol into the blood. It invades the hippocampus and interferes with its work. (Long-term stress can kill hippocampal cells.) 482
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
most people are incapable of performing any but the simplest tasks under stress. 484
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
You see less, hear less, miss more cues from the environment, and make mistakes. Under extreme stress, the visual field actually narrows. 487
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
Emotions are survival mechanisms, but they don’t always work for the individual. They work across a large number of trials to keep the species alive. The individual may live or die, but over a few million years, more mammals lived than died by letting emotion take over, and so emotion was selected. 497
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
To deal with reality you must first recognize it as such, and as Siebert and others have pointed out, play puts a person in touch with his environment, while laughter makes the feeling of being threatened manageable. 521
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
Moods are contagious, and the emotional states involved with smiling, humor, and laughter are among the most contagious of all. Laughter doesn’t take conscious thought. It’s automatic, and one person laughing or smiling induces the same reaction in others. Laughter stimulates the left prefrontal cortex, an area in the brain that helps us to feel good and to be motivated. That stimulation alleviates anxiety and frustration. There is evidence that laughter can send chemical signals to actively inhibit the firing of nerves in the amygdala, thereby dampening fear. Laughter, then, can help to temper negative emotions. 523
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
Survival, then, is about being cool. It’s about laughing with an attitude of bold humility in the face of something terrifying. 546
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
It seemed almost as if he had two brains and they were having an argument over his body. 592
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
Freezing is a classic emotional response of all mammals. A bystander happened to be videotaping the crowd when a bomb went off at the Olympic games in Atlanta in 1996, and the freezing (and crouching) response of the people is a dramatic illustration of a primary emotion. 602
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
William Faulkner wrote in Light in August, “Man knows so little about his fellows. In his eyes all men or women act upon what he believes would motivate him if he were mad enough to do what that other man or woman is doing.” 616
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
a common confusion about the words “emotion” and “feeling.” William James, the father of psychology, was the first to point out that we do not run because we’re afraid of bears, we’re afraid of bears because we run. The emotion comes first—it’s the bodily response (freezing, flight, sexual arousal). The feeling follows (fear, anger, love). 631
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
risky behavior can be fun. Fear can be fun. It can make you feel more alive, because it is an integral part of saving your own life. And if the context is one that you perceive as safe, then it’s easy to make the decision to take the risk. Your body can make it for you. 636
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
There are only a few simple rules to the game but an estimated 10120 possible moves in any game of chess. 644
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
James Gleick pointed out in his book Chaos, there are neither that many elementary particles in the universe nor have there been that many microseconds of time since its creation perhaps 13 billion (1.3 × 109) years ago. Logic doesn’t work well for such nonlinear systems as chess and life. 646
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
The most remarkable discovery of modern neuroscience is that the body controls the brain as much as the brain controls the body. 664
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
When a decision to act must be made instantly, it is made through a system of emotional bookmarks. The emotional system reacts to circumstances, finds bookmarks that flag similar experiences in your past and your response to them, and allows you to recall the feelings, good or bad, of the outcomes of your actions. 671
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
Claparède’s part: his patient could learn without memory or thought. It was as if her body could learn. 697
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
her lack of memory had robbed her of the ability to adapt the response for other circumstances. 699
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
reason is regarded as the highest function. People are named after it: Homo sapiens (from the Latin sapere, to taste, as in “to taste the world”). 720
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
Those who can control that impulse to survive, live. Those who can’t, die. And that’s the simplest way to explain survival, 726
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
the training is only as good as the environment. 786
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
Everyone carries around a necessary measure of his environment and of the self. 795
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
Joseph LeDoux put it, “People don’t come preassembled, but are glued together by life.” 806
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
Like the immune system, the emotional system evolves continuously, taking experiences and situations and attaching emotional value to them in subtle gradations of risk and reward. 807
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
(Scientists estimate that the mature brain has 100 billion neurons and trillions of connections.) 809
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
When two neurons fire together, they become wired together. 818
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
When a strong and weak neuron—call them Al and Betty—stimulate a third neuron—call it Charlie—at the same time, the weak one, Betty, gains the ability to stimulate Charlie to fire. That’s why the ringing of a bell could cause Pavlov’s dog to salivate even when there was no food present. 819
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
Logic simply takes too long, often impossibly long, and in a child logic is not well developed enough at any rate. Instead, he rapidly and unconsciously pages through his atlas of emotional bookmarks 829
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
His training and experience taught him that it was better to die for his country than to fail. 847
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
Nothing in our learning tells us that a mountain is going to come apart before our eyes. It makes no sense. It hasn’t happened, therefore it cannot happen. 860
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
We think we believe what we know, but we only truly believe what we feel. 862
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
chocolate Lab, Lucy. Lucy sometimes reminds me of the amygdala: When anyone comes to the door, she barks before I even hear it. 866
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
the same sensory information reaches the amygdala by a faster pathway. The amygdala screens that information for signs of danger. Like Lucy, the amygdala isn’t very bright, but if it detects a hazard, or anything remotely resembling one, before you’re even conscious of the stimulus, 870
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
the amygdala is wrong a lot of the time: There is no danger. But in the long course of evolution, it has been a successful strategy. 875
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
information from the senses takes a neural route that splits, one part reaching the amygdala first, the other arriving at the neocortex milliseconds later. Rational (or conscious) thought always lags behind the emotional reaction. 876
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
some ability may remain for the neocortex to do the following: First, to recognize that there is an emotional response underway. Second, to read reality and perceive circumstances correctly. Third, to override or modulate the automatic reaction if it is an inappropriate one; and fourth, to select a correct course of action. 884
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
many people (estimates run as high as 90 percent), when put under stress, are unable to think clearly or solve simple problems. They get rattled. They panic. They freeze. 892
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
The two neurological systems of explicit and implicit learning are quite separate. Implicit memories are unconscious. Implicit learning is like a natural smile: It comes by way of a different neural pathway from the one that carries explicit memory. 900
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
Malcolm Gladwell, writing in the New Yorker, put it succinctly: “Choking is about thinking too much. Panic is about thinking too little.” 906
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
THE ILLINOIS RIVER in southwestern Oregon has thirty-five miles of class III to IV rapids with a class V, moss-covered gorge in the middle. That section is known as the Green Wall. 922
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
The environment had changed, and he adapted. Using his reason to manage emotion and emotion to inform reason, he survived. 933
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
a survivor expects the world to keep changing and keeps his senses always tuned to: What’s up? The survivor is continuously adapting. 940
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
John F. Kennedy once remarked, “There’s always some son of a bitch who doesn’t get the word.” 944
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
They were still operating on a model of the old environment. The results were fatal: 948
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
That is the difficulty with logic: It’s step-by-step, linear. The world is not. 957
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
the brain uses for handling complicated problems is to create mental models, stripped-down schematics of the world. A mental model may tell you the rules by which an environment behaves or the color and shape of a familiar object. 960
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
The fact that you have a mental model of the red paperback copy of Moby-Dick allows you to screen out nearly everything you see until, at last, a red book blossoms in your field of vision. But if you’re wrong and it’s a blue hardback edition of Moby-Dick, chances are that you won’t find it even if the title comes into view. 965
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
It’s the reason that many card tricks and magic acts work: You see what you expect to see. You see what makes sense, and what makes sense is what matches the mental model. 969
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
You believe the magician does the trick, but in fact you do it yourself. 979
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
Unless something is successfully transferred from working memory into long-term memory, it is lost. 995
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
The limited nature of working memory (attention) and the executive function, along with the shorthand work of mental models, can cause surprising lapses in the way we process the world and make conscious or unconscious decisions. 999
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
Normal Accidents, he wrote that “We construct an expected world because we can’t handle the complexity of the present one, and then process the information that fits the expected world, and find reasons to exclude the information that might contradict it. Unexpected or unlikely interactions are ignored when we make our construction.” 1014
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
Mental models can be surprisingly strong and the abilities of working memory surprisingly fragile. 1020
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
Stress doesn’t take long to confuse you. 1052
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
MENTAL MODELS, emotional bookmarks, and the ability to keep the right things in working memory played a powerful role in determining who lived and who died in the collapse of the World Trade Center towers. 1059
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
“Thirty-five percent of the observers failed to notice the woman with the umbrella, 1081
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
It was an attitude open to an unfamiliar world, accepting of whatever was there. There was no model and there were no expectations. 1084
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
The order “Tell me what you see” produces curiosity. The order “Count the passes” produces a closed system, a narrowing of attention directed at a particular task, which fills up working memory. 1084
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
Magic confirms the idea that you see what you expect to see, and that under the right circumstances, working memory can’t be distracted from its task. 1088
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
Psychologists who study survivors of shipwrecks, plane crashes, natural disasters, and prison camps conclude that the most successful are open to the changing nature of their environment. They are curious to know what’s up. 1090
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
(56 percent) didn’t notice the gorilla. 1093
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
Everyone says that the mind plays tricks, but deep down, most people don’t believe it. 1098
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
Some people update their models better than others. They’re called survivors. 1114
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
Sometimes an idea can drive action as powerfully as an emotion. 1129
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
Complexity, M. Mitchell Waldrop points out that “All complex adaptive systems anticipate the future…. Every living creature has an implicit prediction encoded in its genes…every complex adaptive system is constantly making predictions based on its various internal models of the world…. 1133
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
To the brain, the future is as real as the past. The difficulty begins when reality doesn’t match the plan. 1137
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
You bookmark the future in order to get there. It’s a magic trick: You can slide through time to a world that does not yet exist. 1140
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
we all make powerful models of the future. The world we imagine seems as real as the ones we’ve experienced. We suffuse the model with the emotional values of past realities. 1150
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
the longer it takes to dislodge the imagined world in favor of the real one, the greater the risk. 1153
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
In nature, adaptation is important; the plan is not. It’s a Zen thing. We must plan. But we must be able to let go of the plan, too. 1154
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
People who survive cancer in the face of such a diagnosis are notorious. The medical staff observes that they are “bad patients,” unruly, troublesome. They don’t follow directions. They question everything. They’re annoying. They’re survivors. 1158
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
Tao Te Ching says: The rigid person is a disciple of death; The soft, supple, and delicate are lovers of life. 1159
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
in a classical drama, the tension comes from the fact that the hero is farthest from his goal when he triumphs. 1170
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
They saw what they wanted to see and disregarded what they knew: 1184
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
people tend to take any information as confirmation of their mental models. 1187
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
suddenly they all felt their hair stand up. Rob knew about St. Elmo’s fire, as sailors call it. 1201
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
(lightning can travel as fast as 54 yards per microsecond). 1210
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
When the World Trade Center collapsed, a man tried to swim from New Jersey to Manhattan to help. He was picked up by a ferryboat captain. 1215
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
they were all wearing what the YOSAR (Yosemite search and rescue) crew call “death cloth”—cotton. 1221
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
we’re always Homo but sometimes not so sapiens. People are emotional creatures, which is to say, physical creatures. 1232
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
Joseph LeDoux concluded that, “people normally do all sorts of things for reasons that they are not consciously aware of…and that one of the main jobs of consciousness is to keep our life tied together into a coherent story, a self-concept.” In other words, everyone is the hero in his own movie. 1233
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
Once an emotional reaction is underway, there can be an overwhelming impulse to act. 1238
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
Nature doesn’t adjust to our level of skill. 1242
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
Zen teaches openness. Survival instructors refer to that quality of openness as “humility.” 1245
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
It’s nothing personal, then, when the brain plays tricks. Nothing personal, either, when you die, as Marcus Aurelius, the Roman emperor and Stoic philosopher, said. 1250
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
Mike’s Sky Rancho, a famous Baja motorcycle hangout high in the mountains, with precious little electricity, no phone at all, and an ancient swimming pool that looked like a poisoned waterhole. 1270
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
if we don’t look out for each other, we’re no better than coyotes. 1277
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
The word “experienced” often refers to someone who’s gotten away with doing the wrong thing more frequently than you have. 1351
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
Charles Perrow who coined the term “system accidents” in the 1980s, 1446
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
unusual thesis: That in certain kinds of systems, large accidents, though rare, are both inevitable and normal. The accidents are a characteristic of the system itself, he says. 1459
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
efforts to make those systems safer, especially by technological means, made the systems more complex and therefore more prone to accidents. 1460
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
most of the time, nothing serious happens, which makes it more difficult for the operators of the system (climbers, in this case). They begin to believe that the orderly behavior they see is the only possible state of the system. Then, at the critical boundaries in time and space, the components and forces interact in unexpected ways, with catastrophic results. 1465
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
When a system is tightly coupled, the effects spread. In a loosely coupled system, effects do not spread to other parts of the system. 1483
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
I Ching says. The cause is in the nature of the system. It’s self-organizing. 1487
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
Classical physics ignored all that and used idealized systems to explain the world. But that left most of the real world unexplained. 1492
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
Edward Lorenz, a meteorologist at MIT, was modeling weather systems on a computer in the early 1960s when he accidentally discovered that a tiny change in the initial state (1 part in 1,000) was enough to produce totally different weather patterns. That became known as the Butterfly Effect, “the notion that a butterfly stirring the air today in Peking can transform storm systems next month in New York,” as Gleick wrote in Chaos. 1499
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
Chaos theory views such systems, which seem chaotic, as actually arising out of a simple, orderly set of mathematical functions. 1508
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
second law of thermodynamics, which says that everything is heading toward more disorder? 1515
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
Like chaos theory, complexity theory postulated “upheaval and change and enormous consequences flowing from trivial-seeming events—and yet with a deep law hidden beneath.” 1518
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
Small collapses are common on the sand pile. Large-scale ones are rare. But collapses of all sizes do happen with an inevitability that can be described mathematically as inversely proportional to some power of the size (with earthquakes it’s the 3/2 power, which curiously is the same power as the one used to determine the time that planets take to go around the sun: the square root of the cube of the size of the orbit). 1542
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
Large accidents, while rare, are normal. Efforts to prevent them always fail. 1547
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
NASA will investigate and explain all the details of how it happened, but knowing those details will not prevent the next accident. Indeed, the safety precautions they take may make it more likely. 1550
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
doing bold things isn’t about engineering risk to zero. Shit happens, and if we just want to restrict ourselves to things where shit can’t happen…we’re not going to do anything very interesting.” 1558
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
The power law applies: The bigger the accident, the less likely it is. 1566
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
I saw how easy it was to cross that invisible dividing line between what has been adapted for us and what demands that we adapt to it. 1587
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
Our instructor had drummed a phrase into our heads: When in doubt, don’t.” 1612
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
a theory called “risk homeostasis.” The theory says that people accept a given level of risk. 1613
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
If you perceive conditions as less risky, you’ll take more risk. If conditions seem more risky, you’ll take less risk. 1614
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
When antilock brakes were introduced, authorities expected the accident rate to go down, but it went up. People perceived that driving was safer with antilock brakes, so they drove more aggressively. 1616
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
Experience is nothing more than the engine that drives adaptation, 1625
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
You need to know if your particular experience has produced the sort of adaptation that will contribute to survival in the particular environment you choose. And when the environment changes, you have to be aware that your own experience might be inappropriate. 1626
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
There are three main difficulties with descent: attitude; an emotion involving goal seeking; 1638
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
humor. The deescalating emotional response. 1641
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
The trap lay in the fact that they were only halfway to their real goal. They were celebrating when they had the worst part of the climb ahead of them. 1641
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
it is part of the natural cycle of human emotion to let down your guard once you feel you’ve reached a goal. 1642
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
Their focus had been sharp in the goal-seeking phase. Now it grew blurry. 1648
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
Stress can trump all the other effects. 1652
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
Last, there is the fact that descending is technically more difficult than ascending. 1654
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
Descent, like the act of walking, is a controlled fall. 1656
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
Scott Sagan puts it in The Limits of Safety, “things that have never happened before happen all the time.” Unfortunately, as Perrow comments, “It is normal for us to die, but we only do it once.” Which is too bad, for it might be the ultimate learning experience. 1658
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
Al Siebert, a psychologist, writes in The Survivor Personality that the survivor (a category including people who avoid accidents) “does not impose pre-existing patterns on new information, but rather allows new information to reshape [his mental models]. The person who has the best chance of handling a situation well is usually the one with the best…mental pictures or images of what is occurring outside of the body.” 1688
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
Everyone, to one degree or another, sees not the real world but the ever-changing state of the self in an ever-changing invention of the world. 1691
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
Dan Meyer, director of the North Carolina chapter of Outward Bound, first published the Accident Matrix in 1979 in the Journal of Experiential Education. Jed Williamson refined it. Contributing causes of accidents are arranged in the Matrix under three general categories: Conditions, Acts, and Judgments, which combine in a dynamic and synergistic sequence to generate accidents. 1701
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
“Conditions” refers to any potential forces that can hurt you, such as those resulting from a slip on a steep icy slope. The main “Act” that set the sequence in motion was to pull the protection and move while roped together. The “Judgment” was the belief that the climbers could self-arrest, which in the Matrix might be phrased as “overconfidence” or “exceeding their abilities.” In other accidents, “Conditions” might be falling rocks, swift and/or cold water, or weather. 1705
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
Peter Leschak, the firefighter, put it, “Sounds like a no-brainer, but in the heat of battle, simple concepts can wander off into the smoke and be forgotten.” 1710
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
meta-knowledge: the ability to assess the quality of our own knowledge. It’s easy to assume that perception and reason faithfully render reality. But as Plato suggested and modern neuroscience has proved, we live in a sort of dreamworld, which only imperfectly matches reality. 1716
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
Experienced climbers may be reluctant to challenge others with experience, and the same is true in any other pursuit. Going into a risky operation, doctors won’t challenge doctors. 1739
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
The design of the human condition makes it easy for us to conceal the obvious from ourselves, especially under strain and pressure. 1746
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
trying to land the model instead of the plane. 1749
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
Be here now. It’s a good survival rule. It means to pay attention and keep an up-to-date mental model. 1764
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
The second rule was: Everything takes eight times as long as it’s supposed to. That was the friction rule, which wilderness travelers will do well to heed. 1765
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
There is a tendency to make a plan and then to worship the plan, 1766
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
the harder we try, the more complex our plan for reducing friction, the worse things get. 1771
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
It all looks so…inviting. And I began thinking how easy it is to die. 1813
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
Tao Te Ching puts it: Heaven and earth are inhumane; they view the myriad creatures as straw dogs. 1818
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
many drowning victims he’d studied, 75 percent were visitors and 90 percent were white males in their forties or fifties. 1822
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
One of the things that kills us in the wilderness, in nature, is that we just don’t understand the forces we engage. We don’t understand the energy because we no longer have to live with it. 1836
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
The environment we’re used to is designed to sustain us. 1839
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
Epictetus wrote, “Be silent; for there is great danger that you will immediately vomit up what you have not digested.” 1846
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
“come to grief because they have not paid attention to facts about the world that would ultimately defeat their plans…. 1852
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
we miscalculate the scale of the places we elect to explore. 1865
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
we head off on “a mad march…without sufficient information about the terrain.” But information is one thing. Believing it is another. 1866
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
For most people it’s unthinkable to imagine what appears to be a solid mountain coming apart. But all mountains are in a state of continuous collapse. 1891
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
The exiguous nature of everyday experience creates habits of mind that shape perceptions, so you don’t see the mountain crumbling. Human life is so brief in comparison to the mountain’s. You live in a compressed time frame that does not match many phenomena you encounter in nature. 1895
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
The best way to become a believer, short of dying, is to sit very quietly and contemplate those things. 1903
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
The forces we engage are relentless. Gravity is on duty all the time. 1938
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
the rule of thumb is that you can survive three minutes without air, three days without water, and three weeks without food. 1942
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
Ski resorts, for example, create the illusion of safety in the midst of wilderness. People approach them as if they were amusement parks, with little idea of where they are and what forces they may encounter. 1945
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
KNOWLEDGE OF the sort you need does not begin with information, it begins with experience and perception. But there is a dark and twisty road from experience and perception to correct action. 1985
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
“If you’re not afraid, then you don’t appreciate the situation.” 2011
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
I do more…prevention than actual life-saving.” 2037
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
early learning may be one of the most reliable kinds, forming deep knowledge and cool cognitions in high-energy states. It is learning that lasts a lifetime. 2044
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
Does anything happen to me? I take what comes… —Marcus Aurelius 2055
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
Mismatching the abilities of people in the outdoors is a sure way to get into trouble. People routinely fail to realize that they have to travel at the speed of the slowest member, not the fastest. 2073
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
PSYCHOLOGISTS WHO study the behavior of people who get lost report that very few ever backtrack. (The eyes look forward into real or imagined worlds.) 2103
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
Edward Cornell, one of the scientists who study the behavior of people who become lost, is a professor of psychology at the University of Alberta in Edmonton. “Being lost is a universal human condition,” he told me. “But there is a very fuzzy area between being lost and not lost.” 2110
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
Place cells and other cells involved in navigation are constantly being reprogrammed. It’s called “remapping.” 2143
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
Blind people often get around just fine because they have excellent mental maps. 2149
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
Rats who have had the lateral nucleus of the amygdala destroyed lose their drive to get to a particular place. 2153
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
The fact of not having a mental map, of trying to create one in an environment where the sensory input made no sense, is interpreted as an emergency and triggers a physical (i.e., emotional) response. 2167
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
Admitting that you are lost is difficult because having no mental map, being no place, is like having no self: It’s impossible to conceive, because one of the main jobs of the organism is to adjust itself to place. 2182
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
anytime you find yourself thinking it’s easier to go around a mountain than over one, you know there’s trouble upstairs. 2188
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
Generally, they would be wiser and safer to stay put and get as comfortable and warm as possible, but many feel compelled to push on, urged by subconscious feelings.” 2209
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
What had begun as a small error in navigation had progressed, step by innocent step, to a grim struggle for survival. 2220
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
SYROTUCK ANALYZED 229 search and rescue cases (11 percent of them fatal) and concluded that almost three quarters of those who died perished within the first forty-eight hours of becoming lost. Those who die can do so surprisingly quickly, and hypothermia is usually the official cause. 2221
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
Until that day in Glacier, I would not have believed how easily I could get lost or how quickly I could lose my ability to reason. 2241
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
“If you ask hikers on a trail to point out where they are on a map at any given moment,” Hill said, “they are usually wrong.” In daily life, people operate on the necessary illusion that they know where they are. Most of the time, they don’t. 2244
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
a red light should go off. You’re trying to make reality conform to your expectations rather than seeing what’s there. In the sport of orienteering, they call that ‘bending the map.’” 2252
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
(Psychologists have observed that one of the most basic human needs, beginning at birth, is to be gazed upon by another. Mothers throughout the world have been observed spending long periods staring into the eyes of their babies with a characteristic tilt of the head. To be seen is to be real, and without another to gaze upon us, we are nothing. Part of the terror of being lost stems from the idea of never being seen again.) 2262
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
“woods shock,” 2276
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
It refers to a state of confusion that can beset people in the wilderness. 2277
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
“‘Woods shock’ is a term for the fear associated with complete loss of spatial orientation,” 2278
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
woods shock can now be seen as an emotional survival response associated with the failure of the mental map to match the environment. Thrashing does not save a drowning person either, but it’s just as natural. Those who can float quietly have a better chance. 2281
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
Being lost, then, is not a location; it is a transformation. It is a failure of the mind. It can happen in the woods or it can happen in life. 2288
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
The research suggests five general stages in the process a person goes through when lost. In the first, you deny that you’re disoriented and press on with growing urgency, attempting to make your mental map fit what you see. In the next stage, as you realize that you’re genuinely lost, the urgency blossoms into a full-scale survival emergency. Clear thought becomes impossible and action becomes frantic, unproductive, even dangerous. In the third stage (usually following injury or exhaustion), you expend the chemicals of emotion and form a strategy for finding some place that matches the mental map. (It is a misguided strategy, for there is no such place now: You are lost.) In the fourth stage, you deteriorate both rationally and emotionally, as the strategy fails to resolve the conflict. In the final stage, as you run out of options and energy, you must become resigned to your plight. Like it or not, you must make a new mental map of where you are. You must become Robinson Crusoe or you will die. To survive, you must find yourself. Then it won’t matter where you are. 2291
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
The stages of getting lost resemble the five stages of dying described by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, the psychologist who wrote On Death and Dying: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. 2310
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
There are great survivors and helpless victims on the curve of human ability. Most of us are neither. Most of us fall somewhere in between and may perform poorly at first, then find the inner resources to return to correct action and clear thought. 2326
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
tell me about flying, “A good landing is any landing that you can walk away from.” 2328
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
That final stage in the process of being lost can prove to be either a beginning or an end. Some give up and die. Others stop denying and begin surviving. 2334
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
One of the toughest steps a survivor has to take is to discard the hope of rescue, just as he discards the old world he left behind and accepts the new one. 2339
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
that’s what my father did in the Nazi prison camp: He made it his world. Dougal Robertson, who was cast away at sea for thirty-eight days, advised thinking of it this way: “Rescue will come as a welcome interruption of…the survival voyage.” 2341
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
do not try to bend the map. They remap the world they’re in. 2361
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
the Zen concept of the beginner’s mind, the mind that remains open and ready despite years of training. “In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities,” said Zen master Shunryu Suzuki. “In the expert’s mind there are few.” 2372
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
She didn’t spend time bemoaning her fate. She looked to herself, took responsibility, made a plan. 2389
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
if she went downhill, she’d find water. He’d said that rivers usually led to civilization. 2392
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
But expecting someone else to take responsibility for your well-being can be fatal. 2394
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
Louis Pasteur said, “Luck favors the prepared mind.” 2403
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
They were rule followers, and it killed them. 2410
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
Survivors aren’t fearless. They use fear: they turn it into anger and focus. 2420
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
Like so many retired pilots, my father wore soft shoes, talked softly, and walked slowly. 2454
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
Apathy is a typical reaction to any sort of disaster, 2473
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
Once fatigue sets in, though, it is almost impossible to recover from it under survival conditions. It is not just a matter of being tired. It’s more like a spiritual collapse, and recovery requires more than food and rest. 2479
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
In survival situations, people greatly underestimate the need for rest. 2488
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
Faith is a very important thing in your will to survive.” As Peter Leschak put it, “Whether a deity is actually listening or not, there is value in formally announcing your needs, desires, worries, sins, and goals in a focused, prayerful attitude. Only when you are aware can you take action.” 2498
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
(Chance is nothing more than opportunity, and it is all around at every turn; the trick lies in recognizing it.) 2502
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
Helping someone else is the best way to ensure your own survival. It takes you out of yourself. It helps you to rise above your fears. Now you’re a rescuer, not a victim. 2507
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
And seeing how your leadership and skill buoy others up gives you more focus and energy to persevere. The cycle reinforces itself: You buoy them up, and their response buoys you up. Many people who survive alone report that they were doing it for someone else (a wife, boyfriend, mother, son) back home. 2508
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
They have a well-defined purpose. Purpose is a big part of survival, but it must be accompanied by work. Grace without good works is not salvation. 2523
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
Plan the flight and fly the plan. But don’t fall in love with the plan. Be open to a changing world and let go of the plan when necessary so that you can make a new plan. Then, as the world and the plan both go through their book of changes, you will always be ready to do the next right thing. 2525
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
People are animals with animal instincts, but they lack many of the other survival mechanisms animals possess, 2527
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
Culture creates a collective survival mechanism for the species. People survive better in numbers. They survive because they use cognition to organize, say, for a hunt, and to make things, even as cognition inhibits their animalness, including strength. 2529
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
The Tao Te Ching is broken into two parts, “Integrity,” and “The Way,” which can be thought of as the two halves of surviving anything. 2536
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
An imbalance of the brain’s functions leads us into trouble, and a triumph of balance gets us out. 2538
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
You have to learn to take a bunch of junk and accept it with a sense of humor.” 2546
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
Byron Kerns’s Mountain Shepherd Survival School is of the modern, technical sort. Mark Morey’s Vermont Wilderness Survival School in Brattleboro, Vermont, is based on ancient native skills. 2563
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
The man had skills, equipment, and experience. It was his attitude that killed him, his inability to balance emotion and reason. 2597
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
I could not change the world; I could only change myself. To see and know that world, then, was the key to surviving in it. I had to accept the world in which I found myself. I had to calm down and begin living. 2613
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
“Don’t get comfortable,” he advised. “Get confident.” 2622
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
Like making art, making fire is a deeply human act. Through it, we know our world in a way that no animal ever will. 2636
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
In Australia the Aborigines have a “labyrinth of invisible pathways,” 2655
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
It was aboriginal neuroscience, using implicit, not explicit, memory circuits to embed the map in the unconscious mind. 2666
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
Peter Leschak speaks of “Standard Fire Order #10: Stay alert, keep calm, think clearly, act decisively.” According to this directive, the best way to meet an emergency is with sharp senses (to gather information), a clear mind (to analyze the information), and bold action; add to these humor (to handle strong emotions). Steven Callahan was able to do all of those things. 2695
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
Survival starts before the accident. 2705
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
certain people, when afraid, experience “activation of the amygdala [which] will lead working memory to receive a greater number of inputs, and inputs of a greater variety, than in the presence of emotionally neutral stimuli.” 2713
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
Turning fear into focus is the first act of a survivor. 2722
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
in the heat of a crisis, the only thought you can allow yourself concerns your next correct action. 2725
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
At least 75 percent of people caught in a catastrophe either freeze or simply wander in a daze, according to some psychologists. 2727
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
The next step was to take bold action while exercising great caution, which is but one of the many delicate balancing acts necessary for survival. 2733
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
He had just saved his life by risking it, which is the essential task of every organism. No risk, no reward. No risk, no life. 2735
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
A sense of humor “is not a luxury,” Leach writes, “it is a vital organ for survival.” 2746
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
The Tao Te Ching says: He who is brave in daring will be killed, He who is brave in not daring will survive. 2759
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
To take delight in small achievements, to celebrate early victories, is another hallmark of the survivor. 2766
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
completely converted himself from victim to survivor. 2768
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
Nature loves to strip the unwary of their gear. 2818
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
Struggling to achieve that essential state of grace and poise, she began praying to keep herself focused. Survival psychologists have long observed that successful survivors pray, even when they don’t believe in a god. 2843
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
He was doing the opposite of going inside himself, where survival begins. 2851
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
he expects all advantage and all harm from himself.” He doesn’t blame others, nor turn to them. He takes responsibility for himself. Epictetus, one of the great Stoic thinkers, 2854
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
Kübler-Ross’s stages: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. 2858
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
Some people subconsciously believe that “to prepare for disaster is to encourage it. ‘Don’t even think about it’—for fear that it may come to pass.” 2861
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
The world won’t adapt to me. I must adapt to it. 2870
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
To experience humility is the true survivor’s correct response to catastrophe. 2870
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
She was not going to give up, and that marked her, at last, as a survivor. 2914
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
a commitment to someone outside themselves. 2919
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
Stockdale wrote, “In difficult situations, the leader with the heart, not the soft heart, not the bleeding heart, but the Old Testament heart, the hard heart, comes into his own.” Survival means accepting reality, and accepting reality takes a hard heart. But it is a strange kind of coldness, for it has empathy at its center. 2930
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
Privacy is life, but so is community. 2942
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
“It is not uncommon for castaways who have been many days at sea and suffered both physically and emotionally to lapse into what has been called ‘a sort of collective confabulation,’ in which the survivors exist in a shared fantasy world. 2964
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
A crucial moment for all survivors comes when they become convinced that they will survive. 2990
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
In the stages of dying, the last step is acceptance. In survival, it is total commitment. 2997
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
Dostoevsky wrote in Memoirs from the House of the Dead, “Man is a creature who can get used to anything, 3019
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
Survival is a simple test. There’s only one right answer, but cheating is allowed. 3020
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
Leadership, order, and routine are all important elements of survival. 3030
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
John Leach uses the term “active-passiveness,” meaning “the ability to accept the situation one is in but without giving in to it….” 3036
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
Survival depends on utility, but it also depends on joy, for joy is the organism telling itself that it is all right. 3044
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
Nearly all survivors report hearing what they call “the voice.” It tells them what to do. It is the speaking, rational side of the brain, the one that processes language, the wellspring of reason. 3052
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
Hunger is one of the most powerful of all emotions. The survival experts call it “food stress.” Although the body can go perhaps three weeks without food, the emotional drive is immense and becomes an obsession, a drive as strong as any fight or flight response. It can’t be ignored. 3070
Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
