Category: Extreme Fear

To quote Glee‘s Sue Sylvester: “It’s time to get back to the real meaning of Halloween. Fear.”

This is the time of year when all of us — rich and poor, young and old, living and undead — can put aside our differences and celebrate the sheer joy of having the wits scared out of us. Most of the time, we do our best to avoid fear, so it’s nice that once a year society can acknowledge the pleasure of terror. Of course, for the scientifically minded, this inevitably raises the question: just how scary is scary?

Two years ago, Michigan cardiologist Nathan Foster decided to find out. Continue reading The Scary Science of Halloween Haunting

I’m not actually having one of those days, but what else to do with the best animated gif ever?

In an instant, your life changes forever. Your car skids off the road. Your plane clips a wing on landing. A motorcycle runs a red light and heads straight at you. For the rest of your time on earth, the sights, smells, and sounds of that instant will be seared in your memory.

In response to my post “How The Brain Stops Time,” more than 100 readers have written to share their experiences of time dilation in the face of intense danger. A closely related corollary is that terrifying memories are burned indelibly in our minds. Long after every other detail of our lives has melted away into the great sea of forgotten things, these moments remain intensely alive.

Reader Alice from Jupiter, Florida writes:

Crossing a street one evening, my sister’s boyfriend picked me up and threw me “fireman” style over his shoulder. I had an injured ankle I remember ‘whining’ about, so he did this in order to assuage – or humor me. My sister, by the way, was trailing a few feet behind us.

Because my rear end was blocking his view from oncoming traffic, he did not see the car coming at us. I did, however, and clearly remember thinking several thoughts: “a car is coming”;”Ted must see this car coming”; “why isn’t he moving faster”; “if he doesn’t, we’ll be hit”; “Oh God, it’s going to hit us.” What seemed an eternity later, the driver did hit us. (She had been drinking and was going pretty fast, I later learned.) I recall a sensation of slowly flying through air and then nothing – until I woke on the pavement with quite a few broken bones. Ted did not survive.

My sister stated later that it happened so quickly, I simply could not have had time to think all the things I did. I clearly remember these thoughts to this day, and have wondered often how it was possible. Why would the brain would manufacture false memories when recalling a fearful event?

With all due respect, I think that Alice’s sister is wrong. Continue reading The Moment That Lasts Forever

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kB0T2M8jDBw&feature=player_embedded]

This gripping video (via Gawker) depicts a group of young Russian men attempting to drive through one of the wildfires currently raging across their country. Fortunately, they survived — though, it seems, just barely, thanks to a timely decision on the driver’s part.

If you found yourself in that situation, how would you react? If unexpectedly found yourself in a life-or-death crisis and had to make a decision that would either save your life or end it, how can you ensure that you would make the right one?

That was not a rhetorical question for people in the state of Victoria, Australia, during February and March, 2009. For five weeks catastrophic brush fires swept across the state amid record-breaking temperatures and drought. Government policy held that when fire threatened a neighborhood, homeowners were to make a choice: either stay and fight to save their houses, or evacuate early. They were explicitly instructed not to wait until the flames were close. Trying to run from a wildfire is the surest way to die in it.

The choice given to the people made sense in strictly rational terms. But can people be expected to make rational decisions when they’re surrounded by 1200 degree flames raging four stories high? Shortly after the Victoria fire’s most lethal day, I talked to a survivor and heard his incredible story, which I included in Extreme Fear. Here’s an excerpt: Continue reading Surrounded by Wildfire, Should You Run or Fight?

Since I wrote about the stampede at Germany’s Love Parade on Saturday, a clearer picture of the event has emerged. Eyewitnesses, including some readers of this blog, have stated that the deaths were not due to a panicked stampede, but rather to the simple force of human bodies pressing forward into a dead-end space. Writes Keith Martin:

It wasn’t fear. It was necessity. I was in there. It was poor planning and far too many people. We were all stuck in a tunnel… NO WAY OUT. There was a mile long line of people behind us and when the venue filled, they simply closed the gates. We had nowhere to go and people kept pushing. Once exhaustion/dehydration set in people could no longer stand or remain conscious so they would collapse and people would fall on them and a body pile would assemble, with those at the body never getting back up. It wasnt fear… People had no choice but to crush each other.

Reader Mats writes:

I also was there, and have to agree with Keith. There was no panic and no stampede, there was just a slow grind as the enclosed area filled up with more and more people, and the ones in front were told to move back again against the people coming in, and people falling trying to climb out… I was in the crowd well before the big crush happened – I was into the festival area at 15:00 – but even then the crowd was intense and I saw with my own eyes a lifeless body being carried out on a stretcher from the tunnel. Ironically, the first thing I did when getting into the entrance area was what you recommend, taking note of exits and escape routes with the intention of getting out ASAP – only to find there was not a single one. There was really no way out, not from the entrance area, the festival area or from the crowd. Even if the entrance had worked, in my mind there is no question there would be an equal incident on the actual parade grounds – even there every single exit was locked down and not opened before the disaster was a fact.

I was careful to point out in my original post that the psychology of panic is only half the story when it comes to crowd stampedes; once the mass shoving is underway, the question of automatic versus deliberate action becomes irrelevant. In the case of the Duisburg tragedy, it seems that what happened wasn’t really the result of a stampede at all, in the strict sense, but rather a kind of slow-motion build up of pressure onto a crowd with no avenue for escape. At any rate, an investigation into the incident is currently underway, so hopefully in due time fuller answers will emerge.

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Terrible news today from the German city of Duisburg, where a summer carnival called the “Love Parade” has been stricken by tragedy. According to breaking news reports, a crowd of revelers inside a tunnel became overcrowded and panicked, causing a stampede that has left at least 15 dead.

There are multiple layers of dark irony in this kind of needless death — for one thing, that a gathering called together in the name of peace could result in such a horrific toll; for another, that in the 21st century simple fear by itself is able to cause mass casualties. But that’s the paradox of terror: a response that evolved to keep us safe can itself pose a terrible danger, rising up at the most inappropriate times. If anything, the advent of modern technology seems to have left us even more vulnerable to fatal stampedes, as mass transportation and instant communication make it easier to bring large crowds together. But this kind of tragedy has a long history. Continue reading Behind the Love Parade Tragedy: The Psychology of Stampedes

I was in the Rocky Mountains of central Colorado yesterday, whitewater rafting on the Arkansas River with a highly experienced outfitter called KODI Rafting. We were to start the day with a seven-mile run down the Numbers rapids, a continuous stretch of Class III and Class IV whitewater that takes about two hours to complete. It’s a challenging stretch of water that demands an aggressive approach. People can and do get hurt.

As we rode to the put-in on a former schoolbus, the head guide gave us a run-down of what to do if we fell out of the boat: one, immediately swim for the boat and try to get back in. Two, if you get separated from the boat, lift your feet up and point them downstream so that you can ward off rocks. And so on. It was all very solid and reasonable advice. But having spent the last few years studying the human fear response, I found myself wondering: if any of us novice rafters winds up in the drink, are we going to remember any of this advice amid our rising panic? Continue reading When Summer Fun Turns Deadly Serious

Wouldn’t it be nice if you could master your fears with a single dose of medicine? It’s an age-old dream — people have been finding courage in a bottle for thousands of years — but recently military psychologists have begun to think they might be hot on the trail of a formulation that could actually work without getting users high as a kite.

Most of us have enjoyed a little “Dutch courage” now and again. It’s great for loosening up social anxieties at cocktail parties and the like; one of alcohol’s many neurological effects  is that it dampens the stress circuitry within the brain. Of course, other effects include loss of coordination and impaired decision-making, meaning that in high-pressure situations alcohol tends to do more harm than good. More recently, psychiatrists have prescribed benzodiazepines like Xanax for anxiety, but these too can cause serious cognitive impairment, and are highly addictive to boot.

Beta blockers like Propanolol aren’t nearly as mind-altering, but they have drawbacks of their own: by suppressing the sympathetic nervous system, they make it hard for users to engage in strenuous physical activity. In the military, you tend to do a lot of that.

So what’s the magic bullet? Some high-tech, top-secret formulation? Nope. Turns out to be a substance you can buy over the counter at most health food stores. Continue reading Can a Common Health Supplement Help Conquer Fear?

Recently, I wrote about how extreme fear distorts our perception of time, causing it to seemingly move in slow motion. In response, a number of readers wrote in with fascinating stories of their own, many of which offer intriguing insights into the phenomenon.

One comment came from a reader who experienced time dilation not in a life-threatening crisis, but in the adrenaline-charged milieu of the boxing ring:

I box at a local gym, nothing big.  But the guys there a really good some go pro.  Watching them from outside the ring they just look lightning fast.  But in the ring with them time does seem to slow down.  I can see punches coming a lot “slower” than when I’m not in there getting  punched in the face.  I have time to react and counter. Continue reading Readers Write: "How Fear Stopped Time"

Last week the world held its breath, wondering if 16-year-old sailor Abby Sunderland had lost her life in the southern ocean. Luckily, she had not, and was plucked from her stricken sailboat two days after its mast was knocked off by a storm. But in the wake of her  rescue relief quickly turned to outrage at Sunderland’s parents (who earlier this year had signed a reality-show deal) for allowing a legal minor to risk her life in such a dangerous undertaking. It all seemed too dismayingly similar: Bad parenting plus fame-seeking equals a call out to search-and rescue teams. Call it Balloon Boy 2010.

If one were to find a bright spot in this lamentable interlude would be that the tsunami or criticism might force other parents of would-be circumnavigators, and the children themselves, come to their senses, and so prevent a repeat of the tragedy.

But I suspect that the reverse will be true. Tragedy, and near-tragedy like Sunderland’s, have a way of teaching some people exactly the opposite of the right lesson. Perversely, disaster can glamorize insane recklessness. Continue reading Abby Sunderland and Tragedy’s Perverse Incentive