December 31, 2013 • 33 mins
Normalcy Bias and Psychogenic Death: Why do some people continue on with their normal lives when reality comes crashing down on them? Why don't they run for cover or try to jump ship? Find out in this episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind.
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey you welcome to Stuff of all
your Mind. My name is Robert Lamp and I'm Julie Douglas. Julie.
Let's let's let's put ourselves in in a situation here. Okay,
all right, we're in the podcast chamber right now, it's you,
(00:25):
it's me, it's no man in the all the complex
equipment that records the sounds that come out of our mouth.
And then there's a window covered up by curtain. Now
imagine suddenly the curtain blows out and and we're also
suddenly we're being sucked out the window as if this
is a pressurized aircraft cabin. I don't know why that
would happen, but let's assume there's like a you know,
(00:45):
a sharknado on the other side. Is King Kong on
the other side of this way though, King Kong and
a sharknado most likely? Okay, yeah, all right, got it
in my head. Go on, Okay, So how do we react?
How do we react to look to set sudden interruption
of normal life? Normalcy is quite literally going out the window,
and suddenly life has become this just complete struggle for
(01:09):
survival and every second counts. Okay, well, I think we
have three options here. One is that you could just
shriek and freak out right and not really do yourself
any sort of service here, always a good option, Okay.
The second thing is you could just stare, you know,
sort of into oblivion as King Kong takes you into
(01:30):
his clutches and stuffs you into his mouth. Just stare
and not do anything. Okay, Well, at least I'm not
gonna look foolish. Okay. The third thing is you can
try to save yourself. You could try to flee from
the situation in some way as you're getting sucked out,
maybe you hold onto something that the window casing, and
you try to crawl back into the room and then
escape through the emergency exits. And what's interesting is when
(01:52):
you when you think of these three possibilities. Yes, and
when we can all put we all certainly will go
through these scenarios in our own head. Maybe not the
King Sharknado combination one, but we we inevitably think about
what am I gonna do in disaster strikes, and we
imagine ourselves typically going through that to survivalist instinct we
imagine ourselves doing the thing that logically would need to
be done to survive. But does it shake out that way?
(02:15):
I mean it does in the movies. Well, all of
us think, of course, we would hold onto the window
frame and we would somehow escape the clutches of King
Kong and Sharknado. But this is according to Esther ingliss Arkel,
she's writing for I oh nine. She says about seventy
percent of people in a disaster exhibit this sort of
unusual Ladi da behavior, just staring into a blivion ten
(02:39):
to fent, freak out in another ten to fent, react
to the situation accordingly, efficiently, and orderly, and they do
the thing they're supposed to do so, in other words,
they get the hell out of dodge. And that is
crazy because you just you we're programmed, especially by movies
and disaster movies, to to to not see things breaking
down along along the percentage lines like that. The image
(03:01):
that always comes back to me is the original Blob movie,
The Blob Steve McQueen. There's a scene where the Blob
has made its way. You know, it's rather grown at
this point. You know, the blob right big jelly creature
that dissolves people, makes its way into a movie theater,
crowded movie theater, and then all hell breaks loose and
there's this wonderful scene of everyone just rushing out of
that movie theater. And then there's a fabulous scene after that,
(03:23):
the blob oozing out of the theater doors and the
crowd just running in front of it like everybody knows
what's up. It's all right, there's a there's a blob.
We're all going to freak out, We're all gonna run,
and you can you can view that freaking out and
running as you know that as either just completely freaking
out and making a run for or doing the logical thing.
But either way, it doesn't line up with these percentage
(03:45):
points that we're looking at, because seventy of them would
be just setting there being are we supposed to? This
is being the movies over? Should I sit there? Hey? Hey,
you do you know if the movie is over, we're
gonna get a refund on this. And meanwhile, you do
just just get your flesh dissolved off of you by
a monster. All right, Well, let me give you a
real life example of that. That's example, well one that
actually happened for real, the not on a film. Actually,
(04:08):
it's one of the best known examples of this sort
of emergency situation in which people gravitate towards what is
called a normalcy bias. And we'll talk more about that
in a moment, but in this scenario, we're talking about
two planes that collided on a runway in the Canary
Islands nine and one of the survivors, Paul Heck, he
grabbed his unresponsive wife who just sat there, you know,
(04:31):
sort of saying what what's going on? And what they
did is they got, of course the hell out of
dodge and on the way is they are passing other passengers,
they're noticing people who are just sitting there, staring straight ahead,
not doing anything. They're uninjured people. And what happened is
that they only had sixty seconds to leave that plane
(04:51):
before it was engulfed in flames. And it was a huge,
huge fatality for that flight. A lot of people did
not get out of it. It and so a lot
of emergency management personnel look at that case is why
why do those people who are uninjured sit on that
plane and do nothing? Is this um because they were unprepared?
(05:12):
Is this some sort of instinct in humans or is
there something else going on here? And that's what we're
really going to try to get at the heart of today. Yeah,
so a normal cy bias is what it sounds like.
It's a bias towards thinking everything's okay, minimizing with the
actual risk, and thinking must not be that big of
a deal. We've all had this, uh, certainly as you
(05:32):
just observe your environment around us. I mean there are
times where you freak out and you say, oh, the
shady person on the street, I better up to no good.
But then a little reason creeps in and you're like, well, there,
it's probably okay. I'm going to air on the side
of just assuming everything is completely normal. Yeah. I mean,
we really sometimes underestimate things, and we'll talk more about
why we do that, but I wanted to say that
(05:53):
According to a National Institute of Standards and Technology study,
which was drawn from the interviews with nearly nine dred
survive verse of nine eleven, they said that the people
who made it out of the World Trade Center waited
an average of six minutes before leaving their desks. So
what we're talking about here is this idea that you
are looking at the odds, You're plane the odds because really,
(06:15):
on a day to day basis, we don't have really
that many, um real dangers in front of us, and
we have imagined dangers that we do with all the time.
So it's like a matter of sort of suessing those out. Well. Like,
I think about this every time I board a plane,
because on one hand, I have every disaster movie I've
ever seen, you know, plane rex happening all the time,
and those because the story of someone getting on an
(06:37):
airplane is generally only interesting if there's a creature on
the wing of the plane where it crashes into a mountain.
Then people have to eat each other. I mean, you
need to drum. But then I start breaking it down
and I think, I think of I think of football,
which I almost never do, but I think, how many
times have I ever heard on the news, Oh, an
entire football team was lost in a plane crash today,
(06:58):
or they can't have this football game because half the
team went down. Um. You know cases like this that
remind me that, hey, these are people that fly around
all the time, Um, why do I not hear of them?
Parash it? Yeah, I mean that takes an enormous amount
of mental energy in the first place for some of
us to board that plane and convince ourselves that it's
a good idea to get into this this metal hole
(07:19):
that's just flinging itself through time and space, and and
that it's going to all turn out okay. Right. In
my theory about the seats, I think the reason that
the seats are so uncomfortable and seemed to be designed
to to to make you uncomfortable is so that you
end up focusing on the immediate discomfort of having to
cram yourself into that small space and deal with all
(07:40):
these people around you, rather than the actual uh potential
of crashing into a mountain. Right. So you have a
couple of different elements going on there. You have all
this this uh, the stories that you've told yourself that
allows you to get on the plane in the first place.
You have distraction, and then when a real emergency happens,
you have something called milling, which is part of that
playing the odds process, right, because milling is this idea
(08:01):
that people will check in with one another before taking action, saying,
is this really a dangerous situation? Are we okay? Did
you did you hear something is that. Does that the
engine sound weird to you? Did you see that creature
on the wing of the plane, because I'm not sure
that's real. Uh. And what's interesting about this this million
is that we're not On one hand, it is, yes,
(08:21):
an attempt to get the best information. You don't want
to jump to conclusions, and you you want to make
sure you get the best possible information from a few
different people. But on the other hand, you also want
to get specific information. You you keep you want to
keep asking the question, do you get the answer that
feels right, the answer that feeds more comforting. You want
somebody to tell you, Oh, it's no big deal. Engines
(08:42):
make that kind of noise. The creatures live on the
wing of the plane. It's just how it works. Here's
a kind of a rote example. But if you've ever
been um in an area where there was a tornado warning,
have you ever called someone up and said, Hey, what's
the weather like over there? Or I mean, have you
ever called up a you know, a friend or a
family member and said, I like, tornado is coming my way.
I'm I'm terrified of tornadoes, So I if I have
(09:04):
any reason to believe they're in the area. Then I well,
I head to the basement if there's a basement, and
if not, I guess I just freeze up and wait
for death. So but you batten down the hatches, right, Yeah,
I know, not to go look out the window because
it could blast in on me and kill me. Well,
from that National Institute of Standards and Technology study, another
finding was that on none elevidently, seventy of survivors spoke
(09:27):
with other people before trying to leave. The study shows
so again it's this Milling idea that sometimes it's not
just sitting there in disbelief in doing nothing. Sometimes it's
just trying to collect data, even in the face of
really significant data in front of you, saying this is
an extraordinary situation. You should do something about it. Now. Yeah.
(09:47):
I mean we're social animals, you know, so it makes
sense that we would reach out for these answers. Um
And you see this all the time with with other
threats to less concrete threats where people end up just
going and go online and to find out let me
feed this fear or let me put out put out
the fires of this fear with enough you know, links
from this website or another. Well, I think that's the
(10:08):
curse of knowledge, right, We all the time are getting
sorts of messages, warning messages, especially here in the United States.
Other countries make fun of us for this, But you
could have a pillow and on that pillow there's going
to be some sort of warning on there that says,
you know, please don't suffocate yourself. Just because of all
the legal battles we have here in the States. Um
(10:29):
So at some point those messages just we they recede
into the background because there are so many of them
to filter through. And again, there are so many real
threats versus perceived threats that the mind does want to
do a little bit of milling to figure out what's what. Yeah, like,
is this is this? Is this a toy that is
actually inappropriate for my child that will actually kill him?
(10:51):
Or is this just one of those situations where it's
a bunch of legal mambo jumbo because you could conceivably
strangle yourself with a toy horse Probably not gonna happen,
But lithium ion batteries keep them away from kids. Okay,
that's my p s A for this podcast, because we
get out juice stuff on them. No, no, it's it's horrible,
(11:12):
for they're tiny, you know, the size of quarter, and
it can do horrible that Actually children can die from
ingesting them to keep them away half. Indeed, all right,
let's take a quick break, and when we get back,
we're going to talk about survival psychology in this idea
of psychogenic death. All right, we're back. So is there
(11:39):
a positive spin here to those just milling about? There
is and and And to understand the positive you have
to remind yourself again, Seventy people of the people are
just setting there, are going, hey, is there something weird?
Is there's something wrong? Ten percent are in action mode,
no what to do? That's ten, and the other ten
to fifteen percent are freaking the heck out. One positive
(12:01):
is that all of those calm people who don't know
what's up and are just asking and milling uh and
and and have that normalusly bias fully engaged, they have
a calming effect on the freakouts. That's true. And some
people would argue that it makes it easier for that
ten to to actually exit even faster, because well, if
(12:21):
nobody's clogging the stairwells or other exit strategies, then you
can zip through there pretty quickly. Yeah. But then that
that's the downside as well, is that those ten percent
who realize what needs to happen, we need to get
off of this plane before we're all consumed by fire,
they could actually have their progress um um impeded by
the individuals who are just setting there asking what's up.
(12:43):
There's saying is there's something wrong, is there's something on
the matter, and they're saying, no, you need to get
out of my way, or and you need to run
for it too, because we have to survive. The ideal
situation is that that ten percent would actually get people
sort of you know, a fire under the artist and say, okay,
I see that person in action, I will now follow suit.
And we have seen this over and over again in
(13:03):
other emergency scenarios, particularly in UM being the world trade
centers and not eleven attacks. So UM I wanted to
just shift a little bit and go into survival psychology
and highlight someone named John Leech. He's a survivor psychologist,
and he says that we need to reframe the question
of survival and quit sort of looking at these examples
(13:26):
of the survivor or not just as they're innately courageous
and they have this robust will to live. But rather
we should be looking at the people who do not
make it and asking the question, why do people die
when they don't need to. Yeah, particularly gets into this
idea of psychogenic death, which is a really snazzy term,
and it refers to a biological process that takes place
(13:49):
as in natural death, but it's triggered at a premature
stage in the person's life, when they're under all this script.
So it's it's kind of this idea of al right,
plane crashes and you have some people who have that
strong will to survive, they're a survivor type, they're gonna
make it. But then there are people who just shut down.
They die within the first first one or one to
three days. And and why is that. It's like, it's
(14:11):
not like they had a grievous injuries, they just shut down. Yeah,
He's got all sorts of examples that he points to.
He talks about light aircraft crash and Sierra Nevada, and
he says that of the three people on board, one
passenger was trapped in the wreckage, so obviously that person
couldn't do anything. Another person had no more than superficial bruising.
But then you have the pilot who had injuries to
(14:32):
his arm, ankle and ribs. And it was actually the
pilot who left the scene and for eleven days he
walked and he hiked through the snow covered mountains before
reaching a road and getting help. Now, after that eleven days,
both the person who had just the superficial wounds and
the person of course who was trapped in the wreckage
(14:53):
they died. But the question was why did the person
with just the minimal wounds perish when he had acts
us to water in food and shelter and could have
made a fire. So does it come down to this like, oh,
you're just prepackaged with courage and know how. Uh No,
According to Leach, it all has to do with the
(15:14):
way that you're processing that information and in some cases
your past experiences. Yeah. And he makes a strong argument
too that it's it's you know, we tend to think
of you know, stress comes our way, threat comes our way,
and it's fight or flight, right, Am I gonna punch
it in the face or turntail and run? And he's
arguing that it's really more than this situation of fight,
flight or freeze? Am I going to punch it in
(15:36):
the face. Am I going to run away from it?
Or am I just gonna stand there and let it
take me? Yeah, Because he's saying that there's a lot
to take in when a trauma happens. He's saying there's
pre impact, impact, recovery, rescue, and post trauma. And he
said that most people have a certain cognitive load that
were that that sort of normalized to our day to
(15:57):
day operations. Right, We've talked about called it to load,
this idea that you have just finite resources of energy
for your brain to operate on. And so he's saying
that if you have this extrnsic condition bringing with it
all sorts of new data in a new environment, it's
gonna crash your brain. So what he said is that
(16:18):
what happens is that in the first three days, particularly
you're looking at the end of this this situation in
Sierra Nevada Mountains, um that those first three days were
really important to the survival of the people who were
still alive, because that's when the executive functions will fritz out,
and when that happens, working memory that stops and you
(16:40):
have you know, at selective attention, disturbed and that becomes
really important because that selective attention is what allows you
to really focus on what matters in Maelstrom. Right, if
you've got you for you're on a plane and smoke
is rolling in and people are screaming or just sitting there,
you still have a situation that is new to you,
(17:01):
and you have to figure out what's important here? Now,
what's happening when people freeze up? What are we talking
about here? Um? Now? Leach refers to this as cognitive paralysis,
So we're talking complete in action. We're talking uh, just
setting there, uh, not not fighting, not flighting, just just
shutting down completely. And he does say that you can
(17:23):
actually recover from this, But what becomes so important is
that if you if you can't find a way out
of that, if you can't find some sort of clarity
in there and get back to your working memory, well
then it's just gonna usually have cognitive dysfunction, which is
probably what happened to the survivor in the plane crash
who for eleven days sat there. Is perhaps after the
(17:46):
third day that his brain just said, forget it, We're
gonna shut this down. And that's what's so interesting about
that idea of psychogenic death that your brain could fold
up in on itself and say, Okay, I'm just gonna
draw the covers here. Yeah. Yeah, And and we and again,
we we all think we're going to be the survivor type.
We all kind of even if we're we have a
(18:07):
pretty realistic understanding of our skills. Like if I crashed
in a plane in the mountain, I'd have to realize, yeah,
I'm probably not going to fashion a bow and arrow
and hunt a grizzly bear or anything like that. But
I like to think that I'll at least have, you know,
the clarity of mind enough to to sort of look
around and realize what my options are. But maybe that's
not gonna be the kicks. Maybe I'm going to freak
(18:28):
the heck out, or I'm just gonna freeze. So the
thing that makes the difference here is really the ability
to call up patterns again, that selective memory, or not
just the working memory, but that selective attention and in
some ways training yourself for for the emergency at hand.
And when you look at Paul Heck and that example
(18:50):
of the two planes colliding, it turns out that he
as a child was involved in a theater fire, and
since then he had always made sure to check exits
no matter where he was. In fact, when he boarded
the plane with his wife, he pointed out to his wife, Hey, look,
these are the emergency exits. And so the idea is
that when the plane crash occurred, he wasn't as um
(19:14):
reliant on trying to piece together new information. In fact,
he could go to that blueprint that he already had
stored in his brain and act quickly. So in some ways,
you can look at the survivors and say, Okay, it
may be that they're prepared to some extent, or they've
had some sort of life experience that has told them
that they should be more aware of their environment and
(19:36):
ready to act on it, and are subconsciously storing away
information that could help them. That's interesting. Yeah, the the
idea of sort of a domestic animal versus a wild
animal suddenly put in a situation of extreme danger. One
has never had to really deal with threats and is
completely overwhelmed by the predator in smits. The other has
always lived in the raw and therefore is more prepared
(19:58):
to act appropriately in the face of danger. Yeah, And
when I was reading about Paul hex account. I thought
this sounds like my dad, and my dad was actually
in special ops in Vietnam, and so in some ways
he has had a lot of the survival training. But
this is a guy my dad who every time he
goes into a hotel will go and look at the
map of the hotel that's pasted on the back of
(20:19):
the door in the hotel room, look at the emergency exits,
and then he will leave the room and count the
number of doors it takes to get the emergency exit.
So he has that information in his mind. And you know,
he didn't train my brother and I to do the
same thing, but in a way, we subconsciously saw how
he was behaving. And both my brother and I, when
(20:40):
we enter a room, most likely we are going to
take the seat that is facing the door so we
can have a bead on the door to exit. And
it's weird way. We've talked about this before, so there
may be something to that. Okay, So in the face
of appropriate training and or real life experience, you're you're
likely to be in a better position to act appropriately
(21:02):
in the face of the threat. Right. It's no guarantee,
but it helps, right, Yeah, case in point. If I
may draw another example from science fiction. Um in the
movie Aliens, the mission there into the colony, it went bad,
and what happened. You had Private Hudson freaked out. He
was definitely in that ten of the freak out, We're
all gonna die game over. You had Lieutenant Gorman. He
(21:24):
was definitely in that se though, where he was just
he you know, he froze up, froze up, just was
was asking questions and was of no use. But then
you had meanwhile, you had Hicks and Ripley. They acted
responsibly and they made it to the end of the movie.
There you go. So all right, now you know we're
focusing on the survivors, which is what we weren't cointd.
We're gonna focus more on and in order to do that,
(21:46):
you really have to look at animals in this reflexive
ability to go into tonic immobility or fantatosis, which is
something that we talked about last week. Yeah, Like the
basic idea here is you have a bunch of ducks.
The foxes move in attack the ducks, and what do
the ducks do a number of the ducks they just
freeze up. They play dead if you will. But it's
not a conscious act of playing dead. It's it's it's
(22:09):
it's just it kicks in. It's a it's involuntary. They're
just they're they're just laying there acting dead for all
intents and purposes. The foxes are mouthing them, dragging them
off to store their bodies for later, and and this
allows them the possibility to escape later on, though it's
not a very high possibility, but apparently they stand a
better chance playing dead and escaping than you know, standing
(22:32):
up and fighting against the foxes. Right, And that's that
example of more of what is a pre meditative response,
at least we think in nature, But there are other
examples that seem to be reflexive. And when I think
about that, I think about the great white, which can
enter that tonic immobility state and basically take the vital
signs down to the studs, whereas something like the fox
(22:55):
or an opossum still has its metabolic rate at its
normal rate and doesn't off it. Yeah, and you also
see it in a number of farm animals to where
actual um, you know, vet's in an animal husbandry where
it's useful to exploit this because you know that if
you kind of handle the animal the right way, it's
gonna freeze up, and it's going to be very calm
and still, and it's essentially give up and submit to
your handling. So in this sense, could humans that could
(23:19):
they be entering into what would be a sort of
reflective state of of tonic immobility. And in order to
answer this question about whether or not that's exists in animals,
we're gonna look at a study called Biological Evidence from
Victims of Traumatic Stress and this was actually published in
Biological Psychology by Alien and Vulcan. You have the Brazilian
(23:39):
study from two thousand eleven, and uh, it's it's pretty interesting.
They looked at thirty three trauma survivors, fifteen women, including
eighteen with the diagnosis of post traumatic stress disorder. Now
what happened to this is they were they were all
asked to describe the ordeals that they went through in detail,
and then that you know that they took these accounts
and they transcribed them into basically sixty second audio narrative,
(24:02):
which is in a male voice presented in a second
person presentense form, so kind of like role playing. You're
walking down the street, there's a shadow that sort of thing,
all right, So each participants account is been played back
for them over headphones while they stand on a platform
that records body sway. Their heart rates also monitored during
this and afterwards, they asked questions about how they felt
(24:24):
as they listened to this, to this recording, to this, uh, this,
this transcribed account of their incident. And what's interested with
the participants who reported a strong sense of being paralyzed, frozen,
unable to move her scream, they tended to show less
body sway, higher heart rate, and less heart rate veriability. Yeah,
and this was true across both PTSD and non PTSD patients,
(24:49):
but it was the PTSD patients who were more likely
to report feelings of paralysis while listening to these recordings
of their ordeals. And so the idea is that those
who suffered a trauma, in particular rape victims, may have
reflexively entered into a state of tonic immobility, hinting that
this kind of frozen state that we see in animals
(25:11):
happens in humans when we're faced with a life or
death situation. Yeah, that's some some tough stuff to think about.
I mean, it's it's really really some kind of dark
material to process. It really is, and I think that
it gives us a much more nuanced look at how
we're react in these situations, because a lot of us say, oh,
I'm the wolf in this situation and you're the sheep
or the sheep dog. And it's not that black and white, um,
(25:34):
as we know any The ways in which our brain
operate depend on the context, that path depends on past experience, UM.
And so you know, you're not maybe always going to
be the wolf or the sheep dog in a situation. Yeah. Yeah.
I think one of the big overall take homes from
all of this is just a more realistic understanding of
(25:57):
how humans um react to threat, react to stress, and
and what we can do, uh, you know, in in
a reasonable sense to prepare for bad times. And of
course it all takes a little bit of preparation or
a lot, depending on the situation, and then just kind
of calming the mind, because otherwise you're gonna be Chess
(26:19):
Tannembomb in the Royal Tannembombs, taking your family through an
endless fire, drill your entire life, trying to prepare and
not living actually in the moment. But the fire drill
is a great example, you know, and they stress you know,
have have an emergency plan for your household. It doesn't
necessarily mean you're going through the fire drill every night,
but but having like a general idea like, hey, if
(26:40):
there's something weird, like if you know, if something happens
to the house, where's where's the point where we meet up?
You know, if there's if if if the smoke detector
goes off, you know, what do we do? What what
is the what is the appropriate response? And you maybe
even rehearse that to a certain extent. Of course, the
closest thing that comes to mind with that, outside of
just you know, workplace fire drill, school fire drill settings,
(27:01):
is that when I was I think junior high, that
was when I had that definitely fear of being abducted
by aliens, and I would run the escape scenario over
my head that if I if they come into my room,
how am I going to escape? How close am eight
of the door? Uh? And and how close am eight
of the window? You, sir, probably would have avoided being
abducted by an alien improbed, I hope. So, But then
(27:21):
again that's the trap we all fall into right. We
think we're gonna we're gonna be the one to run
away from the alien, but are just gonna lay there
and take it. Well, you know, we have talked about
the whole body paralysis that happens when people think that
they're getting alien or abducted by aliens. Um, I will
tell you one thing. The next time our office building
(27:43):
has a fire drill, I will not, as I usually do,
skip out twenty minutes early and go get a sandwich
and avoid the whole ordeal. I am going to line
up with everybody and go down those endless flights of
stairs again and again. I'm not gonna do that. I'm
going to go for the sandwich. Alright. It is far
more effective. And really that puts me, I think in
the tent ten to fifteen percent of people who say, oh,
(28:05):
there's gonna be a fire drill, I'm gonna be proactive
about this and not be here for it. And then
the other ten of fifteen percent that freak out and
they just start ripping off their clothes and running around. Yeah,
you never see that during the fire drills here. But
but he doesn't remind me of the there was no
no I have not been again, I'm always getting the
sandwich st you miss out, my friend. Yeah, but it
(28:26):
reminds me of that episode of the Office where I
think there was it was a fire drill situation where
everyone just goes completely baddy and you know, they're they're
they're knocking stuff over there, running around like crazy and
uh and again that was probably uh, that was probably
an exaggeration as well, because they're they're putting something that
would have been tend to fifteen percent of people freaking
out and extrapolating it to everyone. Well, the question is
(28:49):
if media began to you know, report it in that
way via our stories that we tell, you know, film
books of this sevent normalcy bias, would we begin to
change or be hevi we're more aware of this. That's interesting.
You know, I just watched the new trailer for the
new Godzilla movie and and it would be interest I'm
sure they're not gonna do it, but what if this
new Godzilla movie showed a realistic interpretation in which seventy
(29:13):
of the people just sat there and we're like, hey,
did you hit? Is there a giant lizard outside? Did you?
Is this on the news that's on it's on MSNBC.
Is it also on Fox News? We should check out
CNN to to see what CNN is reporting, and it
would be less traumatics. Yeah, this is They're not gonna
let us direct Godzilla too. No. No, someone somewhere just
tip their cigar into nash Ria and said, forget those kids,
(29:36):
forget him, forget them all right, So there you go,
look at the world of normalcy bias and psychogenic death.
Let's call the robot over here and do a quick
listener mail. Do it all right? This one comes to
us from Hannah. Hannah writes in and says, good and
talk Julian Robert. Back in February two thousand twelve, you
did an episode about rat kings. Uh, and I just
(29:56):
mentioned rat kings in this episode, so this is uh,
this is this is good. Just I'm relatively new to
the podcast and I just listened to that episode. I
thought you'd be interested to know about something that happened
in June two thousand thirteen in Germany, hence the greeting
A squirrel king was found. This was a group of
baby gray squirrels that had gotten stuck together at the
tails by tree sap that had gotten into their nest.
They were successfully separated by veterinarians. One can assume, considering
(30:20):
the massive population of squirrels in the world, that this
has happened to other leaders of squirrels who weren't lucky
enough to be aided by humans. Happy holidays, Hannah in Oakland.
Well there you go. All right, Um, that's terrifying to
think of, especially when I look at all of the
squirrels in my backyard just marauding. Yeah, well, I think
when I when we covered rat kings, I can't remember
(30:42):
we mentioned it, but I remember running across mentioned in
our research of a squirrel king. But it may not
have made it into the podcast because really, you already
talking about about rat That's enough cryptozoological mumbo jumbo or
not to to discuss in one podcast without getting into
the squirrels. But but the squirrel example brought up here
is very interesting and maybe a little less frightening, perhaps
(31:05):
perhaps slightly less. I mean, if if the rat king
is a portent of death and disease and medieval plague
striking down your city, what does the squirrel king represent?
Home values are gonna dip? I don't know, it just
doesn't seem like it would be near as the Diers.
I'm still thinking about it. Hey, I wanted to mention
that before we started podcasting, our video producer, Tyler came
(31:28):
in here and he filmed us chit chatting, and that's
when we were actually talking about the squirrel King. So
if you guys want to excuse me, the rat King. So,
if you guys want to check that out, make sure
to go to stuff to Blow your Mind dot com
because no doubt the video is hanging out there. Um.
I have one quick, super quick email that came through.
This is from Jennifer and the subject line with sasquatch
(31:50):
and it's simply said, spirit totem. Only those meant to
see will see be well. Sounds good to me. I know,
I loved it. Thank you. Cryptic and delightful and I'm
not sure if that is in jest or not, but
it doesn't matter. It's pretty great either way. All right,
on that note, let's go and close it out. Hey,
you want to get in touch with us, You want
(32:10):
to check out this video that Julie mentioned of us
prepping for this episode and just getting comfortable on our chairs.
You want to listen to all the podcast episodes in
the past, such as that rat King episode, such as
the episodes to do with sleep paralysis, all of them.
They are available at stuff to blow your mind dot com,
along with our blog post and just about anything we're doing,
(32:30):
as well as links out to our social media accounts
on Twitter, Facebook, Tumbler, Google Plus, on YouTube where mind
Stuff Show go. Check all those things out if you.
If one of those is your favorite social media side,
follow us uh and we'll try and share stuff with you. Yeah,
and if you would like to share some of your
thoughts with us, you can do so. Blow the mind
at discovery dot com for more on this and thousands
(32:56):
of other topics. Does it How stuff works dot com?
Could you Indu? Could you into the pla
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey you welcome to Stuff of all
your Mind. My name is Robert Lamp and I'm Julie Douglas. Julie.
Let's let's let's put ourselves in in a situation here. Okay,
all right, we're in the podcast chamber right now, it's you,
(00:25):
it's me, it's no man in the all the complex
equipment that records the sounds that come out of our mouth.
And then there's a window covered up by curtain. Now
imagine suddenly the curtain blows out and and we're also
suddenly we're being sucked out the window as if this
is a pressurized aircraft cabin. I don't know why that
would happen, but let's assume there's like a you know,
(00:45):
a sharknado on the other side. Is King Kong on
the other side of this way though, King Kong and
a sharknado most likely? Okay, yeah, all right, got it
in my head. Go on, Okay, So how do we react?
How do we react to look to set sudden interruption
of normal life? Normalcy is quite literally going out the window,
and suddenly life has become this just complete struggle for
(01:09):
survival and every second counts. Okay, well, I think we
have three options here. One is that you could just
shriek and freak out right and not really do yourself
any sort of service here, always a good option, Okay.
The second thing is you could just stare, you know,
sort of into oblivion as King Kong takes you into
(01:30):
his clutches and stuffs you into his mouth. Just stare
and not do anything. Okay, Well, at least I'm not
gonna look foolish. Okay. The third thing is you can
try to save yourself. You could try to flee from
the situation in some way as you're getting sucked out,
maybe you hold onto something that the window casing, and
you try to crawl back into the room and then
escape through the emergency exits. And what's interesting is when
(01:52):
you when you think of these three possibilities. Yes, and
when we can all put we all certainly will go
through these scenarios in our own head. Maybe not the
King Sharknado combination one, but we we inevitably think about
what am I gonna do in disaster strikes, and we
imagine ourselves typically going through that to survivalist instinct we
imagine ourselves doing the thing that logically would need to
be done to survive. But does it shake out that way?
(02:15):
I mean it does in the movies. Well, all of
us think, of course, we would hold onto the window
frame and we would somehow escape the clutches of King
Kong and Sharknado. But this is according to Esther ingliss Arkel,
she's writing for I oh nine. She says about seventy
percent of people in a disaster exhibit this sort of
unusual Ladi da behavior, just staring into a blivion ten
(02:39):
to fent, freak out in another ten to fent, react
to the situation accordingly, efficiently, and orderly, and they do
the thing they're supposed to do so, in other words,
they get the hell out of dodge. And that is
crazy because you just you we're programmed, especially by movies
and disaster movies, to to to not see things breaking
down along along the percentage lines like that. The image
(03:01):
that always comes back to me is the original Blob movie,
The Blob Steve McQueen. There's a scene where the Blob
has made its way. You know, it's rather grown at
this point. You know, the blob right big jelly creature
that dissolves people, makes its way into a movie theater,
crowded movie theater, and then all hell breaks loose and
there's this wonderful scene of everyone just rushing out of
that movie theater. And then there's a fabulous scene after that,
(03:23):
the blob oozing out of the theater doors and the
crowd just running in front of it like everybody knows
what's up. It's all right, there's a there's a blob.
We're all going to freak out, We're all gonna run,
and you can you can view that freaking out and
running as you know that as either just completely freaking
out and making a run for or doing the logical thing.
But either way, it doesn't line up with these percentage
(03:45):
points that we're looking at, because seventy of them would
be just setting there being are we supposed to? This
is being the movies over? Should I sit there? Hey? Hey,
you do you know if the movie is over, we're
gonna get a refund on this. And meanwhile, you do
just just get your flesh dissolved off of you by
a monster. All right, Well, let me give you a
real life example of that. That's example, well one that
actually happened for real, the not on a film. Actually,
(04:08):
it's one of the best known examples of this sort
of emergency situation in which people gravitate towards what is
called a normalcy bias. And we'll talk more about that
in a moment, but in this scenario, we're talking about
two planes that collided on a runway in the Canary
Islands nine and one of the survivors, Paul Heck, he
grabbed his unresponsive wife who just sat there, you know,
(04:31):
sort of saying what what's going on? And what they
did is they got, of course the hell out of
dodge and on the way is they are passing other passengers,
they're noticing people who are just sitting there, staring straight ahead,
not doing anything. They're uninjured people. And what happened is
that they only had sixty seconds to leave that plane
(04:51):
before it was engulfed in flames. And it was a huge,
huge fatality for that flight. A lot of people did
not get out of it. It and so a lot
of emergency management personnel look at that case is why
why do those people who are uninjured sit on that
plane and do nothing? Is this um because they were unprepared?
(05:12):
Is this some sort of instinct in humans or is
there something else going on here? And that's what we're
really going to try to get at the heart of today. Yeah,
so a normal cy bias is what it sounds like.
It's a bias towards thinking everything's okay, minimizing with the
actual risk, and thinking must not be that big of
a deal. We've all had this, uh, certainly as you
(05:32):
just observe your environment around us. I mean there are
times where you freak out and you say, oh, the
shady person on the street, I better up to no good.
But then a little reason creeps in and you're like, well, there,
it's probably okay. I'm going to air on the side
of just assuming everything is completely normal. Yeah. I mean,
we really sometimes underestimate things, and we'll talk more about
why we do that, but I wanted to say that
(05:53):
According to a National Institute of Standards and Technology study,
which was drawn from the interviews with nearly nine dred
survive verse of nine eleven, they said that the people
who made it out of the World Trade Center waited
an average of six minutes before leaving their desks. So
what we're talking about here is this idea that you
are looking at the odds, You're plane the odds because really,
(06:15):
on a day to day basis, we don't have really
that many, um real dangers in front of us, and
we have imagined dangers that we do with all the time.
So it's like a matter of sort of suessing those out. Well. Like,
I think about this every time I board a plane,
because on one hand, I have every disaster movie I've
ever seen, you know, plane rex happening all the time,
and those because the story of someone getting on an
(06:37):
airplane is generally only interesting if there's a creature on
the wing of the plane where it crashes into a mountain.
Then people have to eat each other. I mean, you
need to drum. But then I start breaking it down
and I think, I think of I think of football,
which I almost never do, but I think, how many
times have I ever heard on the news, Oh, an
entire football team was lost in a plane crash today,
(06:58):
or they can't have this football game because half the
team went down. Um. You know cases like this that
remind me that, hey, these are people that fly around
all the time, Um, why do I not hear of them?
Parash it? Yeah, I mean that takes an enormous amount
of mental energy in the first place for some of
us to board that plane and convince ourselves that it's
a good idea to get into this this metal hole
(07:19):
that's just flinging itself through time and space, and and
that it's going to all turn out okay. Right. In
my theory about the seats, I think the reason that
the seats are so uncomfortable and seemed to be designed
to to to make you uncomfortable is so that you
end up focusing on the immediate discomfort of having to
cram yourself into that small space and deal with all
(07:40):
these people around you, rather than the actual uh potential
of crashing into a mountain. Right. So you have a
couple of different elements going on there. You have all
this this uh, the stories that you've told yourself that
allows you to get on the plane in the first place.
You have distraction, and then when a real emergency happens,
you have something called milling, which is part of that
playing the odds process, right, because milling is this idea
(08:01):
that people will check in with one another before taking action, saying,
is this really a dangerous situation? Are we okay? Did
you did you hear something is that. Does that the
engine sound weird to you? Did you see that creature
on the wing of the plane, because I'm not sure
that's real. Uh. And what's interesting about this this million
is that we're not On one hand, it is, yes,
(08:21):
an attempt to get the best information. You don't want
to jump to conclusions, and you you want to make
sure you get the best possible information from a few
different people. But on the other hand, you also want
to get specific information. You you keep you want to
keep asking the question, do you get the answer that
feels right, the answer that feeds more comforting. You want
somebody to tell you, Oh, it's no big deal. Engines
(08:42):
make that kind of noise. The creatures live on the
wing of the plane. It's just how it works. Here's
a kind of a rote example. But if you've ever
been um in an area where there was a tornado warning,
have you ever called someone up and said, Hey, what's
the weather like over there? Or I mean, have you
ever called up a you know, a friend or a
family member and said, I like, tornado is coming my way.
I'm I'm terrified of tornadoes, So I if I have
(09:04):
any reason to believe they're in the area. Then I well,
I head to the basement if there's a basement, and
if not, I guess I just freeze up and wait
for death. So but you batten down the hatches, right, Yeah,
I know, not to go look out the window because
it could blast in on me and kill me. Well,
from that National Institute of Standards and Technology study, another
finding was that on none elevidently, seventy of survivors spoke
(09:27):
with other people before trying to leave. The study shows
so again it's this Milling idea that sometimes it's not
just sitting there in disbelief in doing nothing. Sometimes it's
just trying to collect data, even in the face of
really significant data in front of you, saying this is
an extraordinary situation. You should do something about it. Now. Yeah.
(09:47):
I mean we're social animals, you know, so it makes
sense that we would reach out for these answers. Um
And you see this all the time with with other
threats to less concrete threats where people end up just
going and go online and to find out let me
feed this fear or let me put out put out
the fires of this fear with enough you know, links
from this website or another. Well, I think that's the
(10:08):
curse of knowledge, right, We all the time are getting
sorts of messages, warning messages, especially here in the United States.
Other countries make fun of us for this, But you
could have a pillow and on that pillow there's going
to be some sort of warning on there that says,
you know, please don't suffocate yourself. Just because of all
the legal battles we have here in the States. Um
(10:29):
So at some point those messages just we they recede
into the background because there are so many of them
to filter through. And again, there are so many real
threats versus perceived threats that the mind does want to
do a little bit of milling to figure out what's what. Yeah, like,
is this is this? Is this a toy that is
actually inappropriate for my child that will actually kill him?
(10:51):
Or is this just one of those situations where it's
a bunch of legal mambo jumbo because you could conceivably
strangle yourself with a toy horse Probably not gonna happen,
But lithium ion batteries keep them away from kids. Okay,
that's my p s A for this podcast, because we
get out juice stuff on them. No, no, it's it's horrible,
(11:12):
for they're tiny, you know, the size of quarter, and
it can do horrible that Actually children can die from
ingesting them to keep them away half. Indeed, all right,
let's take a quick break, and when we get back,
we're going to talk about survival psychology in this idea
of psychogenic death. All right, we're back. So is there
(11:39):
a positive spin here to those just milling about? There
is and and And to understand the positive you have
to remind yourself again, Seventy people of the people are
just setting there, are going, hey, is there something weird?
Is there's something wrong? Ten percent are in action mode,
no what to do? That's ten, and the other ten
to fifteen percent are freaking the heck out. One positive
(12:01):
is that all of those calm people who don't know
what's up and are just asking and milling uh and
and and have that normalusly bias fully engaged, they have
a calming effect on the freakouts. That's true. And some
people would argue that it makes it easier for that
ten to to actually exit even faster, because well, if
(12:21):
nobody's clogging the stairwells or other exit strategies, then you
can zip through there pretty quickly. Yeah. But then that
that's the downside as well, is that those ten percent
who realize what needs to happen, we need to get
off of this plane before we're all consumed by fire,
they could actually have their progress um um impeded by
the individuals who are just setting there asking what's up.
(12:43):
There's saying is there's something wrong, is there's something on
the matter, and they're saying, no, you need to get
out of my way, or and you need to run
for it too, because we have to survive. The ideal
situation is that that ten percent would actually get people
sort of you know, a fire under the artist and say, okay,
I see that person in action, I will now follow suit.
And we have seen this over and over again in
(13:03):
other emergency scenarios, particularly in UM being the world trade
centers and not eleven attacks. So UM I wanted to
just shift a little bit and go into survival psychology
and highlight someone named John Leech. He's a survivor psychologist,
and he says that we need to reframe the question
of survival and quit sort of looking at these examples
(13:26):
of the survivor or not just as they're innately courageous
and they have this robust will to live. But rather
we should be looking at the people who do not
make it and asking the question, why do people die
when they don't need to. Yeah, particularly gets into this
idea of psychogenic death, which is a really snazzy term,
and it refers to a biological process that takes place
(13:49):
as in natural death, but it's triggered at a premature
stage in the person's life, when they're under all this script.
So it's it's kind of this idea of al right,
plane crashes and you have some people who have that
strong will to survive, they're a survivor type, they're gonna
make it. But then there are people who just shut down.
They die within the first first one or one to
three days. And and why is that. It's like, it's
(14:11):
not like they had a grievous injuries, they just shut down. Yeah,
He's got all sorts of examples that he points to.
He talks about light aircraft crash and Sierra Nevada, and
he says that of the three people on board, one
passenger was trapped in the wreckage, so obviously that person
couldn't do anything. Another person had no more than superficial bruising.
But then you have the pilot who had injuries to
(14:32):
his arm, ankle and ribs. And it was actually the
pilot who left the scene and for eleven days he
walked and he hiked through the snow covered mountains before
reaching a road and getting help. Now, after that eleven days,
both the person who had just the superficial wounds and
the person of course who was trapped in the wreckage
(14:53):
they died. But the question was why did the person
with just the minimal wounds perish when he had acts
us to water in food and shelter and could have
made a fire. So does it come down to this like, oh,
you're just prepackaged with courage and know how. Uh No,
According to Leach, it all has to do with the
(15:14):
way that you're processing that information and in some cases
your past experiences. Yeah. And he makes a strong argument
too that it's it's you know, we tend to think
of you know, stress comes our way, threat comes our way,
and it's fight or flight, right, Am I gonna punch
it in the face or turntail and run? And he's
arguing that it's really more than this situation of fight,
flight or freeze? Am I going to punch it in
(15:36):
the face. Am I going to run away from it?
Or am I just gonna stand there and let it
take me? Yeah, Because he's saying that there's a lot
to take in when a trauma happens. He's saying there's
pre impact, impact, recovery, rescue, and post trauma. And he
said that most people have a certain cognitive load that
were that that sort of normalized to our day to
(15:57):
day operations. Right, We've talked about called it to load,
this idea that you have just finite resources of energy
for your brain to operate on. And so he's saying
that if you have this extrnsic condition bringing with it
all sorts of new data in a new environment, it's
gonna crash your brain. So what he said is that
(16:18):
what happens is that in the first three days, particularly
you're looking at the end of this this situation in
Sierra Nevada Mountains, um that those first three days were
really important to the survival of the people who were
still alive, because that's when the executive functions will fritz out,
and when that happens, working memory that stops and you
(16:40):
have you know, at selective attention, disturbed and that becomes
really important because that selective attention is what allows you
to really focus on what matters in Maelstrom. Right, if
you've got you for you're on a plane and smoke
is rolling in and people are screaming or just sitting there,
you still have a situation that is new to you,
(17:01):
and you have to figure out what's important here? Now,
what's happening when people freeze up? What are we talking
about here? Um? Now? Leach refers to this as cognitive paralysis,
So we're talking complete in action. We're talking uh, just
setting there, uh, not not fighting, not flighting, just just
shutting down completely. And he does say that you can
(17:23):
actually recover from this, But what becomes so important is
that if you if you can't find a way out
of that, if you can't find some sort of clarity
in there and get back to your working memory, well
then it's just gonna usually have cognitive dysfunction, which is
probably what happened to the survivor in the plane crash
who for eleven days sat there. Is perhaps after the
(17:46):
third day that his brain just said, forget it, We're
gonna shut this down. And that's what's so interesting about
that idea of psychogenic death that your brain could fold
up in on itself and say, Okay, I'm just gonna
draw the covers here. Yeah. Yeah, And and we and again,
we we all think we're going to be the survivor type.
We all kind of even if we're we have a
(18:07):
pretty realistic understanding of our skills. Like if I crashed
in a plane in the mountain, I'd have to realize, yeah,
I'm probably not going to fashion a bow and arrow
and hunt a grizzly bear or anything like that. But
I like to think that I'll at least have, you know,
the clarity of mind enough to to sort of look
around and realize what my options are. But maybe that's
not gonna be the kicks. Maybe I'm going to freak
(18:28):
the heck out, or I'm just gonna freeze. So the
thing that makes the difference here is really the ability
to call up patterns again, that selective memory, or not
just the working memory, but that selective attention and in
some ways training yourself for for the emergency at hand.
And when you look at Paul Heck and that example
(18:50):
of the two planes colliding, it turns out that he
as a child was involved in a theater fire, and
since then he had always made sure to check exits
no matter where he was. In fact, when he boarded
the plane with his wife, he pointed out to his wife, Hey, look,
these are the emergency exits. And so the idea is
that when the plane crash occurred, he wasn't as um
(19:14):
reliant on trying to piece together new information. In fact,
he could go to that blueprint that he already had
stored in his brain and act quickly. So in some ways,
you can look at the survivors and say, Okay, it
may be that they're prepared to some extent, or they've
had some sort of life experience that has told them
that they should be more aware of their environment and
(19:36):
ready to act on it, and are subconsciously storing away
information that could help them. That's interesting. Yeah, the the
idea of sort of a domestic animal versus a wild
animal suddenly put in a situation of extreme danger. One
has never had to really deal with threats and is
completely overwhelmed by the predator in smits. The other has
always lived in the raw and therefore is more prepared
(19:58):
to act appropriately in the face of danger. Yeah, And
when I was reading about Paul hex account. I thought
this sounds like my dad, and my dad was actually
in special ops in Vietnam, and so in some ways
he has had a lot of the survival training. But
this is a guy my dad who every time he
goes into a hotel will go and look at the
map of the hotel that's pasted on the back of
(20:19):
the door in the hotel room, look at the emergency exits,
and then he will leave the room and count the
number of doors it takes to get the emergency exit.
So he has that information in his mind. And you know,
he didn't train my brother and I to do the
same thing, but in a way, we subconsciously saw how
he was behaving. And both my brother and I, when
(20:40):
we enter a room, most likely we are going to
take the seat that is facing the door so we
can have a bead on the door to exit. And
it's weird way. We've talked about this before, so there
may be something to that. Okay, So in the face
of appropriate training and or real life experience, you're you're
likely to be in a better position to act appropriately
(21:02):
in the face of the threat. Right. It's no guarantee,
but it helps, right, Yeah, case in point. If I
may draw another example from science fiction. Um in the
movie Aliens, the mission there into the colony, it went bad,
and what happened. You had Private Hudson freaked out. He
was definitely in that ten of the freak out, We're
all gonna die game over. You had Lieutenant Gorman. He
(21:24):
was definitely in that se though, where he was just
he you know, he froze up, froze up, just was
was asking questions and was of no use. But then
you had meanwhile, you had Hicks and Ripley. They acted
responsibly and they made it to the end of the movie.
There you go. So all right, now you know we're
focusing on the survivors, which is what we weren't cointd.
We're gonna focus more on and in order to do that,
(21:46):
you really have to look at animals in this reflexive
ability to go into tonic immobility or fantatosis, which is
something that we talked about last week. Yeah, Like the
basic idea here is you have a bunch of ducks.
The foxes move in attack the ducks, and what do
the ducks do a number of the ducks they just
freeze up. They play dead if you will. But it's
not a conscious act of playing dead. It's it's it's
(22:09):
it's just it kicks in. It's a it's involuntary. They're
just they're they're just laying there acting dead for all
intents and purposes. The foxes are mouthing them, dragging them
off to store their bodies for later, and and this
allows them the possibility to escape later on, though it's
not a very high possibility, but apparently they stand a
better chance playing dead and escaping than you know, standing
(22:32):
up and fighting against the foxes. Right, And that's that
example of more of what is a pre meditative response,
at least we think in nature, But there are other
examples that seem to be reflexive. And when I think
about that, I think about the great white, which can
enter that tonic immobility state and basically take the vital
signs down to the studs, whereas something like the fox
(22:55):
or an opossum still has its metabolic rate at its
normal rate and doesn't off it. Yeah, and you also
see it in a number of farm animals to where
actual um, you know, vet's in an animal husbandry where
it's useful to exploit this because you know that if
you kind of handle the animal the right way, it's
gonna freeze up, and it's going to be very calm
and still, and it's essentially give up and submit to
your handling. So in this sense, could humans that could
(23:19):
they be entering into what would be a sort of
reflective state of of tonic immobility. And in order to
answer this question about whether or not that's exists in animals,
we're gonna look at a study called Biological Evidence from
Victims of Traumatic Stress and this was actually published in
Biological Psychology by Alien and Vulcan. You have the Brazilian
(23:39):
study from two thousand eleven, and uh, it's it's pretty interesting.
They looked at thirty three trauma survivors, fifteen women, including
eighteen with the diagnosis of post traumatic stress disorder. Now
what happened to this is they were they were all
asked to describe the ordeals that they went through in detail,
and then that you know that they took these accounts
and they transcribed them into basically sixty second audio narrative,
(24:02):
which is in a male voice presented in a second
person presentense form, so kind of like role playing. You're
walking down the street, there's a shadow that sort of thing,
all right, So each participants account is been played back
for them over headphones while they stand on a platform
that records body sway. Their heart rates also monitored during
this and afterwards, they asked questions about how they felt
(24:24):
as they listened to this, to this recording, to this, uh, this,
this transcribed account of their incident. And what's interested with
the participants who reported a strong sense of being paralyzed, frozen,
unable to move her scream, they tended to show less
body sway, higher heart rate, and less heart rate veriability. Yeah,
and this was true across both PTSD and non PTSD patients,
(24:49):
but it was the PTSD patients who were more likely
to report feelings of paralysis while listening to these recordings
of their ordeals. And so the idea is that those
who suffered a trauma, in particular rape victims, may have
reflexively entered into a state of tonic immobility, hinting that
this kind of frozen state that we see in animals
(25:11):
happens in humans when we're faced with a life or
death situation. Yeah, that's some some tough stuff to think about.
I mean, it's it's really really some kind of dark
material to process. It really is, and I think that
it gives us a much more nuanced look at how
we're react in these situations, because a lot of us say, oh,
I'm the wolf in this situation and you're the sheep
or the sheep dog. And it's not that black and white, um,
(25:34):
as we know any The ways in which our brain
operate depend on the context, that path depends on past experience, UM.
And so you know, you're not maybe always going to
be the wolf or the sheep dog in a situation. Yeah. Yeah.
I think one of the big overall take homes from
all of this is just a more realistic understanding of
(25:57):
how humans um react to threat, react to stress, and
and what we can do, uh, you know, in in
a reasonable sense to prepare for bad times. And of
course it all takes a little bit of preparation or
a lot, depending on the situation, and then just kind
of calming the mind, because otherwise you're gonna be Chess
(26:19):
Tannembomb in the Royal Tannembombs, taking your family through an
endless fire, drill your entire life, trying to prepare and
not living actually in the moment. But the fire drill
is a great example, you know, and they stress you know,
have have an emergency plan for your household. It doesn't
necessarily mean you're going through the fire drill every night,
but but having like a general idea like, hey, if
(26:40):
there's something weird, like if you know, if something happens
to the house, where's where's the point where we meet up?
You know, if there's if if if the smoke detector
goes off, you know, what do we do? What what
is the what is the appropriate response? And you maybe
even rehearse that to a certain extent. Of course, the
closest thing that comes to mind with that, outside of
just you know, workplace fire drill, school fire drill settings,
(27:01):
is that when I was I think junior high, that
was when I had that definitely fear of being abducted
by aliens, and I would run the escape scenario over
my head that if I if they come into my room,
how am I going to escape? How close am eight
of the door? Uh? And and how close am eight
of the window? You, sir, probably would have avoided being
abducted by an alien improbed, I hope. So, But then
(27:21):
again that's the trap we all fall into right. We
think we're gonna we're gonna be the one to run
away from the alien, but are just gonna lay there
and take it. Well, you know, we have talked about
the whole body paralysis that happens when people think that
they're getting alien or abducted by aliens. Um, I will
tell you one thing. The next time our office building
(27:43):
has a fire drill, I will not, as I usually do,
skip out twenty minutes early and go get a sandwich
and avoid the whole ordeal. I am going to line
up with everybody and go down those endless flights of
stairs again and again. I'm not gonna do that. I'm
going to go for the sandwich. Alright. It is far
more effective. And really that puts me, I think in
the tent ten to fifteen percent of people who say, oh,
(28:05):
there's gonna be a fire drill, I'm gonna be proactive
about this and not be here for it. And then
the other ten of fifteen percent that freak out and
they just start ripping off their clothes and running around. Yeah,
you never see that during the fire drills here. But
but he doesn't remind me of the there was no
no I have not been again, I'm always getting the
sandwich st you miss out, my friend. Yeah, but it
(28:26):
reminds me of that episode of the Office where I
think there was it was a fire drill situation where
everyone just goes completely baddy and you know, they're they're
they're knocking stuff over there, running around like crazy and
uh and again that was probably uh, that was probably
an exaggeration as well, because they're they're putting something that
would have been tend to fifteen percent of people freaking
out and extrapolating it to everyone. Well, the question is
(28:49):
if media began to you know, report it in that
way via our stories that we tell, you know, film
books of this sevent normalcy bias, would we begin to
change or be hevi we're more aware of this. That's interesting.
You know, I just watched the new trailer for the
new Godzilla movie and and it would be interest I'm
sure they're not gonna do it, but what if this
new Godzilla movie showed a realistic interpretation in which seventy
(29:13):
of the people just sat there and we're like, hey,
did you hit? Is there a giant lizard outside? Did you?
Is this on the news that's on it's on MSNBC.
Is it also on Fox News? We should check out
CNN to to see what CNN is reporting, and it
would be less traumatics. Yeah, this is They're not gonna
let us direct Godzilla too. No. No, someone somewhere just
tip their cigar into nash Ria and said, forget those kids,
(29:36):
forget him, forget them all right, So there you go,
look at the world of normalcy bias and psychogenic death.
Let's call the robot over here and do a quick
listener mail. Do it all right? This one comes to
us from Hannah. Hannah writes in and says, good and
talk Julian Robert. Back in February two thousand twelve, you
did an episode about rat kings. Uh, and I just
(29:56):
mentioned rat kings in this episode, so this is uh,
this is this is good. Just I'm relatively new to
the podcast and I just listened to that episode. I
thought you'd be interested to know about something that happened
in June two thousand thirteen in Germany, hence the greeting
A squirrel king was found. This was a group of
baby gray squirrels that had gotten stuck together at the
tails by tree sap that had gotten into their nest.
They were successfully separated by veterinarians. One can assume, considering
(30:20):
the massive population of squirrels in the world, that this
has happened to other leaders of squirrels who weren't lucky
enough to be aided by humans. Happy holidays, Hannah in Oakland.
Well there you go. All right, Um, that's terrifying to
think of, especially when I look at all of the
squirrels in my backyard just marauding. Yeah, well, I think
when I when we covered rat kings, I can't remember
(30:42):
we mentioned it, but I remember running across mentioned in
our research of a squirrel king. But it may not
have made it into the podcast because really, you already
talking about about rat That's enough cryptozoological mumbo jumbo or
not to to discuss in one podcast without getting into
the squirrels. But but the squirrel example brought up here
is very interesting and maybe a little less frightening, perhaps
(31:05):
perhaps slightly less. I mean, if if the rat king
is a portent of death and disease and medieval plague
striking down your city, what does the squirrel king represent?
Home values are gonna dip? I don't know, it just
doesn't seem like it would be near as the Diers.
I'm still thinking about it. Hey, I wanted to mention
that before we started podcasting, our video producer, Tyler came
(31:28):
in here and he filmed us chit chatting, and that's
when we were actually talking about the squirrel King. So
if you guys want to excuse me, the rat King. So,
if you guys want to check that out, make sure
to go to stuff to Blow your Mind dot com
because no doubt the video is hanging out there. Um.
I have one quick, super quick email that came through.
This is from Jennifer and the subject line with sasquatch
(31:50):
and it's simply said, spirit totem. Only those meant to
see will see be well. Sounds good to me. I know,
I loved it. Thank you. Cryptic and delightful and I'm
not sure if that is in jest or not, but
it doesn't matter. It's pretty great either way. All right,
on that note, let's go and close it out. Hey,
you want to get in touch with us, You want
(32:10):
to check out this video that Julie mentioned of us
prepping for this episode and just getting comfortable on our chairs.
You want to listen to all the podcast episodes in
the past, such as that rat King episode, such as
the episodes to do with sleep paralysis, all of them.
They are available at stuff to blow your mind dot com,
along with our blog post and just about anything we're doing,
(32:30):
as well as links out to our social media accounts
on Twitter, Facebook, Tumbler, Google Plus, on YouTube where mind
Stuff Show go. Check all those things out if you.
If one of those is your favorite social media side,
follow us uh and we'll try and share stuff with you. Yeah,
and if you would like to share some of your
thoughts with us, you can do so. Blow the mind
at discovery dot com for more on this and thousands
(32:56):
of other topics. Does it How stuff works dot com?
Could you Indu? Could you into the pla
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