Video Transcription

It’s very hard for people to know how they’ll react until it happens, and this is why it’s very important for people to gain some kind of understanding of what is going to happen to them when they are presented with the challenge of a very serious, threatening, unusual event. We actually have got two systems in our brain. We’ve got the normal system that we operate in, which we could call the human brain. As long as we’re in a reasonably settled, calm frame of mind, we can think in a rational way. We can carry all our knowledge with us, and we can look at many different aspects of a situation and work our way through it. But as soon as we have a threat, or even a very unusual and surprising experience, the adrenaline is activated and we move into a much more primitive part of our brain, a sort of second brain, if you like, that is sitting quietly in the background but will take over when there is a need to be faster, quicker, stronger, and braver than we need to be in normal circumstances.

And what people don’t realize is that there may be a big gulf between these two systems, and there are things we can do to link them together. But quite often people will just leap into this, you could call it the instinctive brain. I think of it as the reptile brain, where our basic instincts are all coiled up, ready to fly into action. So, the first thing that happens is that they will experience some kind of a threat. That’s what triggers the adrenaline response. But the way the threat is understood is a very personal way and may not actually correspond to the reality. So, one person might become extremely alarmed at a very small fire, another person may need a very big fire to get the same reaction. So, it’s very subjective, very personal. But as soon as that actually takes over, then the person finds that they are being reorganized for physical danger and physical survival.

So, there are two basic mechanisms. One is to narrow their focus onto the threat at the exclusion of everything else. So, they become very focused, which is a great advantage. You can see things clearly, your reaction time increases, a whole lot of changes happen in your body so that you are energized. The second thing that happens is all of our attention goes from inside out onto the situation, which means we lose that understanding of our own state and the awareness of our own state. So, people quite often don’t feel pain or hunger or fatigue, and we need to ensure that people understand that, otherwise, they will tend to push themselves into situations that they may not be able to deal with.

We live within a framework of assumptions and expectations that we call normality, the normal reality. And we do the best we can in our normal life to remove threats from our day-to-day life to make it secure, predictable, and comfortable. When the threat appears, if we’re going to take it seriously, we have to step out of that system and accept the reality that I’m facing a very dangerous situation. Something really bad could happen. Now, there’s a certain tension. Some people will be inclined to leap to the worst possibility and become extremely anxious very quickly. Often, those people have had past experiences that make them feel that bad things can happen. But many people will find it difficult to take that step, and they will tend to minimize, to rationalize, “It’ll be all right, or it’s always worked out in the past, so I’m sure it’ll be fine,” or even go into outright denial, “No, no, I’m sure they’re wrong, or no, no, it’s going to be fine, you’ll be all right, don’t worry about it.” And that means that the person is actually not really taking in and using the information available. They’re relying on their security and their assumptions.

People can have situations where they cannot believe their eyes because what they’re perceiving, what they’re experiencing, falls outside of their previous expectations. That’s a different step from the denial. “I can see it, but I don’t want to actually acknowledge it.” But then the other thing can be when you experience a massive firestorm, or maybe an encounter with some extremely dangerous event, you just can’t quite take it in. And this can be very disorganizing for people because they will often experience a moment in which they feel to be paralysis, and that’s very frightening for them to feel, “I can’t do anything.” Quite often, though, we find that that period of time is relatively short, and usually, you find that by the time some action is required, they are capable of doing it.

What we know is that when the adrenaline gets going, it throws all of our attention out into the environment where the threat is, and so we not only lose a sense of fatigue and pain, but in a very high state, we don’t have any feelings at all because all of that energy goes into action. And so people will be able to engage in very determined and focused activity, but later on, when they look back, they will tend to have the emotional reactions, but at the time, they are just doing. And this is a very different state of mind to normality. The key features of the adrenaline brain are that we are specialized for physical threat, and that means we go into the right side of our brain. We think with the frontal lobe of the right side, where we can think in pictures and actions, and we’ll bring up instinctive plans that are going to save us from a physical threat. The left side of the brain is put offline because it’s too slow. We’ll come up with words, ideas, concepts, reasoning that are really a problem because we’ll start speculating about possibilities, and that’s absolutely not helpful. We want to be specific on adrenaline. People are only capable of very rapid judgment, black and white thinking, yes or no, safe or not, and that will actually help us survive a very severe threat very well. But if we don’t have the right skills and knowledge embedded in it, it may end up being misdirected. People will, for instance, think that the most important thing they should do is run outside and put fires out when, in fact, they need to stay inside and think, “How long have I got here before I can actually move somewhere else?”

People will find that if they confront a problem that they haven’t been able to work out physically before, they just can’t solve it because to solve it, you would need to use ideas and thoughts and reasoning. “What’s happened? Why can’t I move? I have to actually analyze the problem. What’s caused me to get stuck, and how do I develop a strategy, even a simple strategy, of how I move?” And they can’t do it. There’s something very inflexible about that adrenaline mode, as every emergency service person knows. So, you’ve got to build in the training.

So, we need to understand that rigidity. You know, it’s like the instincts of animals. They are very rigid, very effective in their environment. You change the environment and it doesn’t work for them. When a person is in such a heightened state of arousal because their attention’s all gone out into the environment, they actually lose the sense of importance of their own safety. Eventually, they become detached from themselves, and therefore, they can’t really pursue the safety of keeping themselves alive. And the next step would be they start to give up on themselves.

So, we’ll find that people, even in a state of very severe shock, are unable to make decisions for themselves. But if you give them simple instructions of what to do, they will respond, and this is incredibly important. Just to jump forward, if people find themselves as a family or a group in a crisis situation like this, absolutely, there needs to be someone to make the decisions and to tell the family what we’re going to do now. It becomes very important to be giving people a, so to speak, a running commentary of what we’re going to do because that will bypass the need for them to be making their own decisions and interpretations of the situation. So, that part of the survival would be that it’s clear that somebody is going to actually give the instructions, and everyone agrees on that, and that the instructions are understood, even if everyone knows it. The fact that it’s said out loud is incredibly reassuring to people. The only way we’ll be able to problem-solve is if we keep that adrenaline level down. So, we need to recognize that one of the biggest problems is the management of our state of arousal, and that means we’ve got to make the threat more familiar, make the procedures more routine.

I can give an example from my own experience of being surrounded by fire on Black Saturday. My wife and I had actually got walkie-talkies, but we hadn’t practiced with them enough, and she put hers in her back pocket, and when she sat down, it switched the keyboard off. But we hadn’t used them often enough to have an automatic reflex about turning the keyboard on and off. So, the walkie-talkie was disabled, and we might as well not have had them because we couldn’t work out how to solve that problem in the middle of the drama. And that’s you, of all people, me of all people, it has nothing to do with how intelligent or how experienced you are. If your adrenaline’s high enough, your problem-solving capacity will disappear.

And so, to move on to another example, which is Yasi, a different kind of brain thing here. People thought that they didn’t need to go. In fact, there were a number of people who organized cyclone parties. Yes, well, that’s part of the kind of denial of threats, and it’s the same with very infrequent events like tsunamis where people cannot imagine what it’s going to be like. So, there’s a kind of natural tendency to make light of something that other people are taking very seriously when we haven’t experienced it, and I think this is a really important thing to be recognizing and why it’s so important for these stories to be told and the footage to be shown so that people have their assumptions pushed aside and replaced with real experiences. Even if there are other people’s experiences, don’t just practice your fire plan, but practice it once you’ve done it a hundred times, and every time you practice it, then you know exactly what to do. So, all of that requires…