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The Unthinkable: Who Survives When Disaster Strikes—and Why
It lurks in the corner of our imagination, almost beyond our ability to see the possibility that a tear in the fabric of life could open up without warning, upending a house, a skyscraper, or a civilization.
Today, nine out of ten Americans live in places at significant risk of earthquakes, hurricanes, tornadoes, terrorism, or other disasters. Tomorrow, some of us will have to make split-second choices to save ourselves and our families. How will we react? What will it feel like? Will we be heroes or victims? Will our upbringing, our gender, our personality–anything we’ve ever learned, thought, or dreamed of–ultimately matter?
Amanda Ripley, an award-winning journalist for Time magazine who has covered some of the most devastating disasters of our age, set out to discover what lies beyond fear and speculation. In this magnificent work of investigative journalism, Ripley retraces the human response to some of history’s epic disasters, from the explosion of the Mont Blanc munitions ship in 1917–one of the biggest explosions before the invention of the atomic bomb–to a plane crash in England in 1985 that mystified investigators for years, to the journeys of the 15,000 people who found their way out of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. Then, to understand the science behind the stories, Ripley turns to leading brain scientists, trauma psychologists, and other disaster experts, formal and informal, from a Holocaust survivor who studies heroism to a master gunfighter who learned to overcome the effects of extreme fear.
Finally, Ripley steps into the dark corners of her own imagination, having her brain examined by military researchers and experiencing through realistic simulations what it might be like to survive a plane crash into the ocean or to escape a raging fire.
Ripley comes back with precious wisdom about the surprising humanity of crowds, the elegance of the brain’s fear circuits, and the stunning inadequacy of many of our evolutionary responses. Most unexpectedly, she discovers the brain’s ability to do much, much better, with just a little help.
The Unthinkable escorts us into the bleakest regions of our nightmares, flicks on a flashlight, and takes a steady look around. Then it leads us home, smarter and stronger than we were before.
Today, nine out of ten Americans live in places at significant risk of earthquakes, hurricanes, tornadoes, terrorism, or other disasters. Tomorrow, some of us will have to make split-second choices to save ourselves and our families. How will we react? What will it feel like? Will we be heroes or victims? Will our upbringing, our gender, our personality–anything we’ve ever learned, thought, or dreamed of–ultimately matter?
Amanda Ripley, an award-winning journalist for Time magazine who has covered some of the most devastating disasters of our age, set out to discover what lies beyond fear and speculation. In this magnificent work of investigative journalism, Ripley retraces the human response to some of history’s epic disasters, from the explosion of the Mont Blanc munitions ship in 1917–one of the biggest explosions before the invention of the atomic bomb–to a plane crash in England in 1985 that mystified investigators for years, to the journeys of the 15,000 people who found their way out of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. Then, to understand the science behind the stories, Ripley turns to leading brain scientists, trauma psychologists, and other disaster experts, formal and informal, from a Holocaust survivor who studies heroism to a master gunfighter who learned to overcome the effects of extreme fear.
Finally, Ripley steps into the dark corners of her own imagination, having her brain examined by military researchers and experiencing through realistic simulations what it might be like to survive a plane crash into the ocean or to escape a raging fire.
Ripley comes back with precious wisdom about the surprising humanity of crowds, the elegance of the brain’s fear circuits, and the stunning inadequacy of many of our evolutionary responses. Most unexpectedly, she discovers the brain’s ability to do much, much better, with just a little help.
The Unthinkable escorts us into the bleakest regions of our nightmares, flicks on a flashlight, and takes a steady look around. Then it leads us home, smarter and stronger than we were before.
266 pages, Hardcover
First published June 10, 2008
1134 people are currently reading
20460 people want to read
About the author
Amanda Ripley
8 books440 followersFrom the author's website:
Amanda Ripley is an investigative journalist for The Atlantic and other magazines and a New York Times bestselling author. Her books include High Conflict: Why We Get Trapped and How We Get Out, The Smartest Kids in the World: And How They Got That Way, and The Unthinkable: Who Survives When Disaster Strikes—and Why. Ripley spent a decade writing about human behavior for Time magazine in New York, Washington, and Paris. Her stories helped Time win two National Magazine Awards.
Amanda Ripley is an investigative journalist for The Atlantic and other magazines and a New York Times bestselling author. Her books include High Conflict: Why We Get Trapped and How We Get Out, The Smartest Kids in the World: And How They Got That Way, and The Unthinkable: Who Survives When Disaster Strikes—and Why. Ripley spent a decade writing about human behavior for Time magazine in New York, Washington, and Paris. Her stories helped Time win two National Magazine Awards.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 1,417 reviews
February 1, 2019
Incredible. A textbook, basically, on all things scary. And an extremely illuminating one at that.
Q:
For all these reasons, perhaps, heroes feel a nonnegotiable duty to help others when they can. “It’s something in your heart, your soul, and your emotions that gets a hold of you and says, I gotta do something,” Oliner says. This finding agrees with the results of other (albeit scant) research into heroism. People who perform heroic acts are very often those who are “helpers” in everyday life, be they firefighters or nurses or police officers.
Perhaps because of their training and experience, heroes also have confidence in their own abilities. In general, like almost all people who perform well under extreme stress, heroes believe they shape their own destinies. Psychologists call this an “internal locus of control.” I asked Roger Olian if he felt in control of what happens to him. “There’s no question in my mind. To a very large degree,” he said. “Even if I couldn’t control it, I would feel like I should.”
Bystanders, on the other hand, tend to feel buffeted by forces beyond their control. “They pay scant attention to other people’s problems. They will concentrate on their own need for survival,” Oliner says. And bystanders, it’s worth remembering, are what most of us are.
(C)
Q:
Our obedience to authority in a disaster can be an asset, if the people in charge understand it. For years, aviation safety experts could not understand why passengers did so little to save themselves in plane crashes. They would sit in their seats instead of going to an exit. Those who did get up had an infuriating tendency to reach for their carry-on baggage before leaving. Then, once they made it to the exit door, they would pause for a dangerous amount of time before jumping down the slide. And in plane crashes, remember, you usually have a matter of seconds, not minutes, to get out.
In a series of experiments, safety officials ran regular people through mock evacuations from planes. The trials weren’t nearly as stressful as real evacuations, of course, but it didn’t matter. People, especially women, hesitated for a surprisingly long time before jumping onto the slide. That pause slowed the evacuation for everyone. But there was a way to get people to move faster. If a flight attendant stood at the exit and screamed at people to jump, the pause all but disappeared, the researchers found. In fact, if flight attendants did not aggressively direct the evacuation, they might as well have not been there at all. A study by the Cranfield University Aviation Safety Centre found that people moved just as slowly for polite and calm flight attendants as they did when there were no flight attendants present.
(c)
Q:
Panic occurs if and only if three other conditions are present, Quarantelli concluded. First, people must feel that they may be trapped. Knowing they are definitely trapped is not the same thing. In fact, in submarine disasters, such as the horrific sinking of the Russian submarine Kursk in 2000, humans are not likely to panic. The crew knows there is no way out. At submarine depths, even if they were to swim out of the hatch, they would not survive.
But if people worry that they might be trapped, that is a trigger for panic—even in wide open spaces. “War refugees caught in the open by strafing planes can develop as acute a sense of potential entrapment as individuals in a building during an earthquake who see all exits becoming blocked by debris,” Quarantelli wrote.
Second, panic requires a sensation of great helplessness—which often grows from interaction with others. What starts as an individual sense of impotence escalates when people see their feelings reflected around them. One person caught in explosions in a factory explained it this way to Quarantelli: “I can truthfully say that when I heard the moaning and crying of the others, I did get quite panicky.” Perhaps the Blitz and the Three Mile Island accident, like most disasters, did not cause panic because people did not feel very helpless. They could take shelter or evacuate, after all. And following the Lake Wobegon effect, the psychological phenomenon named after Garrison Keillor’s above-average town, most people probably suspected that they would be among the lucky ones.
The final prerequisite to panic is a sense of profound isolation, Quarantelli found. Surrounded by others, all of whom feel utterly powerless, we realize we are exquisitely alone. We understand that we could be saved—but no one is going to do it. Panic is, in a way, what happens when human beings glimpse their own impending mortality—and know that it didn’t have to be so.
(c)
Q:
It was hard to hear or think with the constant thud of the water hitting our precarious plastic shelter. Every thirty seconds or so, when a spray of ice-cold water leaked through, my fellow survivors would erupt in shrieks. At that moment, I remembered once being told by a military researcher that very cold or very hot environments tend to degrade human performance very, very quickly. The effect tends to be geometric. Sitting there for just five minutes in the wet, stinking huddle, I felt suddenly exhausted. I knew I’d be out of there in time for dinner. I knew my life wasn’t even remotely in danger, and I did not feel afraid. But still, I felt surprisingly drained. My brain must have been working harder than I consciously realized. At that moment, the idea of quietly surrendering in a real disaster didn’t seem quite so unimaginable.
(c)
Q:
The Finer Distinctions
At an upscale restaurant in downtown Portland, Oregon, two women are eating together at a table by the window. In the middle of their conversation, a drunken homeless man stumbles up to the window, unzips his pants, and pulls his penis up to the table. After a short period of gasps and guffaws, the police are called. Officer Loren Christensen arrives at the scene and finds two extremes. One of the women, he says, is “laughing her head off.” The other is slumped on a bench in the lobby with someone fanning her.
In his twenty-five years as a police officer, Christensen noticed this kind of variance often—particularly among female victims of flashers. “One would laugh it off. Another would be enraged. Still another would be emotionally traumatized.” Christensen, who has retired from the police force and now works as an author and martial-arts instructor, has always had trouble discerning what makes one person react so differently from another—even in war, when he was a military policeman. “In Vietnam, I saw people psychologically impacted in the extreme who worked as cooks. Cooks! And I saw infantrymen who had seriously faced the dragon who appeared, at least on the surface, to be fine.”
Resilience is a precious skill. People who have it tend to also have three underlying advantages: a belief that they can influence life events; a tendency to find meaningful purpose in life’s turmoil; and a conviction that they can learn from both positive and negative experiences. These beliefs act as a sort of buffer, cushioning the blow of any given disaster. Dangers seem more manageable to these people, and they perform better as a result. “Trauma, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder,” says George Everly Jr., at the Johns Hopkins Center for Public Health Preparedness in Baltimore, Maryland.
This makes sense. A healthy, proactive worldview should logically lead to resilience. But it’s the kind of unsatisfying answer that begs another question. If this worldview leads to resilience, well, what leads to the worldview?
The answer is not what we might expect. Resilient people aren’t necessarily yoga-practicing Buddhists. One thing that they have in abundance is confidence. As we saw in the chapter on fear, confidence—that comes from realistic rehearsal or even laughter—soothes the more disruptive effects of extreme fear. A few recent studies have found that people who are unrealistically confident tend to fare spectacularly well in disasters. Psychologists call these people “self-enhancers,” but you and I would probably call them arrogant. These are people who think more highly of themselves than other people think of them. They tend to come off as annoying and self-absorbed. In a way, they might be better adapted to crises than they are to real life.
Less than a year after the civil war ended, George Bonanno at Columbia University interviewed seventy-eight Bosnia-Herzegovina citizens in Sarajevo. Each person in the study rated himself or herself when it came to psychological problems, interpersonal skills, health problems, and moodiness. Then each person was rated by his or her peers. A small group of people rated themselves significantly higher than others did. And these were the people found by mental health professionals to be better adjusted.
After 9/11, Bonanno found a similar pattern among survivors who were in or near the World Trade Center during the attacks. Those with high senses of self-worth rebounded relatively easily. They even had lower levels of the stress hormone cortisol in their saliva. Their confidence was like a vaccine against life’s vicissitudes.
Several studies have found that people with higher IQs tend to fare better after a trauma. Resilient people may be smarter, in other words. Why would that be? Perhaps intelligence helps people think creatively, which might in turn lead to a greater sense of purpose and control. Or maybe the confidence that comes with a high IQ is what leads to the resilience to begin with.
The more important point is that everyone, regardless of IQ, can manufacture self-esteem through training and experience. That is what soldiers and police officers will tell you; that confidence comes from doing. As we saw in Chapter 3, the brain functions much better when it is familiar with a problem. We feel more in control because we are more in control. But in certain situations, like the one in which Shacham found himself as a rookie cop, sitting next to a violent criminal who had called his bluff, neither experience nor training could rescue him. He drew upon something else, something more fundamental.
(C)
Q:
For all these reasons, perhaps, heroes feel a nonnegotiable duty to help others when they can. “It’s something in your heart, your soul, and your emotions that gets a hold of you and says, I gotta do something,” Oliner says. This finding agrees with the results of other (albeit scant) research into heroism. People who perform heroic acts are very often those who are “helpers” in everyday life, be they firefighters or nurses or police officers.
Perhaps because of their training and experience, heroes also have confidence in their own abilities. In general, like almost all people who perform well under extreme stress, heroes believe they shape their own destinies. Psychologists call this an “internal locus of control.” I asked Roger Olian if he felt in control of what happens to him. “There’s no question in my mind. To a very large degree,” he said. “Even if I couldn’t control it, I would feel like I should.”
Bystanders, on the other hand, tend to feel buffeted by forces beyond their control. “They pay scant attention to other people’s problems. They will concentrate on their own need for survival,” Oliner says. And bystanders, it’s worth remembering, are what most of us are.
(C)
Q:
Our obedience to authority in a disaster can be an asset, if the people in charge understand it. For years, aviation safety experts could not understand why passengers did so little to save themselves in plane crashes. They would sit in their seats instead of going to an exit. Those who did get up had an infuriating tendency to reach for their carry-on baggage before leaving. Then, once they made it to the exit door, they would pause for a dangerous amount of time before jumping down the slide. And in plane crashes, remember, you usually have a matter of seconds, not minutes, to get out.
In a series of experiments, safety officials ran regular people through mock evacuations from planes. The trials weren’t nearly as stressful as real evacuations, of course, but it didn’t matter. People, especially women, hesitated for a surprisingly long time before jumping onto the slide. That pause slowed the evacuation for everyone. But there was a way to get people to move faster. If a flight attendant stood at the exit and screamed at people to jump, the pause all but disappeared, the researchers found. In fact, if flight attendants did not aggressively direct the evacuation, they might as well have not been there at all. A study by the Cranfield University Aviation Safety Centre found that people moved just as slowly for polite and calm flight attendants as they did when there were no flight attendants present.
(c)
Q:
Panic occurs if and only if three other conditions are present, Quarantelli concluded. First, people must feel that they may be trapped. Knowing they are definitely trapped is not the same thing. In fact, in submarine disasters, such as the horrific sinking of the Russian submarine Kursk in 2000, humans are not likely to panic. The crew knows there is no way out. At submarine depths, even if they were to swim out of the hatch, they would not survive.
But if people worry that they might be trapped, that is a trigger for panic—even in wide open spaces. “War refugees caught in the open by strafing planes can develop as acute a sense of potential entrapment as individuals in a building during an earthquake who see all exits becoming blocked by debris,” Quarantelli wrote.
Second, panic requires a sensation of great helplessness—which often grows from interaction with others. What starts as an individual sense of impotence escalates when people see their feelings reflected around them. One person caught in explosions in a factory explained it this way to Quarantelli: “I can truthfully say that when I heard the moaning and crying of the others, I did get quite panicky.” Perhaps the Blitz and the Three Mile Island accident, like most disasters, did not cause panic because people did not feel very helpless. They could take shelter or evacuate, after all. And following the Lake Wobegon effect, the psychological phenomenon named after Garrison Keillor’s above-average town, most people probably suspected that they would be among the lucky ones.
The final prerequisite to panic is a sense of profound isolation, Quarantelli found. Surrounded by others, all of whom feel utterly powerless, we realize we are exquisitely alone. We understand that we could be saved—but no one is going to do it. Panic is, in a way, what happens when human beings glimpse their own impending mortality—and know that it didn’t have to be so.
(c)
Q:
It was hard to hear or think with the constant thud of the water hitting our precarious plastic shelter. Every thirty seconds or so, when a spray of ice-cold water leaked through, my fellow survivors would erupt in shrieks. At that moment, I remembered once being told by a military researcher that very cold or very hot environments tend to degrade human performance very, very quickly. The effect tends to be geometric. Sitting there for just five minutes in the wet, stinking huddle, I felt suddenly exhausted. I knew I’d be out of there in time for dinner. I knew my life wasn’t even remotely in danger, and I did not feel afraid. But still, I felt surprisingly drained. My brain must have been working harder than I consciously realized. At that moment, the idea of quietly surrendering in a real disaster didn’t seem quite so unimaginable.
(c)
Q:
The Finer Distinctions
At an upscale restaurant in downtown Portland, Oregon, two women are eating together at a table by the window. In the middle of their conversation, a drunken homeless man stumbles up to the window, unzips his pants, and pulls his penis up to the table. After a short period of gasps and guffaws, the police are called. Officer Loren Christensen arrives at the scene and finds two extremes. One of the women, he says, is “laughing her head off.” The other is slumped on a bench in the lobby with someone fanning her.
In his twenty-five years as a police officer, Christensen noticed this kind of variance often—particularly among female victims of flashers. “One would laugh it off. Another would be enraged. Still another would be emotionally traumatized.” Christensen, who has retired from the police force and now works as an author and martial-arts instructor, has always had trouble discerning what makes one person react so differently from another—even in war, when he was a military policeman. “In Vietnam, I saw people psychologically impacted in the extreme who worked as cooks. Cooks! And I saw infantrymen who had seriously faced the dragon who appeared, at least on the surface, to be fine.”
Resilience is a precious skill. People who have it tend to also have three underlying advantages: a belief that they can influence life events; a tendency to find meaningful purpose in life’s turmoil; and a conviction that they can learn from both positive and negative experiences. These beliefs act as a sort of buffer, cushioning the blow of any given disaster. Dangers seem more manageable to these people, and they perform better as a result. “Trauma, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder,” says George Everly Jr., at the Johns Hopkins Center for Public Health Preparedness in Baltimore, Maryland.
This makes sense. A healthy, proactive worldview should logically lead to resilience. But it’s the kind of unsatisfying answer that begs another question. If this worldview leads to resilience, well, what leads to the worldview?
The answer is not what we might expect. Resilient people aren’t necessarily yoga-practicing Buddhists. One thing that they have in abundance is confidence. As we saw in the chapter on fear, confidence—that comes from realistic rehearsal or even laughter—soothes the more disruptive effects of extreme fear. A few recent studies have found that people who are unrealistically confident tend to fare spectacularly well in disasters. Psychologists call these people “self-enhancers,” but you and I would probably call them arrogant. These are people who think more highly of themselves than other people think of them. They tend to come off as annoying and self-absorbed. In a way, they might be better adapted to crises than they are to real life.
Less than a year after the civil war ended, George Bonanno at Columbia University interviewed seventy-eight Bosnia-Herzegovina citizens in Sarajevo. Each person in the study rated himself or herself when it came to psychological problems, interpersonal skills, health problems, and moodiness. Then each person was rated by his or her peers. A small group of people rated themselves significantly higher than others did. And these were the people found by mental health professionals to be better adjusted.
After 9/11, Bonanno found a similar pattern among survivors who were in or near the World Trade Center during the attacks. Those with high senses of self-worth rebounded relatively easily. They even had lower levels of the stress hormone cortisol in their saliva. Their confidence was like a vaccine against life’s vicissitudes.
Several studies have found that people with higher IQs tend to fare better after a trauma. Resilient people may be smarter, in other words. Why would that be? Perhaps intelligence helps people think creatively, which might in turn lead to a greater sense of purpose and control. Or maybe the confidence that comes with a high IQ is what leads to the resilience to begin with.
The more important point is that everyone, regardless of IQ, can manufacture self-esteem through training and experience. That is what soldiers and police officers will tell you; that confidence comes from doing. As we saw in Chapter 3, the brain functions much better when it is familiar with a problem. We feel more in control because we are more in control. But in certain situations, like the one in which Shacham found himself as a rookie cop, sitting next to a violent criminal who had called his bluff, neither experience nor training could rescue him. He drew upon something else, something more fundamental.
(C)
May 15, 2021
Easy read on history of disaster planning. Good gut check on understanding risk and how to respond. Starts with the Halifax explosion in 1917 and explores 9/11, 1993 bombing, sewer explosions of Guadalajara, and Katrina. Some of the interesting items. 1) Initial response in a disaster is always by neighbors or self rescue, so be prepared 2) Understand risk of activities – don’t watch the news (references Taleb above), so Heart Attack, Cancer, Stroke, Car accident. A study showed an additional 2000 road deaths due to the decrease in air travel after 9/11. So, based on that we should all start our day with 20 minutes of meditation and a bowl of Oatmeal. 3) Very good information on fear. During a crisis, more people go catatonic than panic. Use profanity and scream to get people to move. For an individual, military training helps (make a plan, execute the plan) or just quickly think about why you need to live. Also, during a crisis most people lose track of time or can have tunnel vision or total vision loss. Hero’s tend to be unmarried males without children (the rest of us need to save our necks for our progeny). Very interesting story on Rick Rescorla, Director of Security for Morgan Stanley in the World Trade Center. After the fiasco of the 1993 bombing, he gave up on the port authority for disaster planning. He had actual, annual fire drills unlike the rest of the world trade center. He was ridiculed by the organization (this was a bunch of rich investment bankers). But 8 years later, he was vindicated when he got out 2800 employees of Morgan Stanley alive. Only 14 died which included himself and 4 of his guards. Take aways – know the relative risk of disasters in your area; practice fire drills; follow tornado, flood, and hurricane warnings; count the seats to an exit in a plane; take the stairs out of a hotel after checking in; take defensive driving seriously; Meditate (not just for heart health, but to calm in a disaster).
December 19, 2022
Storytelling is essential to survival. It’s what turns preparation into ritual and victims into saviors.
I had this review 95% written and my computer died because its battery is crap. And now it's gone.
It was a bomb review. Just pretend you read it and it was REALLY good.
Unfortunately, you are left with the half-assed version of my review, because I've had an extremely rough week; I basically have the mental energy of a toad right now.
Veering away from the disaster that is my life, let's talk about The Unthinkable.
“Life becomes like molten metal,” he wrote. “Old customs crumble, and instability rules.”
For a book about panic, 9/11, hurricanes, and school shootings, The Unthinkable is infused with a comforting sense of hope. It's absolutely horrifying to hear the tales of a woman who stumbled down the stairs of the World Trade Center, or a teenager who lived through the Virginia Tech violence. But these tragic stories have a silver lining - humanity is better, kinder, and smarter than you'd ever think. Even in times of disaster, most people choose to be good. To do good.
And that's the first thing I want to commend Amanda Ripley on. She wrote a well-researched, thorough, optimistic book about disasters and the ways human nature moves though them. It's too easy to say it won't happen to me. Not this plane, not this storm. You've always been safe, so your brain sees no reason to think otherwise.
There's a lot of talk about our instinctual reactions in the face of danger. Why do we perform acts of heroism? How do crowds of people suddenly turn deadly? What physical reactions do our bodies go through when faced with unimaginable fear. How do we keep from freezing and move past denial ?
How are you most likely to die? Think for a moment: Given your own profile, what do you really think is most likely to kill you?
It's more a survival mentality type of story, but there's a bit of practical advice sprinkled throughout. Check your smoke detectors. Pay attention to emergency exit locations. Never try to drive through a flooded road. And finally, know what disasters you could personally face, and mentally rehearse for what you will do. For example, I live right on the border of tornado alley, as well as being close to a major fault line. So it makes much more sense for me to plan for either of those options as opposed to a tsunami.
I ain't afraid of no tsunami.
When people believe that survival is negotiable, they can be wonderfully creative. All it takes is the audacity to imagine that our behavior matters.
The Unthinkable is a remarkable work of nonfiction, realistic without pessimism, and full of personal, eye opening stories of disaster. At it's core, it is a book that believes in humanity as a group and as individuals. No only CAN we survive, we will.
I had this review 95% written and my computer died because its battery is crap. And now it's gone.
It was a bomb review. Just pretend you read it and it was REALLY good.
Unfortunately, you are left with the half-assed version of my review, because I've had an extremely rough week; I basically have the mental energy of a toad right now.
Veering away from the disaster that is my life, let's talk about The Unthinkable.
“Life becomes like molten metal,” he wrote. “Old customs crumble, and instability rules.”
For a book about panic, 9/11, hurricanes, and school shootings, The Unthinkable is infused with a comforting sense of hope. It's absolutely horrifying to hear the tales of a woman who stumbled down the stairs of the World Trade Center, or a teenager who lived through the Virginia Tech violence. But these tragic stories have a silver lining - humanity is better, kinder, and smarter than you'd ever think. Even in times of disaster, most people choose to be good. To do good.
And that's the first thing I want to commend Amanda Ripley on. She wrote a well-researched, thorough, optimistic book about disasters and the ways human nature moves though them. It's too easy to say it won't happen to me. Not this plane, not this storm. You've always been safe, so your brain sees no reason to think otherwise.
There's a lot of talk about our instinctual reactions in the face of danger. Why do we perform acts of heroism? How do crowds of people suddenly turn deadly? What physical reactions do our bodies go through when faced with unimaginable fear. How do we keep from freezing and move past denial ?
How are you most likely to die? Think for a moment: Given your own profile, what do you really think is most likely to kill you?
It's more a survival mentality type of story, but there's a bit of practical advice sprinkled throughout. Check your smoke detectors. Pay attention to emergency exit locations. Never try to drive through a flooded road. And finally, know what disasters you could personally face, and mentally rehearse for what you will do. For example, I live right on the border of tornado alley, as well as being close to a major fault line. So it makes much more sense for me to plan for either of those options as opposed to a tsunami.
I ain't afraid of no tsunami.
When people believe that survival is negotiable, they can be wonderfully creative. All it takes is the audacity to imagine that our behavior matters.
The Unthinkable is a remarkable work of nonfiction, realistic without pessimism, and full of personal, eye opening stories of disaster. At it's core, it is a book that believes in humanity as a group and as individuals. No only CAN we survive, we will.
June 19, 2008
Everyone should read this book! Besides being filled with utterly fascinating tales of how different people react during disasters (did you know panic is actually an extremely rare response?) it gives very helpful ideas/plans for how to prepare yourself mentally for being involved in one. This is the type of book you're always reading bits aloud to whoever happens to be in the room; I cannot stress how terrific and interesting it is...just knowing the most common reasons people die in disasters could save you, because these reasons are not at all what you're always believed!
September 26, 2019
A couple months ago, my place of employment sent me to a Readiness Conference. I fan-girled out listening to Dr. Kevin Menes talk about his experience in the emergency department responding to the Las Vegas shooting aftermath. Seriously. The guy deserves a medal and is a walking superhero in health care. The next session was on responding to shooters in the work force.
The thing that both Dr. Menes and the expert shooter response trainers continued to reiterate is something I completely agree with. But it took my belief from a personal anecdote to something with concrete data: when tragedy strikes, YOU are the first responder. Not 911. So what are you doing to be ready? What makes you confident you are as ready as you can be?
This book was referenced several times, and I immediately put it on my short list to read. It's now on my short list to buy.
Phenomenal book. There's still a long way to go, and I've had a method of self-defense for years, but this takes it to a whole new level. When I sit in a restaurant now, I know the exits. When I'm going around corners, I look for the hallway mirrors. And a million other small awareness things.
The book breaks down behavioral response to disaster, propensity for certain behaviors during disaster, and pushes the reader towards readiness. Not in order to instill anxiety in the ready, but to instill confidence because we know what the heck we would do IF. We've wrestled those demons and we're at peace with a plan.
Beyond fascinating and practical. Highly recommend.
I'd rate this a PG-13 for heavy adult material, swearing, and scenes of death and destruction.
The thing that both Dr. Menes and the expert shooter response trainers continued to reiterate is something I completely agree with. But it took my belief from a personal anecdote to something with concrete data: when tragedy strikes, YOU are the first responder. Not 911. So what are you doing to be ready? What makes you confident you are as ready as you can be?
This book was referenced several times, and I immediately put it on my short list to read. It's now on my short list to buy.
Phenomenal book. There's still a long way to go, and I've had a method of self-defense for years, but this takes it to a whole new level. When I sit in a restaurant now, I know the exits. When I'm going around corners, I look for the hallway mirrors. And a million other small awareness things.
The book breaks down behavioral response to disaster, propensity for certain behaviors during disaster, and pushes the reader towards readiness. Not in order to instill anxiety in the ready, but to instill confidence because we know what the heck we would do IF. We've wrestled those demons and we're at peace with a plan.
Beyond fascinating and practical. Highly recommend.
I'd rate this a PG-13 for heavy adult material, swearing, and scenes of death and destruction.
June 7, 2013
Kinda disappointed to be honest. I mean, it is an engaging read and the her writing style is very readable, which is why I'm so frustrated with how mediocre the actual content was. I think my expectations were misled by the subtitle on the cover - "Who Survives When Disaster Strikes and Why". From the subtitle I was expecting an eye-opening, thought-provoking book based on scientific studies and statistical research similar to Freakonomics and The Tipping Point etc, but what we got were psychological profiles of the different human responses to disaster. Which is interesting enough as it is, but Ripley doesn't quite tell us why people with these particular traits survive, or at least, she doesn't really link her arguments and points well, so each section feels very disjointed and muddled and the point is lost in there somewhere.
April 27, 2024
I wish I could give this book six stars. It's fascinating and will save lives.
April 4, 2016
This book tells you many useful things about survival, human's mind and disasters, and I really enjoy the author's sense of humor as well. Informative, educational and effectively written. We need more non-fictional books like this.
PS: I really like how scientists are having all the fun when they run their experiments: (1) getting people to jump from building (with safety neat beneath) and (2) getting people to swim through a mazelike swimming pool, so they can analyze how human's brain would work at the state of crisis.
PS: I really like how scientists are having all the fun when they run their experiments: (1) getting people to jump from building (with safety neat beneath) and (2) getting people to swim through a mazelike swimming pool, so they can analyze how human's brain would work at the state of crisis.
October 26, 2023
I hate to fly, but if I want to see my oldest son who lives 1700 miles away, I pretty much have to. When I was four months pregnant with this son, I was on a flight that had a fire in the cabin shortly after takeoff, so the pilot told us we needed to assume the crash position, return to the airport, land on a runway surrounded by fire trucks, and exit using the wing evacuation slides. Everything turned out fine, but it was pretty darn scary at the time. I've been terrified to fly ever since, asking my doctor for four Xanax four times a year when I had to fly. She has become less willing to prescribe them, so now I just have a drink before boarding.
When I saw this book at the library, even the title made my heart pound, but I decided to check it out and face my fear. Instead of being scary, I found this book to be interesting, informative, empowering, and a positive look at how people react when faced with a disaster. I hope I never have to learn what my "disaster personality" (how you respond in a crisis) would be if I was in the middle of a real disaster, but this book has given me a lot to think about, and at least listen to the safety presentation before takeoff, identify the plane exits as instructed, and learn where the fire exits are when I check into a hotel. I'm still afraid to fly, but after reading The Unthinkable, I can recognize that as an emotional response, and move beyond it by planning, preparation, practicing, and executing my plan. It's a fine line between telling yourself that the chances of a disaster happening to you or a loved one are slim and expecting disasters around every corner, but The Unthinkable provides an educational, logical, and positive approach to risk, fear, and disaster planning.
When I saw this book at the library, even the title made my heart pound, but I decided to check it out and face my fear. Instead of being scary, I found this book to be interesting, informative, empowering, and a positive look at how people react when faced with a disaster. I hope I never have to learn what my "disaster personality" (how you respond in a crisis) would be if I was in the middle of a real disaster, but this book has given me a lot to think about, and at least listen to the safety presentation before takeoff, identify the plane exits as instructed, and learn where the fire exits are when I check into a hotel. I'm still afraid to fly, but after reading The Unthinkable, I can recognize that as an emotional response, and move beyond it by planning, preparation, practicing, and executing my plan. It's a fine line between telling yourself that the chances of a disaster happening to you or a loved one are slim and expecting disasters around every corner, but The Unthinkable provides an educational, logical, and positive approach to risk, fear, and disaster planning.
April 6, 2020
An exceptional book about who survives and who doesn't in a disaster, Amanda Ripley writes:
"[W]e flirt shamelessly with risk today, constructing city skylines in hurricane alleys and neighborhoods on top of fault lines. Largely because of where we live, disasters have become more frequent and more expensive. But as we build ever more impressive buildings and airplanes, we do less and less to build better survivors. How did we get this way? The more I learned, the more I wondered how much of our survival behaviors—and misbehaviors—could be explained by evolution. After all, we evolved to escape predators, not buildings that reach a quarter mile into the sky. Has technology simply outpaced our survival mechanisms? But there are two kinds of evolution: the genetic kind and the cultural kind. Both shape our behavior, and the cultural kind has gotten a lot faster. We now have many ways to create “instincts”: we can learn to do better or worse. We can pass on traditions about how to deal with modern risks, just as we pass on language."
"[W]e flirt shamelessly with risk today, constructing city skylines in hurricane alleys and neighborhoods on top of fault lines. Largely because of where we live, disasters have become more frequent and more expensive. But as we build ever more impressive buildings and airplanes, we do less and less to build better survivors. How did we get this way? The more I learned, the more I wondered how much of our survival behaviors—and misbehaviors—could be explained by evolution. After all, we evolved to escape predators, not buildings that reach a quarter mile into the sky. Has technology simply outpaced our survival mechanisms? But there are two kinds of evolution: the genetic kind and the cultural kind. Both shape our behavior, and the cultural kind has gotten a lot faster. We now have many ways to create “instincts”: we can learn to do better or worse. We can pass on traditions about how to deal with modern risks, just as we pass on language."
August 29, 2010
A successful journalist, Ripley can really smith words.This piece reads fast and easily. Also, without a doubt she introduces some interesting concepts about behavior of human beings in seriously threatening situations. I just wish that her conclusions were drawn more from scientific data and less from anecdotes and memories of victims.
September 27, 2016
Uma boa leitura sobre comportamento humano e desastres. Como nos acostumamos com saídas de incêndio, alarmes e outras coisas durante a rotina, de maneira que são esquecidos durante um desastre. O que leva as pessoas a negarem o perigo e as etapas entre reconhecer e aceitar uma situação perigosa, com mais conteúdo sobre cognição e a pesquisa de Thinking, Fast and Slow (que vejo cada vez mais em todo tipo de livro). E uma parte sobre como as pessoas reagem ao desastre, seja paralisando ou agindo como heróis. Cobre muito bem ao que se propõe.
May 13, 2025
In her 2008 book The Unthinkable, journalist Amanda Ripley investigates what human behavior in the face of traumatic events, particularly natural disasters (fires, earthquakes, tsunamis, hurricanes) and man-made disasters (shipwrecks, plane crashes, terrorist attacks, school shootings, hostage situations, etc.). Specifically, she explores why some people have better survival instincts and behaviors than others - which she finds to be a mix of uncontrollable factors (genetics and personality traits) and controllable ones (mental and physical preparation). She profiles particularly notable people who survived or died helping others (or failing to help themselves) in many disasters prior to 2008, including 9/11 (particularly the foresight and heroism of Morgan Stanley security director Rick Rescorla), Hurricane Katrina, the 1977 Beverly Hills Supper Club fire, and Air Florida Flight 90's crash into the frozen Potomac in January 1982.
I found this book insightful and very interesting, with largely original (at least to me) content.
Further reading: disaster preparedness in the 21st century
The Big Ones: How Natural Disasters Have Shaped Us and What We Can Do about Them by Lucy Jones
Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago by Eric Klinenberg
The Big Nine: How the Tech Titans and Their Thinking Machines Could Warp Humanity by Amy Webb
My statistics:
Book 147 for 2025
Book 2073 cumulatively
I found this book insightful and very interesting, with largely original (at least to me) content.
Further reading: disaster preparedness in the 21st century
The Big Ones: How Natural Disasters Have Shaped Us and What We Can Do about Them by Lucy Jones
Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago by Eric Klinenberg
The Big Nine: How the Tech Titans and Their Thinking Machines Could Warp Humanity by Amy Webb
My statistics:
Book 147 for 2025
Book 2073 cumulatively
November 1, 2024
4✨
The Unthinkable: Who Survives When Disaster Strikes - and Why is a nonfiction book by Amanda Ripley that explores the human factor in different life and death situations through lens of things like psychology, physiology, and more.
It deals with tragedies both natural and human-caused, and uses these events to analyze human behavior and human interaction. We read accounts of first-hand survivors, as well as more literature-review style research writing.
Using specific events and tying them to specific actions of individuals during them made this a deep, and sometimes dark, but overall interesting read. I would’ve loved to have seen more of this, more specific event examples and survivor stories, then a little analysis, versus more leaning on qualitative research.
The Unthinkable: Who Survives When Disaster Strikes - and Why is a nonfiction book by Amanda Ripley that explores the human factor in different life and death situations through lens of things like psychology, physiology, and more.
It deals with tragedies both natural and human-caused, and uses these events to analyze human behavior and human interaction. We read accounts of first-hand survivors, as well as more literature-review style research writing.
Using specific events and tying them to specific actions of individuals during them made this a deep, and sometimes dark, but overall interesting read. I would’ve loved to have seen more of this, more specific event examples and survivor stories, then a little analysis, versus more leaning on qualitative research.
February 7, 2016
I am, admittedly, very interested in disasters and their aftermath. I have been ever since I was a girl - I remember reading about The Titanic with fascination. I was obsessed with Pompeii for a while. Earthquakes, tsunamis, floods, all of it. Maybe it's because when I was young my town flooded for several days, our basement filling with water and my dad away all day filling sandbags as the streets flowed like a river. I don't know. But I've always had a healthy fear of and fascination with what happens when things go wrong.
When a friend recommended this book to me, I checked it out from the library right away and I'm glad I did. Ripley's writing style is both informative - citing studies and interviewing researchers in the field of human stress and behavior - as well as casual in tone. She interviews disaster survivors from 9-11, fires, active shooting situations and plane crashes, giving insight into the different types of reactions that one can have when confronted with an extremely stressful situation. We learn about the three phases of a human's disaster response and how to help ourselves do a little better to ensure that we are more likely to be safe.
I found it fascinating - I wanted to bring up some of the ideas with people I talk to as well as apply some of her thoughts into my own life. It's straightforward and frightening sometimes but isn't trying to be scary - it's trying to inform and change behavior. Highly recommended for anyone who wants to feel more confident about how to keep themselves safe in those once-in-a-lifetime situations.
When a friend recommended this book to me, I checked it out from the library right away and I'm glad I did. Ripley's writing style is both informative - citing studies and interviewing researchers in the field of human stress and behavior - as well as casual in tone. She interviews disaster survivors from 9-11, fires, active shooting situations and plane crashes, giving insight into the different types of reactions that one can have when confronted with an extremely stressful situation. We learn about the three phases of a human's disaster response and how to help ourselves do a little better to ensure that we are more likely to be safe.
I found it fascinating - I wanted to bring up some of the ideas with people I talk to as well as apply some of her thoughts into my own life. It's straightforward and frightening sometimes but isn't trying to be scary - it's trying to inform and change behavior. Highly recommended for anyone who wants to feel more confident about how to keep themselves safe in those once-in-a-lifetime situations.
December 7, 2021
Probably 3.5 stars. I enjoyed the anecdotal stories and background, but perhaps I was disappointed at the lack of a clear "do this, not that" summation. Much of this is common sense, and we've heard it before.
The most important thing I got out of the book, is that it is an extremely common reaction to "freeze" when faced with a sudden/unexpected disaster, and it is common among all animals. Ripley makes a convincing case that it is an evolutionary adaption, and I think she is correct. Humans will look to see what others are doing when disaster strikes and will tend to seek consensus. This leads to "milling" behavior before people start taking action.
Short version: Read the emergency instructions and know where the emergency exits are on your flight.
The most important thing I got out of the book, is that it is an extremely common reaction to "freeze" when faced with a sudden/unexpected disaster, and it is common among all animals. Ripley makes a convincing case that it is an evolutionary adaption, and I think she is correct. Humans will look to see what others are doing when disaster strikes and will tend to seek consensus. This leads to "milling" behavior before people start taking action.
Short version: Read the emergency instructions and know where the emergency exits are on your flight.
April 3, 2016
This book was an amazing experience. I feel strengthened and prepared for any disaster that comes my way....well almost any disaster. This book has a great mix of psychology, disaster scenarios, personal stories, and scientific research. It makes me look at things in a new light. And it makes me want to be an emergency prepared nerd. Next time I go to a movie theater or get on a plane, I know I'll be checking for the emergency exits.
March 4, 2025
Let me start by saying this book would not be everyone's cup of tea. It is about something many of us take for granted. It is about escape and evacuation in the face of an emergency and about how to plan for these events. The author examines numerous cases from around the world. It SHOULD be something everyone should read and understand. It is one of the things I have spent the last 33 years teaching people.
Great Job! Highly recommended.
Great Job! Highly recommended.
August 30, 2025
This book was soooooooooooo interesting!!! HIGHLY recommend
September 25, 2024
This would’ve been a 4 star book if not for some problematic elements.
First, the good points. This was a well written and entertaining read. Other comments point out it was a little bloated and didn’t offer anything practical, true. But for what it was, stories about people who survive disasters and what psychological or social factors influence their behaviors, was very interesting.
The conclusion was decent though I would’ve liked more advice other than just “breathe” and practice fire drills though.
The new parts about trust were fascinating but failed to follow through.
Now the problematic bits. The people the author chose to interview, whose actions she praises or at least doesn’t challenge or critics is telling. She praises cops for turning off their brains and relying on instinct. Sure that probably DOES improve their survival but kills so many others. She pities a man who literally admitted to war crimes and empathizes for the trauma HE went through. And any mention of Israel was calculated saying things like “in Palestinian controlled West Bank”, do you mean Palestine? I held my breathe expecting her to justify genocide as a valid “survival” response but luckily she stopped short.
There were elements of this book that I might have been annoyed by and brushed off being written 15ish years ago. But this book just went through edits.
Really mixed feelings and not sure how likely I’d be to recommend it. I look forward to exploring the bibliography though!
First, the good points. This was a well written and entertaining read. Other comments point out it was a little bloated and didn’t offer anything practical, true. But for what it was, stories about people who survive disasters and what psychological or social factors influence their behaviors, was very interesting.
The conclusion was decent though I would’ve liked more advice other than just “breathe” and practice fire drills though.
The new parts about trust were fascinating but failed to follow through.
Now the problematic bits. The people the author chose to interview, whose actions she praises or at least doesn’t challenge or critics is telling. She praises cops for turning off their brains and relying on instinct. Sure that probably DOES improve their survival but kills so many others. She pities a man who literally admitted to war crimes and empathizes for the trauma HE went through. And any mention of Israel was calculated saying things like “in Palestinian controlled West Bank”, do you mean Palestine? I held my breathe expecting her to justify genocide as a valid “survival” response but luckily she stopped short.
There were elements of this book that I might have been annoyed by and brushed off being written 15ish years ago. But this book just went through edits.
Really mixed feelings and not sure how likely I’d be to recommend it. I look forward to exploring the bibliography though!
December 13, 2021
If you're new to survival nonfiction, please start with this book! It's a great introduction. The author interviews survivors of disasters and analyzes why they survived while others didn't. How does the human brain react to a sudden catastrophe? The Unthinkable is an engaging, readable book that will (hopefully) make you aware of how your brain might sabotage you in an emergency. (Don't you dare grab your luggage from the overhead bin if your plane is on fire. People die from smoke inhalation because other people won't leave their luggage alone. You need to fight your brain's programming: Let the stuff burn; don't let the humans burn!)
If you've read a bunch of books about survival, then there isn't a ton of new information in this one. The author kept referencing other survival books, and I kept saying, "I've read that. And that. And that." It is an excellent starting point, though. Well-researched and easy to understand.
If you've read a bunch of books about survival, then there isn't a ton of new information in this one. The author kept referencing other survival books, and I kept saying, "I've read that. And that. And that." It is an excellent starting point, though. Well-researched and easy to understand.
January 7, 2024
Überleben. Die Autorin hat sich alle Statistiken zu diesem Thema angeschaut und sich damit beschäftigt, was das Überleben beeinflusst. Gibt es geschlechterspezifische Merkmale? Gibt es individuell bezogene Merkmale wie flight oder fight Mechanismen? Kann sogar die Herkunft eine Rolle spielen? Dabei untersucht sie insbesondere weltbekannte Katastrophen, von 9/11 bis Flugzeugabstürze oder Brände. Was steigert die Überlebenschance?
Ein sehr spannendes Buch.
Ein sehr spannendes Buch.
October 24, 2014
The Unthinkable: Who Survives When Disaster Strikes – and Why by Amanda Ripley
“The Unthinkable” is a captivating book that looks at what happens in the midst of disaster; it’s about the process of survival. Award-winning investigative journalist, Amanda Ripley combines a fascinating topic and engaging writing to produce a real gem. This enthralling 290-page book is broken out cleverly in three parts: 1. Denial, 2. Deliberation, and 3. The Decisive Moment.
Positives:
1. High-quality book. It’s well-researched and well-written.
2. A fascinating topic that captures what goes on in the minds of those in the midst of a disaster.
3. It reads like an exciting action plot complemented nicely by sound science research.
4. I really liked Ripley’s approach. The book is structured cleverly to match the three phases of the survival arc: denial, deliberation and decisiveness. It flows beautifully and an excellent use of flashbacks to tease the readers to satisfactory insights. Fantastic!
5. One of the few books that in fact may help you survive a disaster. I loved the overall tone of the book; you don’t get a sense of dire but one of purpose and better understanding of why people react the way they do.
6. Every chapter highlights a disaster and proceeds to introduce the people involved and their state of minds as the disaster develops. “We worry about horrible things happening to us, but we don’t know much about what it actually feels like. I wondered what they had learned.”
7. This book succeeds because: Ripley has endless curiosity for the topic, conviction, applies sound logic backed by good science research, and great storytelling. In the author’s notes she discloses her sound methodology.
8. Great use of sound research. “Laughter—or silence—is a classic manifestation of denial, as is delay.”
9. Many facts shared throughout the book, “The fires caused by the 9/11 attacks were the deadliest in American history, killing 2,666 people.”
10. A very interesting look at risks and unintended consequences. “But something terrible happened in the name of common sense. In the two years after 9/11, an estimated 2,302 additional people were likely killed because they drove instead of flew, according to a 2006 study of road accidents in America by three Cornell University professors.”
11. Practical advice. “Warnings need to tell people what to do. Since people aren’t sure what action they should take in response to an Orange Alert for terrorism, the color codes are unsatisfying—like someone clinking a glass to give a toast and then standing there in silence.”
12. Great job of describing what happens to us during disasters, the physiology of fear. “This curious sense of aloofness, called ‘dissociation,’ can feel subtle. In a study of 115 police officers involved in serious shootings, 90 percent reported having some kind of dissociative symptom—from numbing to a loss of awareness to memory problems. At its most extreme, dissociation can take the form of an out-of-body experience.” Great stuff!
13. Understanding our brains. “The brain literally changes in structure and function throughout our lives, depending on what we do.”
14. Great stories throughout the book. The Dominican Republic embassy hostage situation in Columbia was fascinating because it was told from the perspective of the hostage and the hostage takers.
15. A look at resilience. “Resilience is a precious skill. People who have it tend to also have three underlying advantages: a belief that they can influence life events; a tendency to find meaningful purpose in life’s turmoil; and a conviction that they can learn from both positive and negative experiences. These beliefs act as a sort of buffer, cushioning the blow of any given disaster.”
16. The role groupthink plays during disasters. “Groupthink, then, is the adaptive strategy of prioritizing group harmony. Dissent is uncomfortable for the group because it can be dangerous to the individual. Sometimes, when we appear to value the group ahead of our own skin, we are actually doing something else altogether.”
17. An excellent chapter on panic exemplified by a stampede. The three conditions of panic.
18. A chapter that my reveal to you what you would do in a disaster. “Many go on to experience extreme remorse because they think they simply surrendered to their attacker, Gallup has found. “They don’t realize that what they did may have been a very adaptive reaction.” Paralysis can also make prosecution of the rapist much more difficult, since the lack of struggle may look a lot like consent.”
19. Compelling arguments that resonate. “I told him that our behavior is almost always a product of our genetics and our experience.”
20. So what makes a hero, a rescuer? “Rescuers tended to have had healthier and closer relationships with their parents. They were also more likely to have had friends of different religions and classes. Their most important quality seemed to be empathy.”
21. Notes and formal bibliography provided.
Negatives:
1. Very little to criticize here but perhaps a lack of visual material such as charts, timetables or graphs may have added even more value to this fantastic book.
2. I’m being nitpicky but a where are they now appendix would have been icing on the cake. Ripley does such a great job of describing the people involved in these disasters that we as readers care about their well-being. I’m sure many readers would like to know how they are doing today. In many instances it is in fact part of the narrative as she describes them being interviewed and such.
In summary, as an avid reader of non-fiction you never know when you are going to find a gem that strikes all the right notes and this is such a book. It combines a fascinating topic such as what happens to people in the midst of disasters with scientific insights of why that is. It’s really a book on the science of how people react to disasters. Captivating! I highly recommend it!
Further recommendations: “The Smartest Kid in the World” by the same author, “Deep Survival” by Laurence Gonzales, “Survivor Personality” by Al Siebert, “Extreme Fear: The Science of Your Mind in Danger” by Jeff Wise, “Surviving the Extremes” by Kenneth Kamler, “Supersurvivors” by David B. Feldman, “Subliminal” by Leonard Mlodinow, “Thinking Fast and Slow” by Daniel Kahneman, “The Tell-Tale Brain” by V.S. Ramachandran, and “Incognito” by David Eagleman.
“The Unthinkable” is a captivating book that looks at what happens in the midst of disaster; it’s about the process of survival. Award-winning investigative journalist, Amanda Ripley combines a fascinating topic and engaging writing to produce a real gem. This enthralling 290-page book is broken out cleverly in three parts: 1. Denial, 2. Deliberation, and 3. The Decisive Moment.
Positives:
1. High-quality book. It’s well-researched and well-written.
2. A fascinating topic that captures what goes on in the minds of those in the midst of a disaster.
3. It reads like an exciting action plot complemented nicely by sound science research.
4. I really liked Ripley’s approach. The book is structured cleverly to match the three phases of the survival arc: denial, deliberation and decisiveness. It flows beautifully and an excellent use of flashbacks to tease the readers to satisfactory insights. Fantastic!
5. One of the few books that in fact may help you survive a disaster. I loved the overall tone of the book; you don’t get a sense of dire but one of purpose and better understanding of why people react the way they do.
6. Every chapter highlights a disaster and proceeds to introduce the people involved and their state of minds as the disaster develops. “We worry about horrible things happening to us, but we don’t know much about what it actually feels like. I wondered what they had learned.”
7. This book succeeds because: Ripley has endless curiosity for the topic, conviction, applies sound logic backed by good science research, and great storytelling. In the author’s notes she discloses her sound methodology.
8. Great use of sound research. “Laughter—or silence—is a classic manifestation of denial, as is delay.”
9. Many facts shared throughout the book, “The fires caused by the 9/11 attacks were the deadliest in American history, killing 2,666 people.”
10. A very interesting look at risks and unintended consequences. “But something terrible happened in the name of common sense. In the two years after 9/11, an estimated 2,302 additional people were likely killed because they drove instead of flew, according to a 2006 study of road accidents in America by three Cornell University professors.”
11. Practical advice. “Warnings need to tell people what to do. Since people aren’t sure what action they should take in response to an Orange Alert for terrorism, the color codes are unsatisfying—like someone clinking a glass to give a toast and then standing there in silence.”
12. Great job of describing what happens to us during disasters, the physiology of fear. “This curious sense of aloofness, called ‘dissociation,’ can feel subtle. In a study of 115 police officers involved in serious shootings, 90 percent reported having some kind of dissociative symptom—from numbing to a loss of awareness to memory problems. At its most extreme, dissociation can take the form of an out-of-body experience.” Great stuff!
13. Understanding our brains. “The brain literally changes in structure and function throughout our lives, depending on what we do.”
14. Great stories throughout the book. The Dominican Republic embassy hostage situation in Columbia was fascinating because it was told from the perspective of the hostage and the hostage takers.
15. A look at resilience. “Resilience is a precious skill. People who have it tend to also have three underlying advantages: a belief that they can influence life events; a tendency to find meaningful purpose in life’s turmoil; and a conviction that they can learn from both positive and negative experiences. These beliefs act as a sort of buffer, cushioning the blow of any given disaster.”
16. The role groupthink plays during disasters. “Groupthink, then, is the adaptive strategy of prioritizing group harmony. Dissent is uncomfortable for the group because it can be dangerous to the individual. Sometimes, when we appear to value the group ahead of our own skin, we are actually doing something else altogether.”
17. An excellent chapter on panic exemplified by a stampede. The three conditions of panic.
18. A chapter that my reveal to you what you would do in a disaster. “Many go on to experience extreme remorse because they think they simply surrendered to their attacker, Gallup has found. “They don’t realize that what they did may have been a very adaptive reaction.” Paralysis can also make prosecution of the rapist much more difficult, since the lack of struggle may look a lot like consent.”
19. Compelling arguments that resonate. “I told him that our behavior is almost always a product of our genetics and our experience.”
20. So what makes a hero, a rescuer? “Rescuers tended to have had healthier and closer relationships with their parents. They were also more likely to have had friends of different religions and classes. Their most important quality seemed to be empathy.”
21. Notes and formal bibliography provided.
Negatives:
1. Very little to criticize here but perhaps a lack of visual material such as charts, timetables or graphs may have added even more value to this fantastic book.
2. I’m being nitpicky but a where are they now appendix would have been icing on the cake. Ripley does such a great job of describing the people involved in these disasters that we as readers care about their well-being. I’m sure many readers would like to know how they are doing today. In many instances it is in fact part of the narrative as she describes them being interviewed and such.
In summary, as an avid reader of non-fiction you never know when you are going to find a gem that strikes all the right notes and this is such a book. It combines a fascinating topic such as what happens to people in the midst of disasters with scientific insights of why that is. It’s really a book on the science of how people react to disasters. Captivating! I highly recommend it!
Further recommendations: “The Smartest Kid in the World” by the same author, “Deep Survival” by Laurence Gonzales, “Survivor Personality” by Al Siebert, “Extreme Fear: The Science of Your Mind in Danger” by Jeff Wise, “Surviving the Extremes” by Kenneth Kamler, “Supersurvivors” by David B. Feldman, “Subliminal” by Leonard Mlodinow, “Thinking Fast and Slow” by Daniel Kahneman, “The Tell-Tale Brain” by V.S. Ramachandran, and “Incognito” by David Eagleman.
January 12, 2026
I tend to be the kind of person that doesn’t consider the risk of disasters because I personally believe the chance of them happening to me is miniscule. Yes, I am culpable of not listening to the safety briefings on planes. I went into *The Unthinkable* with an open mind though, I love human psychology and I suppose it is beneficial to consider the risks I face in everyday life. There was a lot I got out of it for sure, Ripley, covers all kinds of disasters and how people have behave during them. Like how many people were much slower to leave the Twin Towers during 9/11, or how people try to grab their belongings in a plane crash. I feel like I gained a much better understanding of how I’m most likely to react in a disaster and how to prepare for those to increase my chance of survival should that situation ever arise. One of my favorite aspects of the book were actually the survivor interviews, the stories of triumph through disaster were heartwarming.
My main complaint from the audiobook is that I found it fairly disjointed at times, my brain struggled to make connections from the topics she was talking about. She would jump fairly quickly from disaster to disaster and I had a hard time discerning her main argument. I also just found it repetitive at times, and it felt like she’d make the same point just phrase it in different ways, her ‘Denial” chapter and ‘Freeze’ chapter for instance. Perhaps this experience doesn’t carry over to book. Despite my gripes I did find *The Unthinkable* to be valuable and I will likely think back to it often when considering the risks of my everyday life. No promises on listening to the safety briefings on planes though.
My main complaint from the audiobook is that I found it fairly disjointed at times, my brain struggled to make connections from the topics she was talking about. She would jump fairly quickly from disaster to disaster and I had a hard time discerning her main argument. I also just found it repetitive at times, and it felt like she’d make the same point just phrase it in different ways, her ‘Denial” chapter and ‘Freeze’ chapter for instance. Perhaps this experience doesn’t carry over to book. Despite my gripes I did find *The Unthinkable* to be valuable and I will likely think back to it often when considering the risks of my everyday life. No promises on listening to the safety briefings on planes though.
April 29, 2024
I found this book very interesting. Although it may not, and is not expected to, save the reader from every possible disaster, for those disasters that may be survivable, this book addresses various human responses and how understanding these responses works to the reader's advantage. Some valuable 'take aways' include it will probably be other people who do the saving and not so much first responders who come later (although there certainly are cases where it was the first responders with the equipment and training who save people). The positive uptake is regular people are capable of far more than the authorities and even we expect although it's also true that in disasters, instead of panicking, many people chose to do nothing as in ignoring the disaster. The book is organized around various responses such as freezing, panicking, and heroism and includes survivor interviews. Back to panicking, this book gives a good explanation of those situations in which people panic as to what triggers it. Everyone needs an edge and I'm glad I read this to get an 'edge'. My rating is 5 stars.
March 7, 2024
I waited months for this book to be available through my library and it was worth it. By far, one of the most fascinating and compelling books I’ve read in my entire life; giving it 5 stars doesn’t feel anywhere close to sufficient. Touching on topics of human psychology, neuroscience, and biology of people in disaster (although not as intricately as the title may imply), the author retells people’s stories of what they did (or didn’t do) when finding themselves in a life threatening situation. Despite more of a storytelling approach to this topic than getting into the nitty gritty of the science, I’m nowhere close to disappointed. Heartbreaking at times and gracefully written, you end each chapter knowing you will never forget their stories or their names, and leave the book feeling a hope for humanity.
October 8, 2024
An excellent read. It is ok to be prepared in the event of a disaster and it doesn't mean you have to be a doomsday prepper. But awareness of one's surroundings, of exits in a building, and having a plan can be the difference between surviving or not. Meticulously researched and documented. I will probably read it again just to keep it fresh in my mind.
March 5, 2025
I was a bit worried reading this would amp up my anxiety levels, not something I need help amping up with these days, and so I was pleased that instead of jittery fear I felt calmer after reading this. I’m the type of person that likes to plan for every contingency - when I had to carry around a diaper bag, it was insanely full, packed for every possible issue that might arise. Same when I had a car, I had EVERYTHING in my trunk and glovebox. Spare change of clothes? Check. Flashlight? Check. Bandaids? Check. Down to crazy stuff like a roll of tape and a bathing suit in case I stumble across a pool. I also like my mind to be full of potential information that might help and this book provides that in spades. Oh, it’s not a doomsday prepper book, telling you how many cases of water you need, it’s more about prepping your mind.
"The more prepared you are, the more in control you feel, and the less fear you will experience."
I already know if, God forbid, I am in a disaster, I will be the type of person who freezes. Deer in a headlight, that is me. It was interesting learning about why humans react that way and that it is a very common reaction. Panic and heroism are behaviors highlighted more in society but they are not as common reactions. It turns out that breathing, beloved of yoga and meditation teachers everywhere, is the number one way to fight against your fear reaction. Just breathe. It turns out that the military and police/firefighters recommend the same thing but butch it up by calling it “tactical breathing”. First thing to do when the shit hits the fan is some box breathing. Seriously.
Controlled breathing is like a bridge in the brain between the conscious and unconscious.
People perform best when their heart rates are between 115 - 145 beats per minute (resting heart rate is usually about 75 bpm).At this range, people tend to react quickly, see clearly, and manage complex motor skills. After about 145 bpm, people begin to deteriorate. Their voices begin to shake, probably because their blood has concentrated toward their core, shutting down the complex motor control of the larynx and leaving the face pale and the hands clumsy. Vision, hearing, and depth perception can also start to decline. The heart rate of untrained people in life-or-death situations can instantly shoot up to 200 bpm-a stratospheric level that is hard to negotiate. Box breathing, guys! Lower that panic HR!
Another fact I learned about is the tendency of humans in a disaster to stop and gather some shit before fleeing. OK, on the surface this seems like a good idea. See my discussion above about over-packing my bags and cars. However, a lot of times this is a bad idea. Especially in a plane crash. Don’t be the dummy grabbing your bag. It turns out that your bag can injure someone when going down the steep escape slide. It can also block the aisle and generally slow you down. Assuming you survive fleeing the plane you can sue the airline for some money to replace your stuff. But you gotta survive first! Put the bag down! The story of people inside the towers during 9/11 who stopped to grab random shit like a stapler, a book they were reading etc before evacuating was eye-opening. That dithering around, grabbing your sweater and logging off your computer, stop it. Don’t do it. Try and kick start that braindead panic freeze by yelling at yourself to MOVE. Airlines learned to train flight attendants to scream MOVE HURRY UP to passengers for exactly this sort of default behavior people have.
Speaking of being in a plane crash, as well as not grabbing stuff and hurrying up and moving, you should also count how many rows away you are from the exit. It turns out that the airplane will fill up with dense smoke surprisingly quick and you most likely will not be able to see where the exit is. Also, READ THE HANDOUT that is in the pocket in front of your seat. Each plane is slightly different and you should assume you know what to do. I also learned that if you have to put on the life vest, you gotta wait until you are in the water. I know, I know! That sounds like a tough thing to wait to do. But doing it while on the plane or the slide will impede your movement and it might even prevent you from exiting the plane. I knew already about putting on your own oxygen mask first cause you only have like 15 seconds before you become unconscious. Something she did not mention but I am going to start packing in my purse is a bandana to wet with my water bottle I always pack. Smoke is how most people get hurt so wetting a bandana and tying it around my nose/mouth to wear as I scurry along bag free to the emergency exit is how I plan to react.
The book also goes into a lot of details about fire. I saw the movie The Towering Inferno as a small child and boy it did a number on me, I am terrified of fire. What were my parents thinking letting me watch that at such an impressionable age? One great piece of fire advice is that whenever you are staying in a hotel, don’t just note where the staircase is but go down it at least once to familiarize yourself. See where you land when you get out, it’s usually some weird location. I work from home but for those of you who work in office, take the stairs at least once a week. It turns out the people in the World Trade Center who had taken the stairs before had a higher rate of escape. During a disaster your lizard brain takes over and you are not going to be thinking clearly. If you have the muscle memory of going down the stairs that will be very very helpful.
I was relieved to learn that my odds of experiencing a personal home fire(not a mass wildfire which is a different risk) are fairly low because I am not poor. I live in a home with working fire alarms and sprinklers and my home is a fairly modern building with good construction. Reading about the training firefighters go through was intense. People die every year while training!! And there is a 20% failure rate of people who go through the training. It has always seemed like an incredibly intense frightening job to have and after reading this book I learned my impressions are correct. FIrefighters are a different breed from me, that’s for sure!
There is a long section in the book about the head of security at the Morgan Stanley offices in the World Trade Center and how his prepping of the company saved basically everyone except for the few dummies who stayed behind gathering shit or freezing. And the security head who was so awesome also died! Because him and four of his staff went back to do a sweep of the office making sure it was clear. Awww! That is so tragic! What a hero this guy was! He did emergency fire drills for years, making everyone walk down all those stairs. One thing that hadn’t occurred to me was the flow of people on a stairwell. He had the people on the top floor go first, 2 by 2 down the stairs like Noah’s Ark, and once all the people on that top floor passed, THEN the next floor would start to head down. Genius. No bottlenecks, no people being overly polite, pausing the evacuation to say “no, after you, please”. He screamed at everyone to move, like flight attendants do, to jumpstart people out of their denial and freezing.
Besides remembering to breathe deeply and to educate yourself about escape routes, another factor you can work on is your weight. In disasters heavy people are more likely to die than thin people. They don’t move as quickly. Their bodies also have more difficulty handling intense heat. They need more space, so they have more trouble escaping. Body fat changes crowd dynamics. When people walk down a staircase, they sway slightly from side to side, taking up more space than their actual body width. The heavier people are, the slower they move and the more they sway-and the fewer people can fit down a staircase. If you need another reason to work on your exercise and diet, here it is!
Some quotes to help me recall the book:
Cirillo began training other officers with positive visualization exercises. Instead of telling them, "If you jerk the trigger, you will miss the target," he would say: "As you focus on the sights while compressing the trigger smoothly, you will easily achieve a good shot."
Kids remember stop, drop, and roll because we make them rehearse it, not because we make them say it
The brain literally changes in structure and function throughout our lives, depending on what we do. Blind people who read Braille increase the size of the brain region that processes touch. Neuroplasticity For The Win!
About 30 percent of white males see very little risk in most threats. They have a few subtle things in common. They like the world of status, hierarchy, and power. They believed in technology. They are more likely than any other group to disagree with the statement that people should be treated more equally.Hmmmm
On 9/11, women were almost twice as likely to get injured while evacuating, according to the Columbia study. Was it a question of strength? Confidence? Fear? No, it was the high heeled shoes.
Most people in high-income countries do not die in disasters; they die of diseases. You are more likely to die of food poisoning than you are of drowning. It is, however, virtually certain that you will be affected by a disaster in the years to come
Why do people procrastinate in a disaster? The denial phase is a humbling one.We have a tendency to believe that everything is OK because, well, it almost always has been before. All of us have been in situations that looked ominous, and they almost always turn out to be innocuous. If we behave otherwise, we risk social embarrassment by over-reacting. So we err on the side of underreacting.
The best warnings are like the best ads: consistent, easily understood, specific, frequently repeated, personal, accurate, and targeted.
When it comes to disaster risk, there's little to be gained by watching TV news segments: repeatedly absorbing video clips can be particularly damaging. TV makes us worry about the wrong things.Your brain is better at filtering out media hype when it is reading. Words have less emotional salience than images. So it's much healthier to read the news than watch OMG THIS. I swear, part of the huge problem in this country is that people watch their news instead of reading. DO NOT WATCH TV NEWS. NO TIK TOK. NO REELS. Get your information from reading, for Pete’s sake.
Resilience is a precious skill. People who have it tend to also have three underlying advantages:
a belief that they can influence life events; a tendency to find meaningful purpose in life's turmoil; and a conviction that they can learn from both positive and negative experiences. These beliefs act as a sort of buffer, cushioning the blow of anv aiven disaster.
Trauma, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder
Special Forces soldiers produced significantly more of something called "neuropeptide y" a compound that among other things helps you stay focused on a task under stress. In civilian life, people with anxiety disorders or depression tend to have lower levels of neuropep-tide Y. Researchers could literally tell whether someone was a member of the Special Forces unit just by looking at their blood results.The less a soldier dissociated -especially under normal conditions-the more neuropeptide Y he produced, and the better he performed. A simple blood test could potentially save soldiers the trouble of even trying to endure the Special Forces selection process."If you just screened those people out at the beginning, it would save the army millions of dollars. But the generals aren't keen on that idea for philosophical reasons."
The amount of trauma, the degree of family and mental health support for the survivor-these things can massively compound or contain the damage. Suffering accumulates, like debt.
Noise is the other thing most people do not expect in fires. In general, noise dramatically increases stress, and stress, as we know, makes it much harder to think and make decisions. Fire noise! I never even thought about that!
One hour before the wave hit, the elephants headed to high ground -some of them even breaking their chains to get there.After the tsunami, wildlife officials at Sri Lanka's Yala National Park were shocked to find that hundreds of elephants, monkeys, tigers, and deer had survived unharmed. Ooooh, so fascinating, the animals could sense the tsunami!
People who die in crowd crushes do not usually die from trampling. They die from asphyxiation. The pressure from all sides makes it impossible to breathe, much like getting squeezed in a trash compactor. Once you are in a crowd crush, there is little you can do to save yourself. If possible, try gradually working your way to the outside of the crowd by stepping sideways as the crowd moves backward.
Putting a column in front of an exit is an elegant way to help prevent clogging. Huh! I never would have thought that would help.
The best way to get the brain to perform under extreme stress is to repeatedly run it through rehearsals beforehand. Or as the military puts it, the "Eight P's»: "Proper prior planning and preparation prevents piss-poor performance."
In most major disasters, the people who will save you will not be wearing badges. They will be your neighbors and your co-workers.
The most deadly threats in most places are fire, flood, lightning, extreme heat, and suicide.
"The more prepared you are, the more in control you feel, and the less fear you will experience."
I already know if, God forbid, I am in a disaster, I will be the type of person who freezes. Deer in a headlight, that is me. It was interesting learning about why humans react that way and that it is a very common reaction. Panic and heroism are behaviors highlighted more in society but they are not as common reactions. It turns out that breathing, beloved of yoga and meditation teachers everywhere, is the number one way to fight against your fear reaction. Just breathe. It turns out that the military and police/firefighters recommend the same thing but butch it up by calling it “tactical breathing”. First thing to do when the shit hits the fan is some box breathing. Seriously.
Controlled breathing is like a bridge in the brain between the conscious and unconscious.
People perform best when their heart rates are between 115 - 145 beats per minute (resting heart rate is usually about 75 bpm).At this range, people tend to react quickly, see clearly, and manage complex motor skills. After about 145 bpm, people begin to deteriorate. Their voices begin to shake, probably because their blood has concentrated toward their core, shutting down the complex motor control of the larynx and leaving the face pale and the hands clumsy. Vision, hearing, and depth perception can also start to decline. The heart rate of untrained people in life-or-death situations can instantly shoot up to 200 bpm-a stratospheric level that is hard to negotiate. Box breathing, guys! Lower that panic HR!
Another fact I learned about is the tendency of humans in a disaster to stop and gather some shit before fleeing. OK, on the surface this seems like a good idea. See my discussion above about over-packing my bags and cars. However, a lot of times this is a bad idea. Especially in a plane crash. Don’t be the dummy grabbing your bag. It turns out that your bag can injure someone when going down the steep escape slide. It can also block the aisle and generally slow you down. Assuming you survive fleeing the plane you can sue the airline for some money to replace your stuff. But you gotta survive first! Put the bag down! The story of people inside the towers during 9/11 who stopped to grab random shit like a stapler, a book they were reading etc before evacuating was eye-opening. That dithering around, grabbing your sweater and logging off your computer, stop it. Don’t do it. Try and kick start that braindead panic freeze by yelling at yourself to MOVE. Airlines learned to train flight attendants to scream MOVE HURRY UP to passengers for exactly this sort of default behavior people have.
Speaking of being in a plane crash, as well as not grabbing stuff and hurrying up and moving, you should also count how many rows away you are from the exit. It turns out that the airplane will fill up with dense smoke surprisingly quick and you most likely will not be able to see where the exit is. Also, READ THE HANDOUT that is in the pocket in front of your seat. Each plane is slightly different and you should assume you know what to do. I also learned that if you have to put on the life vest, you gotta wait until you are in the water. I know, I know! That sounds like a tough thing to wait to do. But doing it while on the plane or the slide will impede your movement and it might even prevent you from exiting the plane. I knew already about putting on your own oxygen mask first cause you only have like 15 seconds before you become unconscious. Something she did not mention but I am going to start packing in my purse is a bandana to wet with my water bottle I always pack. Smoke is how most people get hurt so wetting a bandana and tying it around my nose/mouth to wear as I scurry along bag free to the emergency exit is how I plan to react.
The book also goes into a lot of details about fire. I saw the movie The Towering Inferno as a small child and boy it did a number on me, I am terrified of fire. What were my parents thinking letting me watch that at such an impressionable age? One great piece of fire advice is that whenever you are staying in a hotel, don’t just note where the staircase is but go down it at least once to familiarize yourself. See where you land when you get out, it’s usually some weird location. I work from home but for those of you who work in office, take the stairs at least once a week. It turns out the people in the World Trade Center who had taken the stairs before had a higher rate of escape. During a disaster your lizard brain takes over and you are not going to be thinking clearly. If you have the muscle memory of going down the stairs that will be very very helpful.
I was relieved to learn that my odds of experiencing a personal home fire(not a mass wildfire which is a different risk) are fairly low because I am not poor. I live in a home with working fire alarms and sprinklers and my home is a fairly modern building with good construction. Reading about the training firefighters go through was intense. People die every year while training!! And there is a 20% failure rate of people who go through the training. It has always seemed like an incredibly intense frightening job to have and after reading this book I learned my impressions are correct. FIrefighters are a different breed from me, that’s for sure!
There is a long section in the book about the head of security at the Morgan Stanley offices in the World Trade Center and how his prepping of the company saved basically everyone except for the few dummies who stayed behind gathering shit or freezing. And the security head who was so awesome also died! Because him and four of his staff went back to do a sweep of the office making sure it was clear. Awww! That is so tragic! What a hero this guy was! He did emergency fire drills for years, making everyone walk down all those stairs. One thing that hadn’t occurred to me was the flow of people on a stairwell. He had the people on the top floor go first, 2 by 2 down the stairs like Noah’s Ark, and once all the people on that top floor passed, THEN the next floor would start to head down. Genius. No bottlenecks, no people being overly polite, pausing the evacuation to say “no, after you, please”. He screamed at everyone to move, like flight attendants do, to jumpstart people out of their denial and freezing.
Besides remembering to breathe deeply and to educate yourself about escape routes, another factor you can work on is your weight. In disasters heavy people are more likely to die than thin people. They don’t move as quickly. Their bodies also have more difficulty handling intense heat. They need more space, so they have more trouble escaping. Body fat changes crowd dynamics. When people walk down a staircase, they sway slightly from side to side, taking up more space than their actual body width. The heavier people are, the slower they move and the more they sway-and the fewer people can fit down a staircase. If you need another reason to work on your exercise and diet, here it is!
Some quotes to help me recall the book:
Cirillo began training other officers with positive visualization exercises. Instead of telling them, "If you jerk the trigger, you will miss the target," he would say: "As you focus on the sights while compressing the trigger smoothly, you will easily achieve a good shot."
Kids remember stop, drop, and roll because we make them rehearse it, not because we make them say it
The brain literally changes in structure and function throughout our lives, depending on what we do. Blind people who read Braille increase the size of the brain region that processes touch. Neuroplasticity For The Win!
About 30 percent of white males see very little risk in most threats. They have a few subtle things in common. They like the world of status, hierarchy, and power. They believed in technology. They are more likely than any other group to disagree with the statement that people should be treated more equally.Hmmmm
On 9/11, women were almost twice as likely to get injured while evacuating, according to the Columbia study. Was it a question of strength? Confidence? Fear? No, it was the high heeled shoes.
Most people in high-income countries do not die in disasters; they die of diseases. You are more likely to die of food poisoning than you are of drowning. It is, however, virtually certain that you will be affected by a disaster in the years to come
Why do people procrastinate in a disaster? The denial phase is a humbling one.We have a tendency to believe that everything is OK because, well, it almost always has been before. All of us have been in situations that looked ominous, and they almost always turn out to be innocuous. If we behave otherwise, we risk social embarrassment by over-reacting. So we err on the side of underreacting.
The best warnings are like the best ads: consistent, easily understood, specific, frequently repeated, personal, accurate, and targeted.
When it comes to disaster risk, there's little to be gained by watching TV news segments: repeatedly absorbing video clips can be particularly damaging. TV makes us worry about the wrong things.Your brain is better at filtering out media hype when it is reading. Words have less emotional salience than images. So it's much healthier to read the news than watch OMG THIS. I swear, part of the huge problem in this country is that people watch their news instead of reading. DO NOT WATCH TV NEWS. NO TIK TOK. NO REELS. Get your information from reading, for Pete’s sake.
Resilience is a precious skill. People who have it tend to also have three underlying advantages:
a belief that they can influence life events; a tendency to find meaningful purpose in life's turmoil; and a conviction that they can learn from both positive and negative experiences. These beliefs act as a sort of buffer, cushioning the blow of anv aiven disaster.
Trauma, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder
Special Forces soldiers produced significantly more of something called "neuropeptide y" a compound that among other things helps you stay focused on a task under stress. In civilian life, people with anxiety disorders or depression tend to have lower levels of neuropep-tide Y. Researchers could literally tell whether someone was a member of the Special Forces unit just by looking at their blood results.The less a soldier dissociated -especially under normal conditions-the more neuropeptide Y he produced, and the better he performed. A simple blood test could potentially save soldiers the trouble of even trying to endure the Special Forces selection process."If you just screened those people out at the beginning, it would save the army millions of dollars. But the generals aren't keen on that idea for philosophical reasons."
The amount of trauma, the degree of family and mental health support for the survivor-these things can massively compound or contain the damage. Suffering accumulates, like debt.
Noise is the other thing most people do not expect in fires. In general, noise dramatically increases stress, and stress, as we know, makes it much harder to think and make decisions. Fire noise! I never even thought about that!
One hour before the wave hit, the elephants headed to high ground -some of them even breaking their chains to get there.After the tsunami, wildlife officials at Sri Lanka's Yala National Park were shocked to find that hundreds of elephants, monkeys, tigers, and deer had survived unharmed. Ooooh, so fascinating, the animals could sense the tsunami!
People who die in crowd crushes do not usually die from trampling. They die from asphyxiation. The pressure from all sides makes it impossible to breathe, much like getting squeezed in a trash compactor. Once you are in a crowd crush, there is little you can do to save yourself. If possible, try gradually working your way to the outside of the crowd by stepping sideways as the crowd moves backward.
Putting a column in front of an exit is an elegant way to help prevent clogging. Huh! I never would have thought that would help.
The best way to get the brain to perform under extreme stress is to repeatedly run it through rehearsals beforehand. Or as the military puts it, the "Eight P's»: "Proper prior planning and preparation prevents piss-poor performance."
In most major disasters, the people who will save you will not be wearing badges. They will be your neighbors and your co-workers.
The most deadly threats in most places are fire, flood, lightning, extreme heat, and suicide.
June 3, 2025
An excellent read to start thinking about how to prepare for and respond to extreme circumstances. The people and responses in the examples chosen are wide-ranging and Ripley provides thoughtful insight into each.
January 26, 2013
Ever wondered how you'd act if you suddenly found yourself in a disaster? This book might get you started thinking more precisely about how you'd act. It's not academic research (although Ripley frequently refers to it and consults experts, providing sources in end notes), but it's a decent survey of how people respond to disasters. It's peppered throughout with stories derived from interviews, news articles, and so on, giving it a nicely human feel.
Ripley organizes her book, and attacks the topic, in three parts.
First she considers the initial response to a disaster: to deny its reality. She examines two varieties of denial: first, to delay in responding intelligently, or in truly coming to terms with what has happened; and second, in improperly evaluating risks before a disaster and while determining how to react during one.
Second she considers the second stage of responding: deciding what to do. She examines fear, how it affects action, and how people deal with it. Next she considers resilience: what makes people better able to deal with extreme situations and stress.
Third she considers the last stage: acting. She breaks this down into three varieties: panicking, becoming paralyzed by fear, and being a hero.
What are the ultimate conclusions? To a fair extent, they're common sense. Be prepared. Mentally plan out escape routes and contingency plans so that if something happens, you'll already know some of what to do. Practice your responses, making them second nature, so that you'll carry them out instinctively. Yet even still, some of it really is genetic (like the correlation between resilience and the size of one's amygdala). So the conclusions are about what you might expect, although it's not completely common sense. (For example, panicking as a response occurs much less frequently than simple paralysis.)
And there's more to the conclusions than common sense, or mistaken intuition, for sometimes there are occasional particularly perceptive observations. For example, the author perceptively notes the distrust that exists between those disaster victims (or would-be victims) and authorities (particularly in a democratic society), in both directions -- for example, the people who didn't believe warnings in advance of Hurricane Katrina to evacuate, or the officials who think that explaining the true extent of a danger will lead to a panic. (Or -- and Ripley didn't come up with this, although I'd be surprised if it never crossed her mind -- the fear among some politicians that in the midst of a mass shooting, having anyone but police carrying guns would inexorably lead to stray bullets and even greater injury, as the law-abiding carriers panicked.) She notes that to properly respect people, effective warnings must tell them why in addition to what, using airline safety instructions for putting on oxygen masks as an example. (Quick: why should you put on your own mask before helping anyone else?) And there are a few more bits beyond this (the brief discussion of SIDS particularly stands out in my mind), including some humor: for example, the wry conclusion that sharks might rarely attack humans, but humans are winning the war against sharks.
This isn't the deepest book around, but it's plenty entertaining. The anecdotes keep things moving along. And ultimately, simply being forced to consider all the issues the book raises will make you more prepared, should anything actually happen to you. A good read, if not one I'm likely to consult again more than sparingly. Three and a half stars, which I'll round to three for this book's being to a large extent common sense.
Ripley organizes her book, and attacks the topic, in three parts.
First she considers the initial response to a disaster: to deny its reality. She examines two varieties of denial: first, to delay in responding intelligently, or in truly coming to terms with what has happened; and second, in improperly evaluating risks before a disaster and while determining how to react during one.
Second she considers the second stage of responding: deciding what to do. She examines fear, how it affects action, and how people deal with it. Next she considers resilience: what makes people better able to deal with extreme situations and stress.
Third she considers the last stage: acting. She breaks this down into three varieties: panicking, becoming paralyzed by fear, and being a hero.
What are the ultimate conclusions? To a fair extent, they're common sense. Be prepared. Mentally plan out escape routes and contingency plans so that if something happens, you'll already know some of what to do. Practice your responses, making them second nature, so that you'll carry them out instinctively. Yet even still, some of it really is genetic (like the correlation between resilience and the size of one's amygdala). So the conclusions are about what you might expect, although it's not completely common sense. (For example, panicking as a response occurs much less frequently than simple paralysis.)
And there's more to the conclusions than common sense, or mistaken intuition, for sometimes there are occasional particularly perceptive observations. For example, the author perceptively notes the distrust that exists between those disaster victims (or would-be victims) and authorities (particularly in a democratic society), in both directions -- for example, the people who didn't believe warnings in advance of Hurricane Katrina to evacuate, or the officials who think that explaining the true extent of a danger will lead to a panic. (Or -- and Ripley didn't come up with this, although I'd be surprised if it never crossed her mind -- the fear among some politicians that in the midst of a mass shooting, having anyone but police carrying guns would inexorably lead to stray bullets and even greater injury, as the law-abiding carriers panicked.) She notes that to properly respect people, effective warnings must tell them why in addition to what, using airline safety instructions for putting on oxygen masks as an example. (Quick: why should you put on your own mask before helping anyone else?) And there are a few more bits beyond this (the brief discussion of SIDS particularly stands out in my mind), including some humor: for example, the wry conclusion that sharks might rarely attack humans, but humans are winning the war against sharks.
This isn't the deepest book around, but it's plenty entertaining. The anecdotes keep things moving along. And ultimately, simply being forced to consider all the issues the book raises will make you more prepared, should anything actually happen to you. A good read, if not one I'm likely to consult again more than sparingly. Three and a half stars, which I'll round to three for this book's being to a large extent common sense.
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