Most Recent
1

Why Your Brain’s Wrong About Danger

– January 13, 2012Posted in: Extreme Fear

The world is full of potential hazards. Unfortunately, the things that we’re afraid of oftentimes aren’t the things that are actually mostly likely to hurt us. Our brains’ admirably lightning-fast danger-detection system evolved in an environment different from the modern world, so it tends to trigger our alarms when the situation isn’t really that grievous. Worse, it can fail to activate when we really are faced with a real-and-present danger, leaving us prone to walk right into potentially harmful situations. That doesn’t mean we’re totally SOL, however. With a little effort we can consciously arm ourselves with rational risk-benefit analysis and try to override our erroneous automatic impulses.

For example? Here are some perceived dangers that get blown out of proportion:

Cell phone radiation. Uncertainty is a powerful trigger of anxiety. When new technologies reach a broad public, they can seem uncomfortably mysterious, and hence ready targets for health-scare furors. Remember Alar, silicone breast implants, electromagnetic fields from power lines? In the case of cell phones, the word “radiation” adds additional emotional baggage. The fact is, numerous studies have failed to turn up any conclusive evidence that cell phone emissions pose health risks, and the physics suggests it’s most likely impossible.

Vaccinations. We tend to be less afraid of things that provide an immediate, palpable benefit. The problem with vaccinations is that we never really know if they’ve helped us or not. What’s more, we’re intuitively suspicious of things we perceive as artificial rather than natural. These biases have helped stoke widespread panic about childhood vaccinations, which in turn expose kids to very real risk. Read the rest of this entry »

  • Share/Bookmark
0

The Truth About Lies

– December 2, 2011Posted in: Psychology

In the ‘90s, psychologist Paul Ekman leapt to fame with his theory of “microexpressions”—the idea that when we lie brief, subconscious flashes of emotion register on our face to reveal our true feelings. People trained to pick up on these cues, Ekman said, can root out the truth with astonishing accuracy. His idea inspired a $1 billion TSA program and the TV show Lie to Me.

There’s just one problem. There’s no evidence that Ekman’s theory has any basis. “It’s hokum,” says Yale psychologist Charles Morgan III. While something like the microexpressions that Ekman described do exist, truth-tellers exhibit them as well as liars. “There is no clue, no behavior, that always means that someone is lying, and never means something else,” says Bella DePaulo, a psychologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara who studies lying. “All of these behaviors are just hints.”

So can science help us unmask deception? Yes. But the key is not just to observe a suspected liar but to ask them the right kind of questions. Making up a story and keeping the details straight require more mental horsepower than just telling the truth. Researchers have found that if interrogators can place an extra “cognitive load” on a liar’s intellect they’ll likely push it to breaking point and cause the story to fall apart.

Dutch psychologist Aldert Vrij has tested several ways to accomplish this. In one experiment, he asked pairs of subjects to either go eat lunch together in a restaurant or to simply lie and say that they had. Vrij found that when it came to the kinds of questions that they probably expected to face—“what did you do in the restaurant?”—the liars were able to come up with such convincing stories that it was impossible to tell the two groups apart. But when he forced them to respond on the fly to unexpected questions, such as queries about spatial layout (“In relation to where you sat, where were the closest diners?’’), the liars gave up the game 80 percent of the time.

So if you want to get the truth, sit your suspected liar down for a chat and lay some cognitive load on them. Here are four proven techniques based on experiments that Vrij and others have conducted: Read the rest of this entry »

  • Share/Bookmark
0

Surviving Fear Under the Ice

– November 28, 2011Posted in: Adventure

I'm still not sure this is a good idea. (Photo by Isabelle Dubois)

You can study the psychology of fear until the cows come home; it’s not going to do much to keep your heebie-jeebies under control when you’re about to jump into a gap in six-foot-thick sea ice.

I shuffle closer to the edge of the five-by-five foot hole that’s been chainsawed into the ice. I have no real reason to be jumping into the frozen-over Hudson Bay. I’ve come up here for a totally different reason—to do a story about igloo building for a men’s magazine. But the trip’s organizers added a couple of extra days onto my itinerary so that I could get a taste for the local Inuit culture—riding on a dogsled, eating raw caribou meat — oh, and going scuba diving under the sea ice. Care to give it a try, Mr. Wise?

I couldn’t say no. Stunts like this are basically what I do for a living. I’m a magazine writer specializing in experiential adventures like skydiving, surfing, and survival training. Along the way, I developed an interest in the psychology of intense pressure and wrote a book on it. So though the idea of scuba diving under ice scares the crap out of me, that’s all the more reason I should do it.

And it does scare the crap out of me. Immersion in 32 degree water sounds bad enough, but to be trapped under six feet of ice as well? There’s a section of my book about how deadly that kind of thing can be. If a diver panics, the instinctive response is to rip away anything that blocks the airway – in this case, the regulator. In an enclosed space far from the surface, there may be no chance to recover from that mistake. Ironically, just knowing that the possibility exists makes it more likely to happen. “Well, let’s see how it goes,” I tell the organizers.

I’m being weasel-y, but with good reason. Read the rest of this entry »

  • Share/Bookmark
0

Sad News

– November 19, 2011Posted in: Aviation

Stull at the Sun n' Fun airshow this past April.

Sadly, I’ve received news that Mark Stull, a 59-year-old airplane designer and builder who featured prominently in last month’s Popular Mechanics cover story about do-it-yourself aviation, died on Wednesday, November 16, in a crash near his home in Texas. Stull had just taken off on his first test flight of a new design when the accident occurred. According to a witness, he had climbed to about 50 feet when the aircraft stalled, flipped, and fell to the ground. Stull died instantly.

When I interviewed Stull earlier this year for the article, I was astonished by the risks that he described to me. He was constantly tweaking and modifying his aircraft, and would regularly take them apart and start new designs from scratch. This approach was no doubt fascinating to him intellectually, but it meant that he was constantly flying untested designs whose flying characteristics only became clear once he was in the air.

Stull is not the first aviator I’ve interviewed who has subsequently died in a crash. Last year, I wrote about John Graybill, who died while flying with his wife Dolly in Alaska. I’d profiled Graybill a decade before for National Geographic Adventure. Like Stull, Graybill knew that his passion for flying might someday lead to his death; like Stull, he was fatalistic about his chances.

“I have had many near-death experiences in my life. I am a thrill seeker,” Stull told me earlier this year. “I used to be a white-water kayaker, paddling steep, flooded creeks in Oregon. We used to say, if we don’t almost die, we aren’t having fun. I have no fear of death, but I fear being seriously injured.”

Like Stull and Graybill, I love to fly. Like them, I understand that doing so entails a certain amount of risk, but believe that by staying within certain parameters I can reasonably expect to live a long life. When I hear of an accident like Stull’s or Graybill’s, I have to step back and ask myself: am I really being as safe as I think, or am I deluding myself? Am I taking unnecessary risks? The answer may be no, but I have to ask the question again and again and again.

In cases like this, you often hear people say, “He died doing what he loved.” That may be true, but I can guarantee that in the final seconds, he didn’t love it at all.

UPDATE: Go San Angelo, the website of the San Angelo Standard Times newspaper, has put up a nice piece up about Stull by staff writer Laurel L. Scott.

  • Share/Bookmark
0

And Then We Fire Off Machine Guns

– November 18, 2011Posted in: Adventure

The perfect way to top off a morning of tank driving: fire off a collection of automatic weapons, including a Tommy gun, and M-16, and the .30 caliber machine gun shown here. I’ll describe the experience in an upcoming “I’ll Try Anything” column for Popular Mechanics.

  • Share/Bookmark
3

VIDEO: Getting Tanked

– November 18, 2011Posted in: Adventure

Popular Mechanics called me up and said, “We want you to go drive a tank.” I said, “Okay.”

  • Share/Bookmark
0

How Congress is Like a Crack Addict’s Brain

– October 20, 2011Posted in: Psychology

We seem to be having a hard time keeping it together lately. Americans are more overweight, more addicted, and more indebted than ever. Congress, meanwhile, is becoming ever more dysfunctional, seemingly unable to come to grips with spiraling deficits.

These two levels of dysfunction – personal and collective – surely must be a coincidence, right? After all, the give-and-take of representative democracy is a completely different process from the infinitely complex tangle of neurons and synapses that underlie individual decision making. But if one addiction researcher’s groundbreaking ideas are correct, then governments’ plans tend to fall apart for the very same reason that our individual attempts at self-control do.

Basically, Congress operates a lot like an addict’s brain. Read the rest of this entry »

  • Share/Bookmark
14

What Didn’t Cause the Reno Air Race Crash

– October 10, 2011Posted in: Aviation

Lately there’s been an email circulating that purports to be from someone on the Wildfire Air Racing team who had a long talk with race pilot Matt Jackson about Jimmy Leeward’s crash last month at the Reno Air Races. The email says that Jackson was racing at the time in his own Unlimited-category plane and witnessed firsthand the trouble that Jimmy Leeward was having as he rounded the course. According to the email,

There is a video of the entire last lap of the Ghost before the crash which Matt showed me. As Leeward was coming around pylon #8 at about 480 mph after passing Rare Bear, he hit turbulence which pitched his left wing down, Leeward corrected with hard right rudder and aileron. Just as the aircraft was straightening out, he hit a second mountain of turbulence which caused the tail to ‘dig in’ resulting in a 10+ G climb rendering Leeward unconscious instantly and resulted in the tail wheel falling out. (broken tail wheel support structure was found on the course). As the Ghost shot upward the LH aileron trim tab broke loose. This can be heard on the tape, so the trim tab did not cause the accident.

This is conclusion is diametrically opposed to the conclusion that I (and many others) reached, based on the information available—namely, that the failure of the trim tab caused the steep climb, not vice versa. As the email was forwarded to me by a trusted and experienced member of the aircraft community, I was surprised and concerned by its assertions. Read the rest of this entry »

  • Share/Bookmark
5

How GPS Makes Clueless Drivers

– September 20, 2011Posted in: Technology

We were driving somewhere in central New York State, along a two-lane blacktop that wound a spectacular course through farm-dotted valleys, past placid lakes and along forested hillsides.  My brother’s attention, though, was on the unwavering purple line on the dashboard-mounted GPS unit. At last we reached the interstate on-ramp – and he drove right past it. “Turn left in 50 feet,” the GPS said. My brother obeyed, hanging a left onto the access road. According to the machine we were smack on the highway, yet here we were, stuck behind a tractor pulling a load of hay. “Time to destination, 30 minutes,” the GPS announced.

As we idled along behind the cloud-belching agriculture machinery, I had a feeling of déjà vu. Not for this exact moment of farm-machinery-induced frustration, but for that hot moment of clarity when you realize that you’ve been suckered by the self-assurance of modern technology.

It’s something I find happening more and more often. In the 25 years I’ve been a travel writer, the information revolution has changed everything. Once, we visited travel agents, bought paper maps, consulted destination guides. Now, all of those needs can be taken care of by a few flicks of a finger across a phone’s touch screen. Because information is so cheap, we don’t need to pay much attention to it. We can browse around the world the way we browse around the web.

Apps and gadgets of every kind allow us to summon instant expertise that otherwise would have required years of study. But they also remove the need to learn, to engage, and to be curious. We can ignore context. And so even when we know exactly where we’re located, we have no idea where we are.

Pilots have a word for the state of presence in the world around you; they call it situational awareness. “Keep your eyes out of the cockpit,” my flight instructor always used to tell me. Meaning: look at the world around you. Don’t get fixated on what your instruments are telling you. Understand the context of what you’re seeing. Situational awareness means understanding where things are in relation to one another.  It means knowing what’s going on, and what you can do when your plans start to unravel.

Electronic gadgets, in contrast, urge us to forget all that tiring mental work and just follow the purple line. They’re the mental equivalent of the electric scooters that obese people ride around at amusement parks to save themselves the effort of walking. Read the rest of this entry »

  • Share/Bookmark
4

What’s It Like to Fly a Mustang?

– September 17, 2011Posted in: Aviation

photo: LA Times. Click through for LA Times slideshow.

Yesterday afternoon an airplane crashed horrifically at the National Air Races in Reno, Nevada, impacting the viewing stands and killing at least three people. Many more were injured. The aircraft involved was a heavily modified P-51 Mustang, arguably the most famous and best-loved fighter plane of WWII, at least on the American side. Built around a huge and supremely powerful Rolls-Royce Merlin engine, the Mustang was designed to accompany Allied bombers on the long journey from England to Germany and back, and fight off the best that the Luftwaffe could throw at them. Later, they became popular among air racers competing in the heavyweight “Unlimited” class of races at Reno. Wealthy owners spend millions to purchase the planes and heavily modify them, changing wings, lengthening the fuselage, swapping in even more powerful engines. According to racers I’ve talked to, there are two categories of Mustang pilots at Reno: those who fly to win, putting extreme wear and tear on the airplane and its engine, and those who are content just to take part, flying the plane gently enough to save themselves the expense of frequent engine overhauls.

As something of an airplane nut myself, I considered the opportunity to fly in a Mustang for a Popular Mechanics story to be one of the high points of my lifetime. In the interests of those who might wonder what it’s like to fly one of these machines, or who want to know why people fall in love with a potentially dangerous sport, I’m reprinting it below.

FLYING A LEGEND

You’re never going to forget your first 60 seconds airborne in a P-51 Mustang.

I’m strapped into the back seat of Crazy Horse II, a vintage World War II fighter plane, as pilot Lee Lauderbeck lines it up on the end of the runway at Kissimmee, Florida. I’ve got a parachute cinched around my torso and a five-point harness securing me to the airframe. Just in case worse comes to worst, I’ve been briefed in how to pop the top of the canopy and bail out.

Lauderbeck opens the throttle on the huge 1700-horsepower, Rolls Royce-built Merlin engines. The 12 cylinders rise to a throaty roar and we start to roll. As we gain speed, the tail lifts, and then we float off the runway. We hold steady, roaring along no more than 25 feet above the ground, as the airspeed indicator passes 150 mph. Then Lauderbeck pulls the stick sharply back and the nose swings up into the blue yonder. We climb like a rocket to 1000 feet.

Leveling off, we barrel along beneath the base of the clouds at 200 mph, the sun-dappled Florida flatlands sweeping past below us. “Okay,” Lauderbeck says, “Your controls.” He lifts both hands above his shoulders, open-palmed.

I tighten my hand around the control stick and nudge it to the right, just enough to feel the wing dip, then bring the plane back to level. I’ve been a pilot for seven years, but I’ve never felt a tingle on my spine like this. I’m actually flying a P-51. Read the rest of this entry »

  • Share/Bookmark
Older Entries