Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why

“That he had lived while so many others had died seemed to me to have so much meaning. I heard the stories over and over and could never seem to plumb their mystery. His survival made me believe that he had some special, ineffable quality. I felt urgently that I ought to have it, too.”

His father’s heroism and harrowing tale of survival in World War II motivated Gonzales to develop his own skills and research why some people are able to survive catastrophic situations. This quotation especially emphasizes the mystery of the situation with words like “ineffable” but keeps readers grounded in the real world by returning to Gonzales’s quest to achieve survivor-hood. This prepares readers for both the near-mystical power of nature and the hard science Gonzales is going to use to make his arguments.

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

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

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

This quotation adds nuance to Gonzales’s claim that emotion can inhibit reason and cognition, as he recognizes that people cannot neatly separate emotion from the rest of brain function, and that emotional reactions can help to save people’s lives in emergencies.