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AAIB. (1988). Report on the accident toBoeing 737-236, G-BGJL, atManchester Airport on 22nd August1985. London: Department ofTransport.

Baddeley, A.D. (2000). The episodicbuffer: A new component of workingmemory? Trends in CognitiveSciences, 4(11), 417423.

Bennet, G. (1983). Beyond endurance:Facing extreme stress. London:

Secker & Warburg.Breivik, G., Roth, W.T. & Jrgensen, P.E.

(1998). Personality, psychologicalstates and heart rate in novice andexpert parachutists. Personality and Individual Differences, 25,365380.

Cullen, L. (1990). The public inquiry intothe Piper Alpha disaster. London:Department of Energy.

Engle, R.W., Kane, M.J. & Tuholski, S.W.

(1999). Individual differences inworking memory capacity and whatthey tell us about controlledattention, general fluid intelligence,and functions of the prefrontalcortex. In A. Miyake & P. Shah (Eds.)Models of working memory:Mechanisms of active maintenanceand executive control (pp.102134).Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress.

Frith, C.D. (2000). The role of dorsolateralprefrontal cortex in the selection ofaction, as revealed by functionalimaging. In S. Monsell & J. Driver(Eds.) Attention and performance: Vol.XVIII. Cambridge MA: MIT Press.

Griffith, J.D. & Hart, C.L. (2002). Asummary of US skydiving fatalities:19931999. Perceptual and MotorSkills, 94, 10891090.

Leach, J. (1994). Survival psychology.

Cognition underlies all ourbehaviour including survivalbehaviour. Yet, when life isthreatened, cognitive functionbecomes impaired. This articleexamines current research into the role of working memory andexecutive function in survivalsituations and attempts to shedlight on why so many people insurvival situations perishunnecessarily. It also seeks toremove the term will-to-live as anoutdated concept that hampers ourfurther understanding of humanbehaviour in extremis.

Tales of human survival in extremishave always held a public fascination:think of climber Joe Simpson,frostbitten and starving, dragging hisbroken leg for four days to reach hismountain camp in Touching the Void(Simpson, 1988). Or the Uruguayan rugbyteam who survived an airliner crash in theAndean mountains by eating the flesh oftheir dead friends before a small team leftto seek help in Alive. Add to these thenumerous accounts of survivorship inbrutal prisoner-of-war and concentrationcamps as well as more contemporaryaccounts of escape from sinking ships,crashed aircraft and collapsing buildings.

There exists a natural admiration, amix of respect and incredulity, for peoplewho have endured life-threatening duress;who have faced death and come throughalive whilst others around them haveperished. We tend to view such survivorsas possessing a quality above the ordinary;a strength of character, a purposefulness ordrive to overcome the crushing physicaland psychological duresses they encounter:a so-called, will-to-live. Indeed, in 1945the Admiralty established a committeeunder Rear-Admiral A.G. Talbot to studynaval lifesaving. One of its findings wasthat, Evidence indicated that it wasessential for survivors to have the will-to-live (Talbot, 1946).

Attempts have been made to pinpointthis will-to-live by identifying a survivorpersonality. These approaches have tendedto be either popular (Siebert, 2001),psychiatric (Bennet, 1983) orautobiographical (e.g. Richards &McEwan, 1989). Yet personality constructs

have proven inadequate, and I would arguethat this is because we have been askingthe wrong question. The tractable researchquestion is not, Why did this personsurvive when all around perished? Instead,we should ask why so many people diewhen there is no need. In other words, it isnot the will-to-live, but the wont-to-livethat matters.

Consider this example. In 1994 a lightaircraft crashed in the Sierra Nevada. Ofthe three people on board one passengerwas trapped in the wreckage, another hadno more than superficial bruising, whilstthe pilot had apparent injuries to his arm,ankle and ribs. To obtain help the pilotwalked for 11 days through the snow-covered mountains before reaching a roadand flagging down a passing car. Thealerted rescue services located the crashsite. Both the pilots companions were dead(NTSB, 1995).

Media attention was given to the featof endurance of the injured pilot intravelling for 11 days over snow-coveredmountains to seek help. His two deadcompanions warranted no more than apassing sentence in the press. Yet, one ofthese men had no more than superficialbruising following the crash. So why didhe die? Material was there for shelter; firecould be made, water was available and hewould not have starved in 11 days. This isthe crux of survival psychology.

One view holds that people diebecause they become depressed and simplygive up. This giving up behaviour iscommonly reported amongst victims inlife-rafts and captives in prison camps. InWorld War II the Japanese called it bura-bura or do-nothing-sickness, whilst theAmericans called it give-up-itis from theirPoW experiences in Korean andVietnamese camps. A mental tipping pointis reached: living is hard, dying is easy. Theprofessional yachtsman Nick Moloneydescribed in an interview the time whenhe was swept overboard and becameentangled in his harness: I was so tiredand in so much pain, there wasnt even an adrenaline surge. I died that day. Icompletely gave up the struggle. Mentally

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www.thesurvivorsclub.orgLeach, J. (1994). Survival psychology.

Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

What adaptive value does our cognitivesystem serve by becoming dysfunctionalunder threat?Why does working memory not workwell when we need it the most?Why are we so poor at monitoring ourown condition in extreme situations?

ARTI

CLE

Survival psychology: the wont to liveJohn Leach looks at why people perish unnecessarily, and the crucial nature of cognitive function

Id lost the will-to-live, and thats a terribleplace to be (Scott, 2004). We investigatedthis apparent depression with members ofa University Air Squadron undergoingwinter survival training. Measures ofclinical depression such as BecksDepression Inventory, word frequency andspeech rate were recorded over three days,yet we found no clinical indicator ofdepression despite the clear observationthat some participants showed an overtlydepressed response to their situation.

This giving up behaviour has beennoticed elsewhere. In his classic book TheJungle is Neutral, Freddy Spencer Chapmanrelates his experiences of jungle warfareagainst the Japanese during World War II.He states, I met in the jungle six NCOsand men who had been cut off. A monthlater they were all dead. Yet there wasnothing wrong with them (SpencerChapman, 2003). The view fromCommand was thatthe jungle hadkilled them.Spencer Chapmandisagreed, statingthat it was, theirmental attitude,which was slowlybut surely killingthem. They wereunable to adaptthemselves to thenew way of life.Hence his choice of book title: thejungle, Chapmanargued, is neitherfor you nor againstyou the jungle isneutral.

Similarly, peopleenter neutral desertareas (includingmodern, developedparts of America) aswell as Arctic regionsand mountain ranges and they perish, andthey do so quickly. Again, the question iswhy? After all, there are communities ofpeople who live quite comfortably in all

these environments. In 1991 a Canadianmilitary Hercules aircraft with 18personnel on board crashed near Alert basein the Canadian Arctic. Five died and 13were stranded for four days before rescue. I was asked to debrief the survivors. Ofthose who died three did so throughinjury, but two were uninjured and werewearing cold-weather flying clothing. Theywere in the same environment in whichwomen routinely give birth and childrenare raised quite happily.

So what happened to them? Commonspeech might say they died because theyjust gave up, or lost the will-to-live etc.My argument is that such statements ordescriptions serve only to explain away theobservation without seeking to explain itat the scientific level of understanding.Instead, I prefer to talk of psychogenicdeath: a biological process takes place as in natural death, but it is triggered at a

premature stage in thepersons life when theyare under duress.Although it is morecommon than realised,the actual process isstill unknown.However, it must beunderpinned bycognitive processes,and a key quest insurvival psychologyresearch is the hunt forthat process. Most ofmy early work in thisarea came fromshipwreck survivorsand their strikinglysimilar descriptions ofthe manner in whichvictims rapidly

perished around them.Once its mechanism isunderstood, we should beable to prevent it happeningto the extent that it

currently does. The road to understanding such deaths

is being mapped out through experimentalwork in cognition and neurocognition

under duress, and it begins with survival.We are all day-to-day survivors. We arealive today because from childbirth ourbehaviour has adapted to our ownparticular environment. The danger ariseswhen we are forced outside of our adaptedenvironment. This suggests that there aretwo types of survival behaviour: intrinsicand extrinsic. Intrinsic survival issupported by our daily, regular, routinebehaviours within our normativeenvironment. Extrinsic survival refers tothose new behaviours we need to survivein an environment or situation notpreviously experienced: from a shipwreckto a kidnapping, from a fire in an officeblock to an airliner crash in the jungle.

Extrinsic survival clearly requires goal-directed behaviour. However, witnesstestimonies suggest that such goal-directedbehaviour is the first function to fail whenunder threat. It was this observation thatprovided a clue to a new researchdirection: a cognitive approach to survival.With this new direction came a newquestion: not, Why do people die whenthey do not need to? but How do peopledie when they do not need to? It is thissearch for the underlying mechanism ofhuman survival that is starting to yieldanswers.

Executive functionsAnalysis of disaster incidents show thatsurvival behaviour follows a patternreflected in the following psychodynamicsequence: pre-impact, impact, recovery,rescue and post-trauma (Leach, 1994).During this sequence, victims willcommonly show cognitive paralysis,stereotypical behaviour, perseveration,hyperactivity and hypoactivity. Thesebehaviours vary over the course of asurvival incident but are most prevalentduring the sudden impact phase and thefollow-on recoil phase when reasoningand comprehension return.

Cognitive paralysis, resulting incomplete inaction, is too common anoccurrence to be ignored, and the case has been presented for the classic fight or

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Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.Leach, J. (2004). Why people freeze in

an emergency: Temporal andcognitive constraints on survivalresponses. Aviation, Space &Environmental Medicine, 75, 539542.

Leach, J. & Ansell, L. (2008). Impairmentin attentional processing in a fieldsurvival environment. AppliedCognitive Psychology, 22, 643652.

Leach, J. & Griffith, R. (2008).

Restrictions in working memorycapacity during parachuting: Apossible cause of no pull fatalities.Applied Cognitive Psychology, 22,147157.

Muir, H.C., Marrison, C. & Evans, A.(1989). Aircraft evacuations: The effectof passengers motivation and cabinconfiguration adjacent to the exit. CivilAviation Authority.

NTSB. (1995). Factual report: Aviation.

LAX95FA046. National TransportationSafety Board.

Porter, H. & Leach, J. (2010). Executivedysfunction in a survivalenvironment. Applied CognitivePsychology, 24, 4166.

Richards, R. & McEwan, M. (1989). Thesurvival factor. Tunbridge Wells: DJCostello.

Sarter, M., Givens, B. & Bruno, J.P.(2001). The cognitive neuroscience of

sustained attention: Where top-downmeets bottom-up. Brain ResearchReviews, 35, 146160.

Scott, C. (2004, 14 November). The bestof times, worst of times: NickMoloney. Sunday Times Magazine,p.17.

Siebert, A. (2001). The survivor personality.New York: Putnam.

Simpson, J. (1988). Touching the void.London: Jonathon Cape.

Survival why are some unable toadapt to the new way of life?

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flight response to be renamed the fight,flight or freeze response (Leach, 2004). As but one example, the engine fire aboardthe Boeing-737 airliner at Manchesterairport in 1985 that resulted in 55 deathsfound some passengers sitting immobile intheir seats until overtaken by smoke andtoxic fumes (AAIB, 1998). An empiricalstudy prompted by this incident describesvolunteers in an airliner simulator as beingbehaviourally inactive (Muir et al., 1989).

The other observed behaviours areindicative of impairment in executivefunction, a view that has received supportfrom recent studies. In one field trial,involving RAF aircrew undergoing theenvironmental duress of an aircraft downsurvival exercise, measures were taken ofselective attention, sustained attention andattentional switching (visual and auditory)(Leach & Ansell, 2008). Significantimpairment was found in both selectiveand sustained attention but not in theother two functions. There are twointeresting points about this finding: one theoretical and one practical. Thetheoretical point relates to work oncontrolled or executive attention. Engle et al. (1999) have argued that executiveattention results from a combination ofsustained and selective attention enablingcontrol of working memory capacity in theface of distraction or interference. Thissuggests that the function underpinningsuccessful survival behaviour is executivein nature.

The practical point is that impairmentin selective and sustained attention wasfully recoverable within the initial threedays of the survival exercise. This isinteresting because the psychological recoilperiod of a disaster is around three days,and it is within the first three days of asurvival incident that most psychogenicfatalities seem to occur. If impairment insustained and selective attention cannot be recovered then major cognitivedysfunction can arise (Sarter et al., 2001),which will cause further difficulties for thesurvivor. Indeed, a US Coastguard officerhas stated, Strange as it may seem somepeople will just die. Thats a little hard to

believe, but Ive seen any number of caseswere the person will die in the first fivehours and others will last several days.

A more recent survival study (Porter & Leach, 2010) probed specificsubcomponents of executive function.Significant impairment was found in theincongruent condition of the Stroop test,the mean repetition gap, adjacent letterpair components of the random lettergeneration task, and the planning andaction components of the Tower ofLondon task. No impairment was found in dual-task performance, verbal fluency or other measures of random lettergeneration. This finding suggestsimpairment occurring in the leftdorsolateral prefrontal cortex, which Frith(2000) suggests is responsible formodulation of the contention scheduler bythe supervisory system. The contentionscheduler mediates between environmentalstimuli that can trigger routine actions andthe selection of behaviours by thesupervisory system to achieve a particulargoal. Our current findings suggest that thebehavioural problems encountered in the

initial survival phase are consistent with anormally functioning contention schedulerbut one lacking appropriate supervisorycontrol. In other words, the problem maylie with the communication pathwaysbetween cognitive modules rather thancognitive processes within modules.

Executive impairment also manifestsitself as a lack of initiative. Such behaviourwas certainly witnessed during theexplosion and collapse of the Piper Alphaoil platform in 1988 where, according tothe official inquiry report, A large numberof people apparently made no attempt toleave the accommodation (Cullen, 1990).The inquiry found that the death toll wasconsiderably greater than it would havebeen if initiative had been taken withrespect to escaping.

Impairment in attention andsupervisory control highlight two areas of difficulty for the survivor: engaging with the new environment (physical andsituational) and maintaining survivalactions as goal-directed behaviour. Theimportance of a rapid return to normalcognitive function is reflected in thecomment of Bill Garleb, a former prisoner-of-war of the Japanese, that survivors werethose who had the ability to reason quicklyand accurately and who could attune theirminds and attention to taking advantage oftargets of opportunity (Townsend, 1983).Garleb describes an incident whenhundreds of his fellow servicemen arebeing herded onto trains leading to theJapanese PoW camps. He describes menpushing and elbowing their way onto theboxcars to grab a space to lie down, whichthey had previously been denied whentravelling in a ships hold to the mainland.

Spencer Chapman, F. (2003). The jungle isneutral. Guilford, CT: Lyons Press.(First published 1949)

Talbot, A.G. (1946). The Talbot report onnaval lifesaving. London: HMSO.

Thexton, M. (2006). What happened to the Hippy Man? London: LanistaPartners.

Thompson, L.A., Williams, K.L.,L'Esperance, P.R. & Cornelius, J.(2001). Context dependent memory

under stressful conditions: The caseof skydiving. Human Factors, 43,611619.

Townsend, S.E. (1983). Hostage survival:Resisting the dynamics of captivity.Unpublished PhD thesis, La JollaUniversity, San Diego, CA.

Turner, M.L. & Engle, R.W. (1989). Isworking memory capacity taskdependent? Journal of Memory andLanguage, 28, 127154.

Parachutists display significant impairments in working memory prior to jumping

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Garleb quickly noticed thatthere was no ventilation in thecars except near the entrance.He allowed himself to be pushedaside and fell back, becomingthe last man to climb aboard,and found a space next to theguard by the door. Twenty-sixmen died from suffocation inthat boxcar. This exampleillustrates executive attention in action: Garleb possessed notonly the ability to detect suchtargets of opportunity but wasalso able to recognise theirsignificance and to plan astrategy to support his goal ofsurvival. Those who fought toclamber aboard first wereresponding directly toenvironmental triggers

suggesting impairment inexecutive attention.

Working memoryBut what of cognitive function during the immediate impact phase of a survivalincident during the first few seconds or minutes? It appears that during athreatening situation working memorydoes not work; or at least, it does notwork as well as one would hope. This isbaffling, because working memory lies atthe hub of all cognition and behaviour,including survival behaviour. Intuitively,it would be expected that workingmemory would improve in efficiencywhilst under threat or, at least, maintainits normal level of processing efficiency.

Consider the world of parachuting: in 2004 a parachutist with 118 previousjumps died following a malfunction of hismain canopy. In 2005 a 31-year-old, withover 2300 recorded jumps, also diedfollowing a main canopy failure. In 2006 a 24 year-old parachutist died from impactfollowing his canopy failure. Thesignificance of these examples is not somuch the failure of the parachutists maincanopies but their failure to deploy theirreserve parachutes; a situation referred toas a no pull. Such no pull fatalities arenot uncommon, accounting for 11 per centof parachuting fatalities (Griffith & Hart,2002).

To investigate this problem workingmemory capacity was measured in bothnovice and experienced parachutists(Leach & Griffith, 2008). The parachutistswere tested on the operation-span task(Turner & Engle, 1989) shortly beforetheir jump, on landing and on a controlnon-jumping day. Our findings revealedsignificant impairments in both storageand processing capacities prior to jumping.

Both experienced parachutists and novicesshowed the same degree of impairment;however, the experienced parachutistsshowed full recovery in storage capacity onlanding, whilst novices continued to showrestriction. Processing capacity hadrecovered in both groups on landing.Clearly, any restriction in working memorywill lead to a slowing down in informationprocessing with implications for survivalbehaviour that is time-dependent, and thismay be one cause of no pull fatalities.

Research in survival psychology tendsto produce findings that are both counter-intuitive and unexpected. That workingmemory was restricted under threat wascounterintuitive. The unexpected findingwas that there were no wrong responses atall in the jump condition. During wordrecall the parachutists produced bothcorrect and incorrect responses in thelanding and control conditions. However,in the jump phase not only did bothnovice and experienced parachutistsproduce fewer words but they failed togenerate any incorrect responses. We have interpreted this finding through theconcept of the episodic buffer (Baddeley,2000) which is proposed as a back-upstore that integrates information from the phonological loop and visuospatialsketchpad and, through the centralexecutive, retrieves information from long-term memory (LTM). The lack ofproduction of any incorrect words duringthe jump phase suggests that access toLTM may be disrupted. This is consistentwith our finding of possible executivedysfunction arising under threat as thesearch and retrieval of information fromLTM is an executive function, and if thesupervisory system becomes inoperablethen no words would be transferred intothe episodic buffer. The implication here isthat one problem with survivability is thedifficulty in integrating information fromthe new survival environment, throughmultimodal systems, to information storedin long-term memory. Equally, one wouldexpect no information to be transferredinto LTM, and this also appears to be thecase, as suggested by reports that someparachutists are unable to recall whathappened during their first jump (Breiviket al., 1998) and from another study thatfound poor learning by skydivers of wordlists in in-air conditions (Thompson et al.,2001).

This difficulty in retrievinginformation from LTM could be the causeof no pull fatalities. The motor actionsequence for deploying the reserveparachute would be stored in LTM but isnot associated with an environmental (air)trigger that would initiate the emergencyprocedure through the contention

scheduler. Consequently, this sequencewould need to be activated through thesupervisory system, however, if this isimpaired (as our studies suggest) then theemergency deployment routine will remaininactive. This impairment might alsosuggest a mechanism for the behaviouralimmobility frequently observed whenfaced with threat, as witnessed during the1994 sinking of MV Estonia with the lossof 852 lives. Also, a hostage taken aboard a Boeing 747 airliner recounted hispsychological response to the moment ofcapture:

In the hand that was on the end ofthe arm that was around the flightattendant's neck, [the terrorist] had a pistol... I didnt duck, or go to help, or shout, or run away, or anything.For what seemed like an age, andwas probably about two seconds, I gawped. If anything went through my mind at all, it was the thought,How extraordinary that man has a gun [...] At first it was numbing. I couldnt respond, I was so stunned(Thexton, 2006).

Big questions remainIn conclusion, research into survivalpsychology began as a natural adjunct tothe need for survival training for militarypersonnel and extended into the civilianworld of both natural and man-madedisasters. The current indications are thatvictims perish unnecessarily because thethreat environment restricts both thestorage and processing capacities ofworking memory coupled with a form of temporary, environmentally induceddysexecutive syndrome. This field ofsurvival psychology is still in its infancyand big questions remain to be answered.Why should working memory bevulnerable to dysfunction under duress?What is the cognitive trigger forpsychogenic death? In case you are in any doubt as to the importance of suchquestions, I will finish with one finalquote from a shipwreck survivor whowatched four other passengers perish inhis life-raft:

I had no thought people could die soeasily. Their heads just fell back, thelight just seemed to go from theireyes, and it was all over.

John Leachis at FSES(NorDISS),Norway, and at the Centerfor the Study of HumanCognition, University of Oslojohn.leach@psykologi.uio.no

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