Stress Response and Emotional Inoculation

"It took me a second to figure out what was happening ... I saw the lights in the distance. My mind was to alert the train," Abbasi said.

This is a tragic story about an unnecessary loss of life.  It's also a fascinating look at how people react.  The man who took this picture has responded to questions about why he took a picture by instead focusing on how upsetting he found the behaviour of people closer to Mr. Han than he was.  Why did he feel this necessary?  Probably because he's got some internal cognitive dissonance between what he knows would have been "moral" behaviour (help Han up) vs. what he actually did.

 

Hindsight is a funny thing; it forces us to offer logical rationalization for reactive behaviour that is more gut instinct than logical reasoning.  Reactive behaviour relies on pre-programming, which happens much more quickly than abstract thought.  It shouldn't really be a surprise that a photographer would respond to an uncomfortable situation by turning to comfortable, established behaviour - like taking pictures.

 

Police, soldiers, fire fighters, even CPR students all go through test-case scenarios that help build familiarity with the sorts of stressful scenarios they could encounter in their jobs; consider it a kind of emotional inoculation.  While some people are more naturally inclined to react well under pressure, everyone can learn to handle prescribed situations better.  This principle underlies everything from cognitive behaivoural therapy to improv class.

 

There will be a lot of focus on what didn't happen in this situation; it's an instinctual approach to take.  A more useful one, though, might be to think about what could be learned to prevent such tragedies in the future.

Systems, not Silos

The evolutionary line that ultimately led to the invention of the iPhone did refine these capabilities to enhance social interactions to an extent not found in chimps, enabling hunter gatherers in the Flintstone era to function as a “unique and highly competitive predatory organism.”

There's a Hopi proverb that says "one finger cannot lift a pebble."  It takes the whole hand to grasp, the arm to move and of course, the brain to coordinate.  Each finger is it's own thing, yet each is part of something larger, too.  It takes a centrally coordinated executive function for those parts to do things together, but when they do - the results are are disproportionately greater.

 

 

 

 

 

The brain works like that, too.  We like to look at the separate pieces as serving distinct functions, but the reality is that we need every piece to reach our full potential.

 

Whatever we like to tell ourselves, the same holds true for society.  We're not a bunch of silos working in competition; we're part of the same societal system.  Together, we are more than the sum of our parts.  When we recognize this, consciously, we don't need hand outs or hands up - we become the force that moves pebbles and mountains ourselves.