AUDIO INTERVIEW: SURVIVAL EXPERT Author  Laurence Gonzales shares his survival insights in an audio interview. Download the audio interview >>

We have the capacity to be thinking creatures. Yet we scarcely try, despite the fact that everything we might love and enjoy as well as every pain we might avoid is decided by how well we learn to use that ability. Or as Gregory Berns, Ph.D., a professor of psychiatry and behavioral science at Emory University, wrote: "People who seek out information about the world get more goodies." When I was in survival school, I was taught the acronym STOP for Stop, Think, Observe, Plan. That's what smart people do when trouble comes. If you don't do that, your behavior will be whatever you've practiced. Most of us are practicing all the time without even recognizing it. We may be rehearsing our own death.

Dave Grossman describes in his book On Combat how one police officer had trained himself to snatch a pistol from an assailant's hand. During practice, he'd grab the gun, then give it back and try it again. One day, facing a real assailant, he snatched the gun out of a criminal's hand, taking him completely by surprise. Then he handed it back. (Luckily, he shot the criminal.) However reasonable and thoughtful we may seem to be, our intellectual powers grow weakest just when we need them most. One of the most useful things I learned in survival school was not part of the lesson plan at all. It came from watching my instructor. I was eager to blaze through the woods and prove I could find my way with map and compass. My instructor, however, seemed to be stuck in slow motion. He ambled along, looking at flowers, and was in no hurry to complete our plan. After some days of this, I realized what he was doing: He was slowing down and paying attention. He was allowing himself to have second thoughts, because first thoughts are no thoughts at all. They're automated actions. This practice of his—which I had also observed in fighter pilots—makes all the difference in the world when confronting the models we create that lead to automated (unthinking) action.

I've worked with wildland firefighters a good deal over the years, and recently I heard of one captain who makes a habit of setting his watch alarm to go off once an hour while he's on a fire. When it goes off, he stops to look around and question what he's doing, what he's missing, what he ought to notice. If he's thirsty, he stops his crew and makes them drink water, because dehydration is often the first step in setting us up: It impairs judgment and can allow other factors to organize themselves into an accident. As Frank R. Wilson, M.D., a neurologist, puts it, "There is not and cannot be anything called intelligence, independent of the behavior of the entire organism, or of its entire and exclusive personal history of interactions with the world." Brain and body are not two things. They are one. And what we call our "self" is neither of those. It is, rather, a process shaped by our experience of touching the world. The emotional system with all its mental models does not come already assembled. We create it through our experience of responding to the world. Most of us do that construction work haphazardly, and then we're sometimes surprised by our own behavior.

At every step, we should strive to slow down and examine what we are really doing. And to become believers: Yes, I tell myself. It really can happen to me. It's out there waiting for me now. It will come unannounced. Out of a fog. And chances are good that I won't even know what it looks like when it comes. Dozens of people have fallen to their deaths off the rim of the Grand Canyon—nearly 20 percent of them while taking or posing for a photo. Their model of what they're actually doing could not be further from reality.

Continue reading on the next page >>

Survival Intro >>

Page 2 - The Darwin of Dumb >>

Page 3 -  When Mental Models Go Wrong >>

Page 4 - The Trouble With Success >>

Page 5 - Learning How to S.T.O.P. >>

Page 6 - Living Mindfully >>

Page 7 - The Survivor: Rulon Gardner >>









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