Is the TSA Fighting Terror, or Abetting It?

This week the ever-excellent aviation blogger (and commercial pilot) Patrick Smith posed the question: why haven’t Americans rebelled against the petty tyranny of the Transportation Safety Administration?

…one of the things that has always baffled and frustrated me is the lack of any organized protest against TSA by the airlines, the media or the traveling public. People complain, roll their eyes and maybe make a wisecrack or two, but there have been few formal calls for agency accountability. Groups like FlyersRights.org never miss a chance to exploit the latest tarmac stranding, but are mostly silent when it comes to the single biggest indignity of the air travel experience: concourse passenger screening.

I’d like to second Smith’s irritation, and go one further: are America’s transportation policies not fighting terrorism, but actually serving its ends?

There’s no question that the government’s intent is good. But as psychologists of fear know all too well, attempts to control fear are prone to what are known as “paradoxical effects.” Trying to quell anxiety can have the opposite result. Continue reading Is the TSA Fighting Terror, or Abetting It?

Readers Write: "How Fear Stopped Time"

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"

I Feel Like I’m Floating on Air

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Last week I got a lesson in piloting a C-Quester submarine in Aruba, a thrilling experience. I was struck by how similar it feels to flying a Zeppelin, which I wrote about for the July issue of Popular Mechanics. In both cases, you’re zooming along in a horizontal plane, while trying to maintain your altitude (or depth) by countering buoyancy effects with vertical thrusters. In both cases, you have to anticipate your correction well before it takes effect — there’s a huge lag time.

And in both cases, you’re bound to have a thrill of a lifetime. If you have a chance to try either one, I’d strongly suggest you take it.

Fat, Drunk, and Broke? Don’t Blame the Caveman

Spare a thought for the most abused demographic in the US today: the Pleistocene hunter-gatherer. These plucky ancestors, who scurried across the earth from two million to 12,000 years ago, have lately taken responsibility and blame for seemingly every aspect of modern life.

Cavemen-bashers would have us believe that because our brains evolved in a world where hunting and gathering were requisite skills, not juggling frequent flier points or angling for a promotion, we’re ill equipped to deal with modern life. We want to be good, but our brains are forever subconsciously pulling us back to our cavemen ways. Marital fidelity? Not in our genes. Peaceful co-existence? Not adaptive for life on the savannah.

Lately, Pleistocene hunter gatherers seem to be getting an especially harsh ragging on behalf of the obesity epidemic. If the last time you stepped on your bathroom scale it broke, the common wisdom seems to be, just blame the atlatl-wielders.

In the May/June issue of Psychology Today, Leyla Muedin argues in “The Way We Were” (p. 51) that “our bodies are best adapted to what our Paleolithic ancestors ate.” Back in the good old days, she writes, “over the course of a year, you might eat 100 different types of fruit and vegetables… but you wouldn’t drink any milk or consume any dairy products.” She quotes S. Boyd Easton, an anthropologist at Emory University,who wrote in a recent editorial in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition that “the dietary and lifestyle difference between then and now account for most of our chronic diseases and cancer.”

How is this absurd? Let me count the ways. Continue reading Fat, Drunk, and Broke? Don’t Blame the Caveman

What Makes Sports Fans Happiest: Fear and Despair

Everyone knows that the US Soccer team is all but certain to go down in flames sometime between now and the finals of the FIFA World Cup on July 11. And for American fans, that could be wonderful thing, researchers say.

A recent study by a team at Ohio State University looked at 113 college football fans  as they watched a game between their school’s team and that of an arch rival. The subjects were asked to watch a particularly crucial game and then log their emotional state during commercial breaks. They also logged  their perception of their teams’ chance of victory. It turned out that fans who thought the game was the most enjoyable were those who were convinced at some point during the game that their team would lose – but then watched as the team turned around and managed to win. From the press release:

The results showed how important negative emotions were to enjoyment of the game.  “When people think about entertainment in general, they think it has to be fun and pleasurable.  But enjoyment doesn’t always mean positive emotions,” [said study co-author Prabu] David. “Sometimes enjoyment is derived by having the negative emotion, and then juxtaposing that with the positive emotion.”

… “You need the negative emotions of thinking your team might lose to get you in an excited, nervous state,” [study co-author Silvia] Knobloch Westerwick said. “If your team wins, all that negative tension is suddenly converted to positive energy, which will put you in a euphoric state.”

In a sense this study (which seems to me far from rigorous) offers up a pretty unsurprising conclusion: ask any screenwriter about how to craft a gripping plotline, and they’ll tell you that the hero must find herself in the grip of a seemingly inextricable problem at the end of Act Two.

But this study’s results also serve as a reminder of a larger, and very important point: that the pursuit of unalloyed pleasure is a doomed undertaking. Continue reading What Makes Sports Fans Happiest: Fear and Despair

Coming Up for Air

I’m heading home this afternoon from Aruba, where I spent the last two days diving in the C-Quester 3, the first operational sub built by the Dutch company UBoat Worx. It’s really a blast! Last night we motored over in it from the marina to a seaside restaurant, where we had dinner and enjoyed the sunset. I’ll be posting more about this in the future, including some cool video that we shot.

Can You Lose Weight By Thinking Really Hard?

The human brain is a gas-guzzler of an organ, accounting for some 20 percent of  the body’s total metabolic activity. The high cost of keeping a big brain functioning is presumed by many to be the reason why our big noggins took so long to evolve, and why no other organism has bothered to cram such a big brain in such a relatively small body.

What was a hurdle in evolutionary terms could, however, prove to be a blessing for the obesity-challenged. Because if normal everyday thinking burns up 20 percent of  our total calories, just imagine how thinking really hard — doing math homework, say, or trying to figure out the plot of Lost — could melt the pounds away! Right? Continue reading Can You Lose Weight By Thinking Really Hard?

Abby Sunderland and Tragedy’s Perverse Incentive

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

The Ultimate Daredevil’s Guide to Conquering Fear

No one alive has done more hair-raising crazy stunts than Travis Pastrana. The first person to ever pull a double-backflip on a motorcycle, he has also jumped out of an airplane without a parachute (video here) and back-flipped a child’s Big Wheel off a huge jump called a megaramp (video here). But contrary to common belief, Pastrana is not immune to fear — in fact, almost every night he wakes up in the grip of night terrors. So how does he keep cool when his life is on the line? Here are some tips.

Be Prepared. “The scariest thing for me is when I go into something unprepared. When I jumped a Big Wheel on the megaramp, that was scary. I didn’t know if it was going to blow up on the takeoff. It’s not made to be going 55 mph and withstanding four g’s.”

Use Your Fear. “When I’m not nervous, I’m not 100 percent focused on something. When I jumped out of the plane without a parachute, the part that scared me the most was that I wasn’t scared enough. I had to deliberately re-set my mind: ‘Okay, Travis, you have the rest of your life to find those other jumpers and make this work.’”

Trust Your Crew. “The hardest part about putting the jump together was finding people that were a) good enough and b) willing to risk being involved with a stunt like this. But once I found a good crew, we all trusted each other. The guys that I was jumping with had 10,000 jumps apiece.”

Commit Yourself. “Before I did the double backflip, I was scared all day. I didn’t know if I would decide to do it or not. And then the second I was on the jump, and I knew that I was going to do it, the fear just went away. It was like, ‘Well, okay, it’s inevitably going to happen — let’s try to make it work.’”

Pastrana shared these tips with me as I was interviewing him for an article in Red Bulletin, which you can check out here.

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The Science of Sports: Is There Such a Thing as a Clutch Performer?

In Slate today, writer Alan Siegal poses the burning question:  “Is Kobe Bryant really the best clutch player in the NBA?” That is to say, does Bryant possess that ineffable quality, so highly prized among athletes, of being able to respond to the highest degree of pressure by pulling out the stops and performing at an even higher level of performance than usual? Which, as Siegel acknowledges, raises a corollary question: does such a quality even exist? A growing consensus among sports statisticians is that the answer is no, as attempts to identify clutch players based on their average performance under certain high-stress conditions (the last shot of a game, say) have so far come to naught. Writes Siegal,

The topic of “clutch” is a contentious one in sports. In baseball, the debate over clutch hitting has raged for decades, with sabermetricians arguing there’s no evidence it’s an actual skill and wizened baseball men claiming they’ve seen it with their own two eyes. In basketball, a sport that’s been slower to embrace modern statistics, the fight over clutchness is in its relative infancy. Perhaps Kobe Bryant, then, will become the NBA’s Derek Jeter: a player whom the media and the fans perceive as clutch despite a lack of statistical evidence to prove the case.

The piece goes on to describe various attempts to identify various statistical grapplings with the data before coming to the conclusion that, no, Bryant is not a masterful performer in the clutch, if indeed anyone is. But as the saying goes, an absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. So allow me to address the topic from a different perspective: is clutch performance biologically plausible? That is, could the human brain could be capable of responding to intense pressure by performing outstandingly? Continue reading The Science of Sports: Is There Such a Thing as a Clutch Performer?