Category: Extreme Fear

At first, Gerry and Margarita Licon only saw the benefits of doing business on the US-Mexico border. Co-founders of Licon Engineering, a construction management and engineering services company, the couple expanded their business from two employees to 38 in their first seven years in business, and took their revenues to more than $5 million. It seemed like they had the best of both worlds. From their headquarters in El Paso, Texas, they had access to US government contracts with set-asides for minorities and small businesses. Across the border in Ciudad Juarez, they could tap low labor costs and an ever-growing customer base in the manufacturing sector.

Business was so good that they weren’t particularly concerned when drug-gang warfare sent the murder rate in Juarez skyrocketing. By early 2008, six or seven people a day were being killed. Gunmen riddled a pickup truck with 31 bullets, killing the driver and her 9-year-old girl passenger. A man kidnaped from his front yard in El Paso turned up dismembered in Juarez.  Seventeen patients in a drug rehab center were lined up agains the wall and shot to death. The scale of the slaughter led Time magazine to dub Juarez “The Most Dangerous City in the Americas.”

Like many living and working in the border region, the Licons still didn’t think at this point that the crime wave posed a direct threat to them personally. The killings seemed to be strictly limited to those involved in the drug trade. But as the violence escalated, the criminality expanded. Kidnaping and extortion also became endemic.

And on an afternoon in March 2008, Gerry Licon experienced the dark side of Juarez for himself. Continue reading Murder and Profit in Mexico’s Most Dangerous City

The new issue of The Brain, Discover magazine’s newsstand special, is now out, and with it an excerpt from Extreme Fear in which I discuss Sue Yellowtail’s struggle with a mountain lion in a remote canyon in southwestern Colorado:

At 25, Sue Yellowtail was just a few years out of college, working for the Ute Indian tribe as a water quality specialist. Her job was to travel through remote areas of the reservation, collecting samples from the streams, creeks, and rivers. She spent her days criss-crossing remote backcountry, territory closed to visitors, and rarely traveled even by locals. It’s the kind of place where, if you got in trouble, you were on your own.

On a clear, cold morning in late December Yellowtail pulled her pickup over to the side of the little-traveled dirt double-track, a few yards from a simple truss bridge that spanned the creek. As she collected her gear she heard a high-pitched scream. Probably a coyote killing a rabbit, she thought. She clambered down two steep embankments to the water’s edge. Wading to the far side of the creek, she stooped to stretch her tape measure the width of the flow. Just then she heard a rustling and looked up. At the top of the bank not 30 feet away, stood a mountain lion. Tawny against the brown leaves of the riverbank brush, the animal was almost perfectly camouflaged. It stared down at her, motionless.

She stood stock still.

As I go on to explain, Yellowtail had entered the first instinctual fear-response state, the condition of freezing known as attentive immobility. But her trial had just begun. Within the next 15 minutes, she would pass through the three other distinct forms of panic. Continue reading In an Encounter with a Cougar, Four Different Ways to Panic

According to Google Translate, that’s German for “The book is in German.” By which I mean that I just learned that the German edition of Extreme Fear will be on shelves April 26. Unglaublich!

Interestingly, the Amazon page indicates that book was translated “from the American” by Stefanie Schaeffler. Hopefully the original is intelligible to English-speakers as well.

Few things are as bafflingly tragic as the mass death that can occur when a crowd of people becomes overcome by panic and stampedes within a confined space. As I’ve written earlier, in many cases of mass panic individual members of a crowd do not themselves act irrationally. However, in the case of a stampede the crowd truly seems to leave its senses, becoming a heaving mass in which rational behavior by an individual becomes impossible. The result can be truly horrific — in some cases, over 1,000 people have died in the ensuing crush.

Compounding the awfulness is the fact that in many cases the stampede is triggered by no actual danger. It seems that, in certain settings, a crowd that grows to a critical density reaches a critical state at which the slightest twitch is sufficient to send it into a stampede — like a supercooled drop of water that just needs the tiniest seed to instantly freeze.

The toll in human lives is immense: in the past decade there have been over 100 stampede events resulting in mass fatalities.  Yet there has been surprisingly little study has been done into the phenomenon. I was delighted, then, to learn via @bengoldacre of an absolutely fascinating new paper from Ed Hsu and colleagues at Johns Hopkins:  “Epidemiological Characteristics of Human Stampedes.” I emailed Dr. Hsu and he sent me copies of the paper, along with another, “Human Stampedes: A Systematic Review Historical and Peer-Reviewed Sources,” that further elaborated his team’s findings.

The papers are chockablock with intriguing findings, but here are some of the highlights: Continue reading How a Peaceful Crowd Turns Into a Lethal Stampede

At first, it sounded like a straightforward case of a faulty product in need of a recall. Last summer, Toyota “‘became aware of rare cases where the accelerator pedal did not return to its idle position as swiftly as it ideally should.” It started changing the way it produced the pedals in question. Then, when it realized that further design issues could cause problems, it recalled 4.2 million vehicles. But the automaker’s problems didn’t go away. Within months, it realized that another problem with the pedals’ design could cause them to stick, and so started a recall of another 2.4 million vehicles.

Here’s where things began to get strange. Even as Toyota moved to correct problems with its accelerators, reports of malfunctions skyrocketed. Continue reading Do Toyota Drivers Suffer From Faulty Brakes, or Errant Panic Circuitry?

An uncanny thing about life-or-death crises is how often those in them don’t feel fear. Time and again, I’ve heard from people who’ve had a close brush with death and didn’t experience any emotion at all. In the moment, they felt calm and focused. Everything seemed crystal clear. They saw what they needed to do and they did it. Only afterward, when they found themselves in a place of safety, did they become overwhelmed with emotion.

In the book I tell the story of Johan Otter, who was hiking in Glacier National Park with his daughter when they were attacked by a grizzly. Stepping between the bear and his child, he fought it off as best he could until he felt the animal’s massive jaws locked on his head. “I felt a tooth going into my skull and I thought, ‘This is going to be it.’” Otter says. Continue reading A Strange Calm in a Sea of Danger

One of the strangest side-effects of intense fear is time dilation, the apparent slowing-down of time. It’s a common trope in movies and TV shows, like the memorable scene from The Matrix in which time slows down so dramatically that bullets fired at the hero seem to move at a walking pace. In real life, our perceptions aren’t keyed up quite that dramatically, but survivors of life-and-death situations often report that things seem to take longer to happen, objects  fall more slowly, and they’re capable of complex thoughts in what would normally be the blink of an eye.

Now a research team from Israel reports that not only does time slow down, but that it slows down more for some than for others. Anxious people, they found, experience greater time dilation in response to the same threat stimuli.

An intriguing result, and one that raises a more fundamental question: how, exactly, does the brain carry out this remarkable feat? Continue reading How the Brain Stops Time

Few animals arouse as much passion, both for and against, as the wolf. Spend some time in ranching country and you’ll quickly find that many consider the animal not only economically costly but downright evil. Conservationists, on the other hand, marvel at the complex social lives and admirable adaptability of a creature closely related to our beloved pet dogs. One thing both sides agreed on was that wolves posed no real threat to human beings, at least in North America. Since the earliest days of European colonization, there have been no recorded killings of people by wild wolves on the continent. (Domesticated wolves are another matter.) Until now. According to a report in the Huffington Post, wolves in southern Alaska appear to have ended their streak of good behavior towards us humans:

Wolves likely killed a teacher jogging alone along a rural Alaska village road, public safety officials said Thursday. The Alaska State Medical Examiner listed “multiple injuries due to animal mauling” as the cause of death for Candice Berner, 32, a special education teacher from Pennsylvania who began working in Alaska in August. Her body was found off the road a mile outside the village of Chignik Lake on the Alaska Peninsula, which is about 474 miles southwest of Anchorage.

I suspect that how you take this news will depend entirely on how you viewed wolves beforehand. For wolf-haters, it’s yet more evidence of their nastiness. For wolf-lovers, a lone data point that by itself does little to change our overall perspective on wolves and their behavior. For everyone, though, a reminder that nature must be treated with respect, and that wild animals have a knack for upsetting our received notions of how they should act.

South African student parachutist Lareece Butler was on a training jump on Monday when, according to the UK Telegraph, her chute got tangled and she plummeted to earth at high speed. She wound up with a concussion, a broken leg, and a busted pelvis. Doctors called her survival “a miracle.” That’s bad enough, but in the aftermath the woman’s aunt told the paper that Butler hadn’t jumped out of the plane at all. She’d been pushed. Continue reading "I Didn’t Jump, I Was Pushed"

Via Not Exactly Rocket Science: The Times of London has a fascinating, if flawed, piece investigating the different patterns of behavior exhibited by passengers aboard the Titanic and those aboard the Lusitania, which sank three years later.

When the Titanic hit an iceberg four days into her maiden voyage to New York, on April 14, 1912, the maritime maxim of “women and children first” was famously obeyed. Young men aged between 16 and 35 were the least likely to be among the 706 survivors, while women and children were the most likely to be saved. A different story played out, however, when the Lusitania was torpedoed by a German U-boat off Ireland on May 7, 1915. Then, the majority of the survivors were young men and women — fit people in their prime who could fight their way on to the lifeboats.

What was the crucial difference between the two sinkings? According to Bruno Frey and his team at the University of Zurich, it all came down to time. Continue reading Sinking Ships: Why Some Passengers Panic, Some Don’t