Extreme Fear Archive

Helen Kim is pioneering a new interview series this coming Monday evening at 6:30 at her studio near Lincoln Center in New York City. Each session will be an hour-long conversation with a different author about his or her work and ideas; I’ll be the first in the series, talking about “Extreme Fear” and other topics. There are still some tickets available, so if you’re interested in attending drop me a line or contact Helen directly at her website.

As a pilot, and as someone with a personal and professional interest in the emotion of fear, I was delighted to read the following in today’s front-page New York Times story about mayor Michael Bloomberg’s obsession with helicopters:

 Back in 1976, when Mr. Bloomberg was training to become a pilot, he nearly encountered disaster as he flew alone off the coast of Connecticut.

“I wasn’t sure what was going on in the engine compartment behind me, but I certainly knew I was falling and couldn’t breathe. I was going down,” he wrote in his autobiography. He landed on an island and ultimately put out the helicopter fire himself.

“Was I scared?” he wrote. “Well, there’d been no time for any emotion when I was in the air, and on the ground I was safe. So the answer is no — unless of course you count the internal shaking I couldn’t stop for the rest of the day.”

Funnily enough, a very similar story came up at a talk I gave just two days ago at my flying club in Poughkeepsie. I gave a brief presentation about the different kinds of fear that I’ve encountered as a pilot, and the mechanisms that underlie each. I said that I imagined that every single pilot has felt intense fear at one time or another, and that that was a good thing. Fear focuses our attention on what’s important and helps us to survive.

After the talk some of the guys shared their experiences. I found it particularly interesting that two of them discussed how they felt after unexpectedly losing engine power in the club’s Cessna 152 and having to make an emergency landing. Those stories brought a lump to my throat because apparently they happened quite recently. Last summer I took the plane on a long flight to Indiana and back, a trip of more than 1000 miles all told. I’d always assumed that the chance of losing engine power in a well-maintained, fully certified airplane was essentially zero. There were a few stretches along the way in which an engine-out would have put me in a dire predicament indeed.

At any rate, one of the pilots raised his hands and said that he while he thought there was a lot of sense in the points I’d made about fear, there was one major area where he thought I’d got it wrong: that we all naturally are bound to feel fear at some time or another. He said that he’d had one hair-raising flight that had the potential to go seriously wrong, and he hadn’t felt any fear at all. He just did what he had to do, and then didn’t feel any emotion at all until he was back on the ground.

“And how did you feel then?” I asked.

“Like I was going to keel over,” he said. Read the rest of this entry »

On Dec. 21, 2012, the Mayan calendar will reach the end of a 394-year cycle called a b’ak’tun. In no sense does that imply that the world is going to end — the Mayan calendar cycle is no more momentous than our own calendar ticking over from 1999 to 2000. But that doesn’t mean catastrophe won’t strike. There are plenty of risks to life on earth, ranging from disasters that threaten millions or billions of people to an all-out “extinction-level event” that wipes out the majority of life on the planet. To understand the infinitesimally small—but nonetheless real—risk of planetary disaster, it helps to travel back in time. Because such events have happened before. And the results weren’t pretty.

To see the evidence, let’s take a trip. Start with a visit to the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. On the fourth floor, just inside the entrance to the Hall of Saurischian Dinosaurs, you’ll find a chunk of Montana dirt with dark and light bands layered like Neapolitan ice cream. Not very exciting compared to the huge creatures on display nearby. But one thin, grayish-beige layer might explain what exterminated these great beasts: It’s the impact residue of a 6-mile-wide asteroid that struck the Yucatán 65 million years ago. “In its aftermath we see extinctions of everything from single-celled organisms to the largest dinosaurs,” says Mark Norell, chairman of the museum’s paleontology division. Could another one seal our own fate? Or could some other extraterrestrial catastrophe bring us death from above?

Or maybe it could come from below. Twenty-two hundred miles west, in Yellowstone National Park, one of America’s most popular tourist attractions, is another ominous harbinger of destruction. About once every hour, the pool around the Old Faithful geyser explodes in a fountain of spray 145 feet tall. It’s a cool effect, until you consider what powers it: geothermal energy radiating up from a subterranean plug of magma. Every 500,000 years or so, the Yellowstone supervolcano erupts and rains lava and ash for hundreds of miles. An eruption 250 million years ago in Siberia may have released enough carbon into the atmosphere to cause the largest mass extinction in earth’s history, the Permian-Triassic, which wiped out 96 percent of all sea life.

In the cruelest of ironies, the gravest threat to human life on earth may be other life on earth—the microbial kind. Let’s turn our tour of all things apocalyptic to the Netherlands, where virologist Ron Fouchier at the Erasmus Medical Center recently synthesized an airborne version of the H5N1 avian flu. The lethality and frequent mutations of H5N1 make it a serious pandemic threat. The last big influenza pandemic, the Spanish flu of 1918, is estimated to have killed more than five times as many people as World War I. The possibility of a naturally occurring global outbreak is ever present, but the threat from labs is becoming more frightening. “The cost of synthesizing a new organism goes down every year,” says Dr. Ali Khan, head of the Office of Public Health Preparedness and Response at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “A bad guy could make his own smallpox.”

Although imminent destruction seems all around us, the probability of extinction in any one year is vanishingly small. Our long-term prognosis, however, is far darker. Very few species survive through the eons like the alligator and the coelacanth. “The safe bet is that we won’t make it, because 99.9 percent of things don’t,” says Timothy Spahr, director of the Minor Planet Center in Cambridge, Mass., an asteroid- and comet-tracking organization.

We’ve got some time, though. On average, vertebrate species stick around 4 to 6 million years, and modern humans are only about 200,000 years old. And we’re not your typical vertebrates. Our science and technology might ultimately migrate off this little planet altogether. So maybe we’re just getting started.

What are the 12 threats that could end life as we know it? Read the rest of my Pop Mech story here.

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 »

Courage: it’s not just for heroes. Fear is an emotion we all deal with, and how we handle it is everything. How we grapple with our anxieties determines what kind of life we’ll lead — whether shackled by anxiety and dread, or empowered to conquer new challenges. Yet we spend most of our time trying to avoid fear, so we muddle along, rarely getting much better at the art of mastering it. That’s a shame, because with a little effort we can find the courage to push beyond our comfort zone and tackle new worlds.

In my book Extreme Fear: The Science of Your Mind in Danger — out this month in paperback — I explore the neurological underpinnings of the brain’s fear response to better understand how to take charge of this formidable emotion, shedding light on the science with stories of people who have faced terrible threats and managed to come through intact.

Can we learn from such brave souls and train ourselves to be more courageous? The evidence says yes. Here are nine techniques for steeling yourself for the challenges ahead. Read the rest of this entry »

One of my constant themes is that our fears, left unchallenged, hedge in our lives and prevent us from becoming the fullest expressions of ourselves. But what if we go the other way entirely, and not only embrace the things we fear, but fear itself?

I recently got a note from a reader, Jason Tyne, who wrote: “Since reading your book, I continue to be fascinated by the idea of fear but at least I have some perspective on it. Recently (and inspired by your book) I took my own jump out of an airplane and it was amazing…in fact I just blogged that it was my number one recommendation for EVERYONE to do in 2011.” I followed the link to Jason’s website and found a very entertaining account of an experience very much like what I had when I jumped out of an airplane for the first time. It really is bizarre, if you’ve never done anything like this before, how an alternate personality or parallel mind seems to wake from its slumber and start wrestling with you for control of your body. As Jason puts it, “I was sane all the way up to the moment that I stepped out of an airplane at 10,000 feet; it was the very next moment that I lost my mind.” He describes his inner dialogue like this: Read the rest of this entry »

Most of the mistakes that we make in life are survivable. We suffer our punishment, painful as it may be, and then move on. But there is a different category of mistake that exacts a penalty of another error. The small miscalculations, seemingly insignificant errors of judgment that can snowball into a life-threatening crisis. These mental traps can occur in all sorts of situations, but many a great majority can be lumped into just a handful of categories. Here, I’d like to consider one of the most pernicious: hanging on too long.

When a ground crew is getting ready to launch a hot-air balloon, they have to hold on to the basket to prevent it from taking flight prematurely. They grasp the edge of the basket with both hands and plant a foot on a hold near the base. Only, ever, one. The one sacred unbreakable rule of balloon ground handling is: always keep one foot on the ground.

Why?, I asked the ground handler who first revealed this wisdom to me.

“It’s a mental thing,” he said. Read the rest of this entry »

How to take a really boring story about a bureaucratic procedural revision and turn it into a hot national news story? Spray on a coating of terrorism. While you’re at it, add a dash of drug-war hysteria.

Okay, to get the boring part out of the way: The Federal Aviation Administration has been wanting to update the way it registers airplanes for years. Ever since forever, plane owners only had to register their aircraft once, when they bought it, and they had to pay a nominal fee. Now the FAA wants owners to renew every couple years, like car owners do. Naturally plane owners are going to have to shell out more money. This is the way of the world.

This is not something very many people should care about, even pilots like me. The only ones who are going to get shellacked are people like Brian Boland, a balloon maker who lives in rural Vermont. He makes a lot of balloons for his own amusement; he’s got over a hundred of them, packed into bags in his loft. Every time he built a new one, he’d send the government a few bucks, and they’d issue him a registration certificate. Now, under the new rules, he’ll be on the hook for thousands of dollars just to register a bunch of balloons he hardly ever flies. He’s not a rich man; he’s going to have to cancel all those registrations. The days when he could pull out any balloon he wanted and take it for a ride are over.

A small loss in the grand scheme of things, perhaps, but what does humanity get in return, apart from increased government revenue? The latest spin is that the new registrations are going to protect us from the darkest forces on the planet.

Read the rest of this entry »

Crazy video, via Mark Frauenfelder at Boing Boing, of Xmas shoppers trampling each other to get at Black Friday bargains at 4am.

Not a proud moment for humanity. But as I’ve written before, this kind of crowd dynamic isn’t unique to the US; in 19th century Russia 1389 people died at a coronation ceremony for Tsar Alexander II of Russia when a rumor circulated through the crowd that souvenirs were in short supply, causing people to rush forward en masse.

There’s a wonderfully insightful piece in the New York Times today by science writer Gina Kolata, who describes a cycling accident in which she ran into another rider, fell off her bike, and broke her collar bone. The injury was not crippling – she managed to ride another 90 miles that same day – but the psychological ramifications were long-lasting, as the accident made her realize how vulnerable she really was when riding a bicycle. All at once, an activity that had long given her joy became a source of fear. An important part of her life was shut off.

As I’ve written before, the two main tools that we possess to control fear are information and a sense of control. In Kolata’s case, she realized that the sense of control that she had once felt while riding her bike was illusory. Stripped of her sense of control, she was helpless against her fear. She just couldn’t get back on the bike, at least for a while.

“Control makes a big difference in whether we take risks,” [Carnegie Mellon] professor of economics] Dr. Loewenstein said. “With biking, you feel in control until you have an accident. Then all of a sudden you realize you are not in control. That can have a dramatic effect — you can shift abruptly from excessive daring to exaggerated caution.”

I’m currently working on a story for Psychology Today about why some people are mentally tougher in the face of crisis than others, and what the rest of us can learn from them. A major lesson I’ve taken away from my research is that the way we choose to think about our struggles is a critical factor in resilience. Those who bounce back easiest are those who can think of a negative outcome as a challenge rather than a defeat, and recognize in each setback an opportunity to grow and test themselves.

In Kolata’s case, she was not able to take such an upbeat stance. She had come to feel that when she was on a bicycle, something bad could happen to her at any time, and there was nothing she could do about it. Yet at the same time she continued to run, even though that activity poses an even greater risk of injury. Why? Read the rest of this entry »