Fear-watching

I am in the middle of reading Alec Wilkinson’s fascinating New Yorker story about Swedish explorer S.A. Andree, who tried to be the first man to reach the North Pole by floating there in a helium balloon. Turned out to be a bad idea.

As part of his self-education into aeronautics, Andree took his first balloon ride at the age of 38. The year was 1892. In an age when traveling by air was still a novel and rather far-fetched idea, it must have been far more terrifying than we can imagine today. As he prepared to board the contraption, Andree must have wondered whether he would feel fear or not. Ever the man of science, he decided to pay careful attention to his body’s reaction.

Andree wrote that he was preoccupied with observing himself to determine whether he was afraid. He was surprised to find himself, as the balloon left the ground, holding tight to the ropes encircling the basket. “I discovered  that I was not conscious of any feeling of fear, but that I probably was influenced by it unconsciously,” he wrote. Continue reading Fear-watching

"Go Toward the Light": The Science of Near-Death Experiences

Modern medicine has proven so adept at saving victims of cardiac arrest that a good number of people are walking around today who at one time or another were considered clinically dead. While this is a good thing in and of itself, it has the side benefit of having generated numerous reports of the shadowy psychological condition that people experience when they’re close to “the other side.” So consistent are these reports — combining the sensation of floating, seeing oneself from an outside perspective, and moving through a tunnel towards light — that they have earned an official moniker, “Near Death Experiences,” or NDEs.

Just what is behind these eerily similar reports? To those of a certain mindset, they are a  supernatural phenomenon, an early glimpse of the afterlife that awaits. To those of a more materialist persuasion, these sensations must be generated by some common brain architecture that gets activated under intense stress. As it happens, this latter view has just received some intriguing scientific backing, in the form of a paper in the latest issue of the journal Critical Care. A key component of NDEs, it appears, is carbon dioxide in the blood. Yes, the same thing that makes Cokes fizzy also makes your life flash in front of your eyes. Continue reading "Go Toward the Light": The Science of Near-Death Experiences

More Red Bull Mishigas

I was going to go gliding today but the weather radar made it seem like Wurtsboro would be too overcast for good thermaling — plus I had work to do. So instead I stayed home and watched this:

If you ever go gliding with me, please do not open the cockpit and go sit on the wing, no matter how tempting this prospect may be.

Parenthetically, how do you stand on top of a fuselage with a relative wind of at least 50 mph without getting blown off?

iPhone vs Earthquakes

Another day, another major earthquake — this time, a magnitude 6.9 tremblor that killed at least 300 people in China’s Qinghai province. I’ve been talking to a lot of seismologists lately, and they all agree that the recent cluster of devastating earthquakes, including the jolt that shook northern Mexico earlier this month, do not point to some planet-wide upheaval; it’s all a statistical coincidence, they say. Well, that may be true, but it sure doesn’t feel that way. It feels like something is up. Not surprising, then, that a few days ago false rumors started proliferating in Southern California that the Big One would strike imminently.

Seismologists’ reassurances would be more soothing if they had a detailed, empirically verified understanding of how earthquakes work. Unfortunately, they’re the result of forces at work deep within the earth that are difficult to gather data on. So the science remains in its early stages. But progress is being made — and soon, you can be a part of the process. As I wrote recently on the Pop Mech website:

As part of their battle to understand and protect against the destructive force of earthquakes, seismologists have gone to extraordinary lengths. They have bored holes deep into the earth’s crust, laid out arrays of sensors hundreds of miles across, and built supercomputers capable of running simulations at teraflop speeds. But the most exciting new effort in cutting-edge seismology involves a piece of instrumentation that’s a good deal less exotic. It’s called an iPhone. Continue reading iPhone vs Earthquakes

In Smolensk Air Crash, Blame People, Not Machines

Horrific news this weekend from Smolensk, Russia, where a plane crash killed Polish president Lech Kaczynski. I’ve got a blog post up this morning on Popular Mechanics about the psychological factors that may have caused the pilot to fly a perfectly functioning aircraft into the ground:

Sometimes… a pilot is highly motivated to get on the ground, a state of mind known colloquially in aviation circles as “get-there-itis.” He might be suffering mechanical problems, a fuel shortage or simply be impatient to get where he’s going. Instead of abandoning his approach, he continues lower, hoping that by pressing on a little longer he’ll emerge from the clouds, spot the runway and accomplish his landing. He might figure that, since there’s a certain amount of safety margin built into the descent protocol, there’s no harm in pushing it a little bit. But “busting minimums” as this behavior is called, can be an insidiously dangerous pastime.

Continue reading In Smolensk Air Crash, Blame People, Not Machines

When Fears Come True, And Disappear

Cary Tennis, an advice columnist at Salon, is currently on leave while he undergoes treatment for cancer. In the meantime, he’s blogging about his experiences in a very personal way. Recently, he wrote about how the experience of coming so close to death has erased many of his old fears:

I realized a few weeks ago how much fear had dominated so many aspects of my life. It wasn’t big enormous fear. It was little fears. Like little fears of being uncomfortable about stuff. And now, after all I’ve been through, after what I’ve faced, I just kind of don’t have that. I don’t have that complex of behaviors to avert little pains and such. So this is fascinating, and maybe the biggest single change I’ve undergone in years. Not sure I’m describing it right, but it’s a good thing and good things will come of it.

We spend so much of our lives worrying that the worst might happen, yet when it does, so often it winds up deepening our lives and giving us an appreciation of life that wouldn’t have been possible otherwise. Continue reading When Fears Come True, And Disappear

Closer to Danger, and Less Frightened

Fear is our brain’s way of preparing us for danger in the world around us. But, though we may think of fear and danger as being closely linked, they can actually be wildly out of sync with one another. As David Ropeik has been discussing on his blog at Psychology Today, we often feel a great deal of fear when there is little actual risk  (such as flying commercial), and little fear when there is actually substantial risk (such as smoking or driving on the highway).

In my book, I describe a particularly compelling example of this disjuncture between fear and danger, one that occurred during the Blitz in World War II, when the German Luftwaffe tried to bomb Britain into submission.

Londoners who were subjected to German bombings regularly during the Blitz eventually grew blase. They grew used to the wail of the air-raid sirens, the ritual tramping down into the bomb shelter, the rumbling thuds of distant explosions. The terror of aerial devastation, which prewar theorists had predicted would quickly cow a populace into submission, instead became a commonplace, a part of daily life.  Britons who lived in the suburbs, by contract, became progressively more terrified of German raids.

The difference, I argued (with a nod to Stanley Rachman), is that people living with daily exposure to the terrors of bombing eventually grew used to it through a process called habituation, which requires frequent and regular exposure to a stimulus. Conversely, infrequent or irregular exposure to fear may not lead to habituation at all, but to its opposite: sensitization. Instead of grow smaller, the response to a stimulus grows more intense.

Recently, however, I came across another explanation for this disparity, one which requires neither habituation nor sensitization and in fact can happen almost instantaneously. Continue reading Closer to Danger, and Less Frightened

When to Listen to Your Fears, and When to Ignore Them

In response to an earlier post here on what part of a frightening experience is the most scary, Mark Phelps of Flying magazine has written an interesting article about his own fears — specifically, to the jitters he feels when he’s getting ready to make a flight. As anyone who flies knows, fear is a crucial part of the experience of flying. I think that no other factor leads people to abandon their training, or give up flying after they’ve gotten their license, than the sheer psychic difficulty of constantly having to battle against one’s sense of trepidation. As Phelps acknowledges, our fear is often a useful indicator that we’re about to engage in behavior that might not be in our best interest, and sometimes we just have to listen to it. But if we listen to it too often, we’ll never break through to that state of exhilaration that we can find swooping above the clouds. The key he writes, is to rationally assess the actual dangers involved, asking: what really is the danger here? And then: Continue reading When to Listen to Your Fears, and When to Ignore Them

How a New York Woman Died of Fear

People who have suffered panic attacks — and I’m one — know that fear can be so intense that you feel like you’re going to die. Your pulse races, your heart pounds, you find it hard to breathe. You might even pass out. But you can fear become so intense that it actually kills you?

This past Friday Danielle Goldberg, a 26-year-old Staten Island woman, was riding in her building’s elevator up to her sixth floor apartment just before noon when her neighborhood suffered a blackout. For half an hour, she was trapped inside the small space, in the darkness, alone. In an effort to stifle a growing panic attack she used her cell phone to call her mother, but it was no use. By the time rescue workers freed her half an hour later, she was unconscious. She died in the hospital a short time later. At first glance,  the cause of her death seems clear: pure fright.

But the truth is a bit more complicated. Continue reading How a New York Woman Died of Fear