They remember in great detail words or images that would not normally be significant. It’s not unusual for people to describe this period as having time almost stand still. In the deliberation phase the mind begins to put together possible courses of action. Still, many assessed the risk and determined it was better to stay put than to flee. Often it took someone shouting or speaking in a rude or demanding voice to spur people into action. But because the event is so unlike anything ever experienced before, the brain has trouble putting the situation into perspective.įrom her interviews with 9/11 survivors she learned that even after hearing what had actually happened in the Twin Towers and that there was a need to get out quickly, many workers continued to talk on the telephone, put away items on their desks, gather personal effects and mill about in casual conversation. During this stage the brain is processing information, delaying its decision-making process and assessing the risk. The steps are denial, deliberation and decision.ĭuring the denial stage, it’s not unusual for people to continue performing mundane tasks while chaos reins around them. Her research showed that the human mind goes through three basic steps when confronted with a crisis. Whether they froze, panicked or led, many people were, in retrospect, surprised by their actions. Ripley determined that most people did not respond the way they thought they would. What she learned could help you understand your response should you ever be confronted with a disaster situation. She interviews the survivors to learn how they made it out, the rescuers to learn how the victims were responding, and the heroes to learn what made them different. In this book she retraces some of history’s biggest calamities-from the 1917 explosion of the munitions ship Mont Blanc, to plane crashes, calamitous fires, the 9/11 World Trade Center attacks, hostage situations and mass shootings-and studies people’s responses in an effort to find out why some survive the seemingly unsurvivable while others perish in situations where survival should have been assured.
Ripley, an award-winning journalist for Time magazine, has covered some the world’s biggest disasters over the course of her career. That’s the conclusion of Amanda Ripley’s The Unthinkable, which has a subtitle: Who Survives When Disaster Strikes-And Why? And while practice or preparation can help us to respond properly, we may have little actual control over what we do in a disaster.
And we certainly hope that we would never just freeze, like a deer caught in the headlights-or worse, panic.īut how we respond to crisis may be hardwired into our brain’s circuitry long before we’re confronted with a disaster situation. Each of us secretly hopes that, should we find ourselves facing a disaster, we would respond nobly if not heroically.
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