Deep Survival: who lives, who dies, and why

whitecoast

The Living Force
FOTCM Member
Hello everyone, I wanted to share a riveting book a family member of mine lent me back around Christmas. It's called Deep Survival, by Laurence Gonzales. It’s a book that discusses the philosophy and psychology of survival in either a wilderness or in an urban setting amid disasters and catastrophes. Essentially, the author writes a lot about what could only be called a Survival Personality. This is a person with certain psychological traits that greatly improve their survival rate, even in environments where much more experienced individuals can perish.

The book is divided into two parts. Part one is Why Accidents Happen. Part two is all about Survival. Each section is chock-full of case studies of piloting, rafting, camping, mountain climbing, and boating accidents, and why some people survive and not others. All the anecdotes are actually some of my favorite parts of the book itself, since they’re very vividly crafted and sketch very concise pictures of the types of situations people often face in wilderness or survival emergencies.

He talks in general about why accidents happen. The most spectacular disasters are attributed to critical failures in complex systems, and how even safety features can become liabilities when the conditions change. Discussion of safety features can in themselves even encourage faith in a flawed mental model of the environment. Due to the inherently unstable system mountains are, there will always be a certain number of people who die mountain climbing – simply as a fact of statistics.

He goes into a lot of cognitive psychology work some readers on this forum will be familiar with. Things like normalcy bias and splitting are both mentioned in some of the literature on here. One thing I found kind of interesting was the psychology of getting lost, which is a state when we cannot make our mental maps/constructs of the world conform to reality. People can succumb to what’s been called “woods shock”, which leads to otherwise well-trained individuals to do inexplicable things like leave behind backpacks, tear off clothes, abandon rifles, etc. David Paulides remarked on the same type of behavior in his Missing 411 series.

Stage 1 of getting lost is denial, as you press on trying to make your physical reality fit your flawed mental map. Stage 2 is when you realize you’re lost you begin to panic at stage 3 and make all kinds of irrational decisions that feel like you’re doing something productive. Then when you’ve exhausted yourself you try and re-orient yourself to the mental map, which doesn’t work because you’ve gone and confused yourself further during the panic phase. Stage 5 is resignation and psychological deterioration.

One of the biggest keys was the notion of “mental mapping” of our implicit learning in particular environments is only ever suited for those conditions in which we learn them. This is why most people underestimate the risk of avalanches – because unless you physically witness a mountain coming apart before your eyes, your instinct can almost not simply believe it. Mental maps contain emotional content as well. Marines who survive all manner of hazards in their training can succumb to simpler situations, because they instinctively learn that to require rescue is to fail as a marine; so they reactively seek out help less likely, even though it can mean life or death. It’s the same reason co-pilots do not question pilots, or vice versa, even when someone thinks something may be wrong.

One of the coolest things I learned from this book that apparently the age group with the highest survival rates in some cases is children age 4-6, while the group with the lowest survival rates is children 7-12. Young children are often good survivors because they are in touch with their essence and instinct, and are more likely to do things like crawl into a tree trunk when they’re feeling cold or take it easy so as not to become fatigued. They stay comfortable, which seems to be important in the wilderness. They also are incapable of feeling “lost” psychologically, since they do not produce or follow detailed mental maps of the world. Because of that they never enter the panic stage.

Children who are older (7-12) start to acquire the more sophisticated mental mapping capabilities, while losing some of their instinctive survival abilities due to the development of personality. So they lose some intuitive knowledge of survival while having a fully functional ability to panic and lose their cool. It reminds of what G said in ISOTM that people who grow up in places where greater physical danger is tend to be much closer to their essences. I think this could be because as children they retain those intuitive survival abilities, while all of that gets suppressed due to the development of education in environments of low ambient threat (like say in a town or city).

In the second section, about Survival, Gonzales cites a whole bunch of traits that enable people to survive better.One of the keys was to surrender to a situation without succumbing to it. This is does not mean giving up, it means accepting your fate while doing everything in your power to help yourself and your situation. Strong shades of non-attachment to results can be found. People marooned at sea who kept routines, kept journals, etc. all helped keep in them a sense of purpose. Expressing gratitude for every little thing that goes your way helps prevent the nihilistic despair that can overwhelm some victims of disasters.

One major emotional element that helped people pull through was empathy and thinking about loved ones, even if it was newly forged. One story related how a man and a woman who ended up on a life raft in shark-infested waters with 3 others who were either badly injured or non-survivor material (one tried to peel off a raft seal out of boredom, for example). They made a pact to be awake while the other slept, to make sure the 3 others didn’t make any fatal mistakes. Their empathy and care for each other as survivor personalities helped to protect them, and become less dragged down by the psychological deterioration. One of the other 3 ended up dying, and the last 2 ended up having full-blown hallucinations in which they swam away from the raft (to get something from the truck). So empathy is important, but so was psychologically hardening yourself against those elements which can jeopardize your own psychological well-being.

Toward the end of the book he outlines the main traits he sees as part of a survivor mentality, which I’ll try to sum up.

1. Perceive, then believe. This is a reference to our tendency to make reality conform to our mental model, instead of the other way around.

2. Stay calm. (Use humor and fear to focus). In the initial crisis, survivors make use of fear without being ruled by it. They understand on a deep level about keeping cool and protecting the psyche against too much emotion.

3. Get organized; set up small, manageable tasks. Survivors quickly develop routines and institute discipline. Survivors often report their experience of being two people at once, one emotion and one reason. This partition helps keep a lid on all the anxiety and panic that can sometimes arise during a crisis.

4. Take correct, decisive action. Survivors know how to take rational risks to save themselves and others. They retain this type of judgement in spite of the challenging situations around them.

5. Celebrate all your successes, no matter how small. This helps relief some stress and maintain motivation hour-to-hour.

6. Count your blessings. Be grateful you’re alive. Pretty self-explanatory.

7. Play. Sing, play mind games, recite poetry, count anything, tell stories about the environment. One story in the book recounts how a wilderness guide managed never to get lost because he maintained narratives of the travel in his head (that bend in the road is where I showed you the interesting mushrooms; we took a left at the pond that had some frogs in it, which liked the south-facing hill it was on due to the sun). This is actually a very ancient mnemonic technique that can be found embedded in many regional myths and legends.

One of the things I liked about the book was that one of the keys to the survival from the very start is to see reality for what it is, both on a factual and an emotional level. There’s the element of remembering oneself that not only helps us find the proper relation between our own faculties and functions, but the proper relationship between ourselves and others in our predicament, and the relationship between ourselves and the environment we find ourselves in. Mechanical behavior shuts down our perception of reality thoroughly. I also liked how the author emphasized in an indirect way the spiritual dimension of survival, and how it takes all of your heart and soul to make it through a difficult situation. I find it fascinating how work-related concepts arise naturally in the context of survival, and how falling asleep seems to be the biproduct of low-risk environments which don't really require all of our essence and strength to survive in. Much to think about for me. :)


You can find some reviews of the book on amazon here:
_http://www.amazon.com/Deep-Survival-Who-Lives-Dies/product-reviews/0393326152/ref=cm_rdp_hist_hdr_cm_cr_acr_txt?ie=UTF8&showViewpoints=1
 
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