Danger Modes

Note: November 2015: Bloggingheads.tv has changed their backend software, so the clips I've embedded below no longer appear. But the links work.

Think of this as a pendant to my series of posts on mode and behavior. It involves no general discussion but, rather, is about one or two modes. And I’m not discussing them. The discussion is by Jessica Stern, author of Denial: A Memoir of Terror, and Garance Franke-Rota, who writes for The Washington Post. The discussion takes place on bloggingheads.tv and centers on Stern’s book, which centers on her own rape, at 15, and its aftermath.

My interest is narrower, in passages in this nine-minute section of the conversation. Consider this statement by Stern where she’s talking about war correspondents are writing to her.



Here’s a rough transcription:

War correspondents are saying, gosh, I really know exactly what you’re talking about, that I become calm when I’m endangered. And some have said I think I’ve become addicted to living in this kind of situation. Danger, addicted to living in a dangerous situation. I think what happens is one is very well equipped to deal with danger, and certainly happens in a war zone. [Where one] goes into a state that is life-preserving in a war zone, but is not life-affirming at home. I got a really moving email from a psychologist who said that she is very good at dealing with high-risk situations, and she tries to be a good mother and a good wife, but she thought she was much better at her work, which is kind of heart-breaking. One letter saying you know me, you know me. I am someone who can handle dangerous situations and cannot necessarily handle normal life.

Here’s another clip, first Franke-Rota:

But I also sometimes wonder [about] that stilling quality that you describe. I mean like where that comes from in human nature. What is that? It seems very primal; that is something that people experience. Is that what animals feel like when they get eaten. That quality of stillness in the middle of chaos. I wonder how deep it goes in our biology, the capacity for moving in a calculated way, in the midst of something very disastrous.

Stern: Yeah, I think it’s very hard to know, in advance, how we’ll react to abject terror and whether this fight-flight-freeze. Freezing is another reaction, it does feel quite animal, and so does the capacity to remain calm in chaos. You feel animal, I agree with you. You feel completely physical; it’s a chemical reaction. It doesn’t feel like something one can control. It might be nice to bring that on in certain situations. I don’t think it’s something you can will to happen, or maybe you can train yourself to.

It’s hard to know exactly what they’re talking about — fighting, fleeing, or freezing strike me as being different modes (especially freeing, which IS an animal survival technique) — but that apparent fact that one cannot WILL such a state suggests to me that it is a modal state. The whole tenor of the discussion suggests that it is very basic and deep in our behavioral biology.

Earlier posts in this series:

• Mode & Behavior 1: Sonnet 129
• Mode & Behavior 2: McCulloch’s Model
• Mode & Behavior 3: Music, Language, and Beyond
• Mode & behavior 4: Affective Technology
• Mode & Behavior 5: The Autobiographical Self

The second post is the one most directly relevant to this post.

ADDENDUM: Gordon Marino has an interesting column in The New York Times on the moral value of learning to box.

Boxing provides practice with fear and with the right, attentive supervision, in quite manageable increments. In their first sparring session, boxers usually erupt in “fight or flight” mode. When the bell rings, novices forget everything they have learned and simply flail away. If they stick with it for a few months, their fears diminish; they can begin to see things in the ring that their emotions blinded them to before. More importantly, they become more at home with feeling afraid. Fear is painful, but it can be faced, and in time a boxer learns not to panic about the blows that will be coming his way.