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.”
Three Sentence Summary
An exploration of the characteristics of who survives in dangerous situations and why, illuminated by countless survival stories that Gonzales has curated. Survival often comes down to the interplay between emotions and cognition. Training and experience can help, but there are mental qualities you can cultivate, but it's very hard.
WHAT DID I THINK?
This initially seems like it might be a book for extreme sports enthusiasts, but it is actually a remarkable book about life. It offers a latticework of wisdom, exploring themes like the value of a beginner's mindset, the power of emotions, complexity theory and risk.
What Gonzales does well is combine neuroscience with a large sample of survival stories to offer useful conclusions.
Some of insights I particularly enjoyed:
Accidents are a feature of many systems, which can go unnoticed, especially because of the timeframe we use.
The value of realism and the beginner's mindset when you find yourself in a survival situation. Children six and under do well in survival situations because they follow their instincts and adapt to the situation they find themselves in.
A survival situation brings out the underlying personality - something that I've observed in the days surrounding my own brother's death.
Stress can cause an amygdala hijack. In this situation, you are more likely to choose unconscious behaviours vs. learnt ones.
How strongly I recommend it: 9/10
NOTES
Book and his career inspired by his father who was a fighter pilot who survived being blown out of the air and life in a Nazi prison camp.
In survival situations in the wilderness, easy to think it would all focus on equipment, training and experience, but while they are good to have, Gonzales finds they are not decisive. Instead "corny as it sounds, it's what's in your heart."
Who survives?
Commonalities amongst those who survive include:
Self-control (or agency) is in Gonzales words "perhaps the only which be said with certainty to make for success" in survival situations and arguably beyond. The idea that your behaviour matters.
An ability to stay calm, and not panic. Only 10-20% of untrained people can stay calm and think in the midst of a survival situation.
Facing reality. "Survival by surrender." Survivors don't lack fear but they channel it to adapt to the situation they find themselves in. The "most successful are open to the changing nature of their environment. They are curious."
Humour. Laughter connects someone to their environment and makes the feeling of being threatened manageable. It isn't conscious - it's automatic - if you laugh, you can induce the same reaction in others.
Independent. Rule followers don't do as well as those who are independent minded and spirited.
Rest. Rest is underestimated in survival situations. Gonzales says you should operate at 60% of your normal level of activity.
Help others. "It takes you out of yourself. It helps you to rise above your fears. Now you’re a rescuer, not a victim."
Look for beauty. Even in the darkest times, there is richness to be found.
Intentions. Whatever, whoever you believe in, state what you are going to do out loud.
Emotions & stress vs. reason - what happens in our brain?
"the rein of reason on the horse of emotion":
Well-known that emotions can trump reason, but reverse also applies.
Emotion instinctive response focused on self-preservation; reason is slow and fallible.
Highlights research of Joseph LeDoux, a neuroscientist, who talks about the process of "reconsolidation" whereby the brain that remembers is not the same one that formed the initial memory - something that explains why our memory can be faulty.
Le Doux differentiates between "primary" emotions - like finding a mate or food - and "secondary" ones, that are acquired unconsciously because they've helped us adapt in the past.
During a fear reaction, the amygdala (amygdala hijack) releases adrenaline and norepinephrine (causes feeling of being startled). Cortisol (the stress hormone) heat rate to rise, breathing to speed up, sugar to be released into your metabolism and distribute oxygen - all so that we have the strength to run or fight.
Cortisol can disrupt perception and even memory, but by can excite the amygdala allowing it to stage a "hostile takeover of conscious by emotion." This can lead you to make mistakes. Writes of a pilot who had an emotional bookmark that safety could be found on the ground even if it wasn't safe in this instance.
Stress causes people to focus narrowly on what seems most important to the person, but it may be the wrong thing. Stress can cause us to go with unconscious behaviours vs. learnt ones.
Overall, "emotion is the source of both success and failure at selecting the correct action at the crucial moment."
Top athletes learn to manage fear. Mike Tyson’s trainer, Cus D’Amato, said, “Fear is like fire. It can cook for you. It can heat your house. Or it can burn you down.”
What drives sensation seeking? An exploration of emotional bookmarks
Uses example of snowmobile riders going up a slope and causing an avalanche.
The riders did so because they had done so before and had a good feeling. An "emotional bookmark."
Uses example of seeking food in a fridge to elaborates further on the concept of emotional bookmarks. You can be on "pilot" - unthinking - and then consciously grab something like pizza. "Your hunger, your body, leads you there," not your cognition.
When you decide to act instantly you use a system of emotional bookmarks.
To use a different words to Gonzales, you have habits, which shape future behaviour by offering incentives depending on whether your habits led to good or bad experiences. If left unchecked by your conscious these habits will guide your behaviour.
Going back to the riders, he writes:
"What were they thinking? They weren’t. The whole point of the system is that you don’t have to think."
“Those who can control that impulse […] live. Those who can’t, die.”
Information from your senses actually arrives milliseconds earlier in the amygdala than it does at the neocortex, meaning rational (conscious) thought lags behind the emotional reaction. Pathways from amygdala to neocortex are stronger and faster than vice-versa, but still ability for neocortex to:
Recognise emotional reaction underway;
Perceive circumstances correctly;
Override the automatic reaction and select the correct course of action.
All of which Gonzales describes as a "tall order".
Implicit vs. explicit learning
When you first learn something - i.e. tennis - you must think through every move. Stored in explicit memory. You can talk about it.
As you become more experienced, you begin to do the task less consciously. It becomes second nature, aka implicit learning.
Under stress, the implicit system can break down, leaving you with your explicit learning, meaning you might go "through each motion like a rank beginner."
Mental models
"stripped-down schematics of the world."
Uses example of who lived and died in collapse of the World Trade Center on 9/11. In the South Tower, at least 200 people headed for the roof, some following Roko Camaj, a window cleaner who had the key for the roof. Some of those following had been in the building when the World Trade Center was bombed in 1993, where survivors were hauled off the roof by helicopter. Their previous experience "betrayed them."
Prone to confirmation bias, whereby look for any information to confirm how we think the world works. Challenges arise when the reality doesn't match how we expect the world to look.
The Beginner's Mindset
Zen teaching says you can't add anything to cup that is already full. The same is true of the mind. "I already know" may mean you miss important information.
Systems & Accidents
In certain systems, accidents are inevitable and normal. They are a characteristic of the system. [[Quotes]] Perrow in Normal Accidents, who found that efforts to make those systems safer, especially through the use of technology, made systems more complex and more prone to accidents.
For a long time nothing serious will happen, so people "begin to believe that the orderly behaviour they see is the only possible state of the system."
Some systems "tightly coupled" - rigid - if something happens unintended complex interactions can unfold (if system is not tightly coupled and such interactions don't occur, no accident can occur). Uses the example of an airliner, which has explosive fuel, and flies at speed. Small force can cause release of destructive release of large amount of energy in the system.
If dominos placed closely together, they are tightly coupled, and they will all fall, but if they loosely spread, they don't necessary fall.
Chaos Theory and Complexity Theory, and Emergent Behaviour
Idea of chaos theory is that patterns can exist in very complex systems marked by randomness.
Complexity theory postulates small events can trigger enormous consequences.
Gonzales writes of how nature tends to create "self-organising systems" (also known as emergent behaviour).
He illustrates emergent behaviour by describing the sandpile effect: Peter Bak, a Danish physicist, setup a pile of sand as part of an experiment in 1980. At a certain point the sand pile did not shrink, nor did it grow. It "simply continued in that steady state of continuous collapse."
Touches on power laws - similar themes explored by Geoffrey West in Scale. "The bigger the accident, the less likely it is."
Risk
People accept different levels of risk, known as "risk homeostasis." You tend to keep risk you're willing to take at the same level, so if conditions become less risky, you'll take more risk (and vice-versa).
To address this recommends that you take on outside views that can improve your understanding of the situation.
A mountain for example is "in a continuous state of collapse." Easy to forget, as we think it is solid.
Getting Lost
Few people who get lost backtrack.
Quotes study where 75% of those who get lost die in the first 48 hours. Many people who get lost are prepared to live through the experience.
Have to accept reality and embrace the present when you get lost. Describes his father as making the Nazi prison camp he was in: "his world."
Children 6 and under have high survival rate when getting lost, children aged 7-12, one of the worst.
The younger children don't have mental maps. They follow instinct. If they are cold, they find shelter. If they're tired, they rest (incidentally these children can also be hard to find). Gonzales writes that they "do not try to bend the map. They remap the world they're in."
Children aged 7-12 can't control their emotional responses and panic.
We like to think that education and experience make us more competent, more capable. But it seems that the opposite is sometimes true.
Laurence Gonzales's 12 Rules For Survival
1. Perceive, believe (look, see, believe).
2. Stay calm (use humor, use fear to focus).
3. Think/analyze/plan (get organized; set up small, manageable tasks).
4. Take correct, decisive action (be bold and cautious while carrying out tasks).
5. Celebrate your successes (take joy in completing tasks).
6. Count your blessings (be grateful—you’re alive).
7. Play (sing, play mind games, recite poetry, count anything, do mathematical problems in your head). They use the deeper activities of the intellect to stimulate, calm, and entertain the mind.
8. See the beauty (remember: it’s a vision quest).
9. Believe that you will succeed (develop a deep conviction that you’ll live).
10. Surrender (let go of your fear of dying; “put away the pain”).
11. Do whatever is necessary (be determined; have the will and the skill).
12. Never give up (let nothing break your spirit).
QUOTES
The most remarkable discovery of modern neuroscience is that the body controls the brain as much as the brain controls the body.
We think we believe what we know, but we only truly believe what we feel.
If you distill all of the psychology, cognitive science, and neuroscience of the last hundred years or so, what you find is that we’re always Homo but sometimes not so sapiens.
… there’s no such thing as a “beginner’s mountain.” It’s a concept that doesn’t work, like beginner sex.
A survival situation brings out the true, underlying personality.