Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why

“My father didn’t fly much after the war, and he hardly ever talked about it as such, but when he did, I listened. He used to say, ‘When you walk across the ramp to your airplane, you lose half your IQ.’ I always wondered what he meant, but instinctively I felt it.”

Here, Gonzales sets up a few themes he will explore moving forward, the first being Balancing Emotion and Reason to Achieve Focus. He recalls his father talking about how piloting requires overcoming emotion and fighting to think clearly through the brain’s flurry of fear-inducing chemicals. The second theme is Humility and Humor. Gonzales talks later about gallows humor within dangerous professions, and this quote shows that humor can reach even across generational lines.

“Although strong emotion can interfere with the ability to reason, emotion is necessary for both reasoning and learning. Emotion is the source of both success and failure at selecting correct action at the crucial moment. To survive, you must develop secondary emotions that function in strategic balance with reason. One way to promote that balance is with humor.”

This quotation adds nuance to Gonzales’s claim that emotion can inhibit reason and cognition, as he recognizes that people cannot neatly separate emotion from the rest of brain function, and that emotional reactions can help to save people’s lives in emergencies. This passage begins building the argument that dark or gallows humor is an essential part of coping with stress and remaining attentive to reality.

“The most remarkable discovery of modern neuroscience is that the body controls the brain as much as the brain controls the body. Most decisions are not made using logic, which we all recognize at least on some unconscious level.”

Here, Gonzales sets up his theme of Memories, Mental Models, and Bias. In particular, the idea of the body controlling the brain segues neatly into the idea of somatic markers, emotional bookmarks that drive people to chase pleasure rather than make rational decisions. Additionally, he is speaking to the popular misconception that we can simply overpower our body through brainpower, a misconception his book discredits many times over.

“So information from the senses takes a neural route that splits, one part reaching the amygdala first, the other arriving at the neocortex milliseconds later. Rational (or conscious) thought always lags behind the emotional reaction.”

Gonzales uses significantly different language when speaking scientifically and colloquially. In the first, impulses arrive “milliseconds later.” In the second, reason “lags behind.” This second phrasing allows him to emphasize the delay more clearly than straight neuroscience would have, showing the value of integrating science with conversational prose.

“The two neurological systems of explicit and implicit learning are quite separate. Implicit memories are unconscious […] Implicit memories are not stored in or necessarily even available to the analytical, reasoning part of the brain.”

The author explores two types of learning, explicit and implicit, to explain how humans can learn without conscious thought. Implicit learning can include “emotional bookmarks,” which prompt people to unthinkingly pursue or avoid certain things based on their past experiences. While Gonzales understands these emotional bookmarks are natural, his caution against unthinkingly following them is a cornerstone of the theme Memories, Mental Models, and Bias.

“Mental models can be surprisingly strong and the abilities of working memory surprisingly fragile. A psychologist who studies how people behave when they’re lost told me, ‘I saw a man I was hiking with smash his compass with a rock because he thought it was broken. He didn’t believe we were heading in the right direction.’”

This quotation offers a dramatic example of the power of mental models. People create mental models by making projections based on their past experiences to plan and guide their actions; unfortunately, people can become too attached to these predictive thoughts and deny contradictory information. The hyperbolic silliness of this example (smashing your compass when lost) emphasizes Gonzales’s point about being able to discard mental models if new information arises.

“The human brain is particularly well suited to making complex plans that have an emotional component to drive motivation and behavior. Plans are stored in memory just as past events are. To the brain, the future is as real as the past. The difficulty begins when reality doesn’t match the plan.”

This quotation uses evocative language like “the future is as real as the past” to emphasize the minuteness of the distinction between plans and memories in the human brain. People tend to assume that the brain is a logical, well-ordered place, but Gonzales wields neuroscientific research to explain that the brain is much messier and can easily drive people to make illogical decisions. This illuminates Gonzales’s anecdotes about people who ignored new information and forged ahead with their existing plans when it was risky to do so.

“Researchers point out that people tend to take any information as confirmation of their mental models. We are by nature optimists, if optimism means that we believe we see the world as it is. And under the influence of a plan, it’s easy to see what we want to see.”

Gonzales uses an ironically negative definition of optimism to mock the self-assuredness with which some people cling to mental models. Additionally, the phrase “under the influence” evokes a drugged state, suggesting that overinvestment in mental models can cloud the mind as much as alcohol or other drugs. Altogether, the quote comes off as teasing and shows Gonzales’s disdain for people’s unwillingness to adapt their mental models.

“Many of the people who get into the worst trouble on such nontechnical peaks are those who have climbed more difficult mountains elsewhere […] They are hijacked by their own experience combined with ignorance of the true nature of what they’re attempting to do.”

This quote delves into another element of human bias, experience, using dramatic words like “hijacked” to emphasize just how counterintuitive this bias is. The idea feeds into topics Gonzales explores later, like risk homeostasis, but this quote relies on shock value and paradox to make its point. The author goes out of his way to draw extra attention to the types of inattention biases he discusses, presumably to keep adventurers suffering from them safer.

“A true survivor would be attuned to those subtle cues, the whisper of intuition, which might have been saying, I don’t feel quite safe here. Why is that so? But since most of us are not conscious of these processes, we have nothing to draw our attention to what’s happening to us.”

The author urges adopting the mentality of a “true survivor” by remaining in tune with gut instincts, as well as the surrounding environment. He frames these gut instincts—with words like “whisper”—almost as another element of the environment. Naturalizing these instincts supports his point that both emotion and reason are vital in survival situations.

“Making someone into a believer, grasping the forces of nature, is difficult. Sometimes it takes a near-death experience […] The best way to become a believer, short of dying, is to sit very quietly and contemplate those things.”

This quote emphasizes the value of humility in the face of the forces of nature. Using religious language like “believer” positions nature as a god and humans as its acolytes. This is emphasized when Gonzales suggests quiet contemplation, a state very like prayer. Throughout the book, Gonzales reveres nature, but this is the clearest example of his near-religious belief in it.

“Psychologists who study the behavior of people who get lost report that very few ever backtrack. (The eyes look forward into real or imagined worlds.).”

This is a clear example of Gonzales’s interplay of data and prose. He ground his information in science (“psychologists report”), then translates it into imagery for easier reader comprehension (“eyes look forward”). In this particular example, the prose offers a potential explanation for the data, that people can only foresee progress if they move forward, and this is more emotionally compelling than the safety of backtracking.

“One of the toughest steps a survivor has to take is to discard hope of rescue, just as he discards the old world he left behind and accepts the new one. There is no other way for his brain to settle down. Although the idea is paradoxical, it is essential. I know that’s what my father did in the Nazi prison camp: He made it his world.”

Here, Gonzales makes the difficult argument that hope for help is yet another human bias that must be discarded in a survival situation. He uses his father as an example to highlight that even in the most desperate circumstances (Nazi prison), survivors must begin Balancing Emotion and Reason to Achieve Focus. By focusing on the tasks of surviving, people engage their reasoning brain rather than operating from emotional instinct.

“Even after a lifetime in the wilderness, Kerns entered the woods with a deep sense of respect and humility, like a man approaching a magnificent, dangerous, and unpredictable creature…As we worked in the wilderness, learning technical skills, Kerns kept talking about Positive Mental Attitude.”

Gonzales touts survival instructor Kerns as an example of his theme of Humility and Humor by tying together his respect for the wilderness and his focus on “Positive Mental Attitude.” The phrase “magnificent, dangerous, and unpredictable creature” echoes the way Gonzales himself talks about nature, and the parallel subliminally aligns the two men. By doing this, Gonzales sets Kerns up as a valuable and trustworthy source of information, reinforcing Gonzales’s point about humility.

“After we’d followed him deep into the woods, he asked us to close our eyes and point the way home. It is a humbling experience to find that you can’t. I’d been following him, which is never a good idea. I had not walked my own walk, and, as a result, I was lost.”

This quote is one of many examples where Gonzales illustrates his theme of Humility and Humor by humbling himself in the reader’s eyes. Additionally, this passage delves deeper into one of the book’s more peripheral ideas: being able to rely on only yourself in survival situations. Most of his successful survivors are soloists or, at most, one of a duo. This individualist perspective colors the way Gonzales approaches his adventures and teaches others to approach theirs.

“A Navy SEAL commander told Al Seibert, the psychologist, ‘The Rambo types are the first to go’ [...] The concept is ancient. The Tao te Ching says, ‘He who is brave in daring will be killed / He who is brave in not daring will survive.’”

The author considers how risk-taking personalities can become overconfident, increasing their chances of injury or death, while more cautious people avoid such catastrophes. By quoting the Tao te Ching, Gonzales suggests that this is a timeless and universal aspect of human behavior. However, Gonzales never discusses the idea of “not-daring” in terms of not engaging in adventures altogether, so this theme goes somewhat unexplored.

“Survival psychologists have long observed that successful survivors pray, even when they don’t believe in a god.”

Gonzales details several stories in which survivors calmed their minds through prayer. Even when people have no specific faith or god to pray to, this act seems to help them reset their minds from their initial panic. This quotation supports Gonzales’s theme of Humility and Humor, which includes keeping a positive mindset in the face of danger.

“Ultimately, it is the struggle that keeps one alive. What seems a paradox is simply the act of living: Never stop struggling. Life itself is a paradox, gathering order out of the chaos of matter and energy. When the struggle ceases, we die.”

The author ponders the paradoxical nature of survival, advising the reader to embrace the “struggle” of their situation to stay motivated to live. He notes that survivors must strike a balance: They must accept their situation and its hardships, but also want to be somewhere better. This speaks to Leach’s concept of “active-passiveness” (also discussed in Chapter 12), a state in which one understands what is unchangeable and works to change only what is.

“Chanting, for example, is a pattern that can alter consciousness and calm the mind. The military uses marching and songs to move troops and keep fatigue and emotions under control. The brain is organized to recognize patterns, language and numbers among them. They are elemental.”

Gonzales explores how tapping into patterns can calm emotions and aid perseverance. By using the word “elemental,” he elevates patterns and pattern-making to the level of nature itself, a position he values very highly throughout the book. This supports his anecdotes about survivors who focused on patterns as a way of staying in the present moment and guiding their bodies through difficult landscapes.

“They don’t need others to take care of them. They are used to caring for themselves, and facing the inherent hazards of life. So when something big happens, when they are in deep trouble, it is just more of the same, and they proceed in more or less the same way: They endure.”

Gonzales summarizes what he deems to be the core traits of survivors, emphasizing the lifelong nature of preparation for survival situations. The prose’s choppy rhythm and straightforward quality reinforce Gonzales’s opinion of the nature of survivors: They are not razor-sharp scalpels built for careful maneuvering—they are blunt instruments who survive through determination as much as any physical prowess. The word “endure” shows this idea most clearly. A true survivor, in a difficult situation, simply waits it out while doing what is necessary to keep themselves alive.

“There is instant wilderness, but no instant survival.”

Gonzales uses repetition to emphasize the difference between how ready nature is for humans and how ready humans are for nature. While people can quickly find themselves in a survival situation, being able to survive requires lifelong training in maintaining a positive and constructive mindset. This quotation connects to the author’s observation that life is always inherently a struggle of some kind, with no instant success or answers.

“The same arrogance and disregard for safety that will kill you in a high performance aircraft will kill you in the wilderness or in any other place of high objective hazard. The modern craze for high-risk sports and recreation, which has been embraced by so many naive travelers, is bound to result in accidents, but the images such myths project make it even more likely.”

This passage emphasizes the importance of caution and humility when out in nature or playing sports, tying into Gonzales’s thoughts about humans’ fragility compared to nature’s power. Ironically, people who are very confident about these pursuits are overrepresented among those who get injured or die. The author chastises “naive travelers” who participate in such recreation without considering the risks involved.

“The lesson, which took me many decades to learn, was that he was here among us because he was cool. He was cool and had been cool at the moment of his death, saying nothing more than had to be said: ‘This is it,’ and ‘Bailout, bailout, bailout,’ as prescribed on the checklist before him.”

Here, Gonzales discusses the reason he believes his father survived World War II. His use and repetition of the word “cool” makes the prose sound almost childlike, evoking the colloquial meaning “great” rather than the more contextually likely “level-headed.” This reminds the reader that Gonzales has been admiring and trying to figure out his father since childhood and injects a more human element into the end of this very scientific book.