How We Decide (14 page)

Dodge looked at the dry grass and the dry pine needles. He felt the hot wind and the hot sun. The conditions were making him nervous. To make matters worse, the men had no map of the terrain. They were also without a radio, since the parachute on the radio pack had failed to open and the transmitter had been smashed on the rocks. The small crew of smokejumpers was all alone with this fire; there was nothing between them and it but a river and a thick tangle of ponderosa pine and Douglas fir trees. And so the jumpers set down their packs and watched the blaze from across the canyon. When the wind parted the smoke, as it did occasionally, they could see inside the fire as the flames leaped from tree to tree.

It was now five o'clock—a dangerous time to fight wilderness fires because the twilight wind can shift without warning. The breeze had been blowing the flames up the canyon, away from the river. But then, suddenly, the wind reversed. Dodge saw the ash swirl in the air. He saw the top of the flames flicker and wave. And then he saw the fire leap across the gulch and spark the grass on his side.

That's when the updraft began. Fierce winds began to howl through the canyon, blowing straight toward the men. Dodge could only watch as the fire became an inferno. He was suddenly staring at a wall of flame two hundred feet tall and three hundred feet deep on the edge of the prairie. In a matter of seconds, the flames began to devour the grass on the slope. The fire ran toward the smokejumpers at thirty miles per hour, incinerating everything in its path. At the fire's center, the temperature was more than two thousand degrees, hot enough to melt rock.

Dodge screamed at his men to retreat. It was already too late to run to the river, since the fire was blocking their path. Each man dropped his fifty pounds of gear and started running up the brutally steep canyon walls, trying to get to the top of the ridge and escape the blowup. Because heat rises, a fire that starts burning on flat prairie accelerates when it hits a slope. On a 50 percent grade, a fire will move nine times faster than it does on level land. The slopes at Mann Gulch are 76 percent.

When the fire first crossed the gulch, Dodge and his crew had a two-hundred-yard head start. After a few minutes of running, Dodge could feel the fierce heat on his back. He glanced over his shoulder and saw that the fire was now fewer than fifty yards away and gaining. The air began to lose its oxygen. The fire was sucking the wind dry. That's when Dodge realized the blaze couldn't be outrun. The hill was too steep, and the flames were too fast.

So Dodge stopped running. He stood perfectly still as the fire accelerated toward him. Then he started yelling at his men to do the same. He knew they were racing toward their own immolation and that in fewer than thirty seconds the fire would run them over, like a freight train without brakes. But nobody stopped. Perhaps the men couldn't hear Dodge over the deafening roar of flames. Or perhaps they couldn't bear the idea of stopping. When confronted with a menacing fire, the most basic instinct is to run away. Dodge was telling the men to stand still.

But Dodge wasn't committing suicide. In a fit of desperate creativity, he came up with an escape plan. He quickly lit a match and ignited the ground in front of him. He watched as those flames raced away from him, up the canyon walls. Then Dodge stepped into the ashes of this smaller fire, so that he was surrounded by a thin buffer of burned land. He lay down on the still smoldering embers. He wet his handkerchief with some water from his canteen and clutched the cloth to his mouth. He closed his eyes tight and tried to inhale the thin ether of oxygen remaining near the ground. Then he waited for the fire to pass around him. After several terrifying minutes, Dodge emerged from the ashes virtually unscathed.

Thirteen smokejumpers were killed by the Mann Gulch fire. Only two men in the crew besides Dodge managed to survive, and that was because they found a shallow crevice in the rocky hillside. As Dodge had predicted, the flames were almost impossible to outrun. White crosses still mark the spots where the men died; all of the crosses are below the ridge.

Dodge's escape fire is now a standard firefighting technique. It has saved the lives of countless firefighters trapped by swift blazes. At the time, however, Dodge's plan seemed like sheer madness. His men could think only about fleeing the flames, and yet their leader was starting a new fire. Robert Sallee, a first-year smokejumper who survived the blaze, later said he'd thought that "Dodge had gone nuts, just plain old nuts."

But Dodge was perfectly sane. In the heat of the moment he managed to make a very smart decision. The question, for those of us looking back on it, is how? What allowed him to resist the urge to flee? Why didn't he follow the rest of his crew up the gulch? Part of the answer is experience. Most of the smokejumpers were teenagers working summer jobs. They had fought only a few fires, and none of them had ever seen a fire like that. Dodge, on the other hand, was a grizzled veteran of the forest service; he knew what prairie flames were capable of. Once the fire crossed the gulch, Dodge realized that it was only a matter of time before the men were caught by the hungry flames. The slopes were too steep and the wind was too fierce and the grass was too dry; the blaze would beat them to the top. Besides, even if the men managed to reach the top of the mountain, they were still trapped. The ridge was covered with high, dry grass that hadn't been trimmed by cattle. It would burn in an instant.

For Dodge, it must have been a moment of unspeakable horror: to know that there was nowhere to go; to realize that his men were running to their deaths and that the wall of flame would consume them all. But Dodge's fear wasn't what saved him. In fact, the overwhelming terror of the situation was part of the problem. After the fire started burning uphill, all of the smokejumpers became fixated on getting to the ridge, even though the ridge was too far away for them to reach. Walter Rumsey, a first-year smokejumper, later recounted what was going through his mind when he saw Dodge stop running and get out his matchbook. "I remember thinking that that was a very good idea," Rumsey said, "but I don't remember what I thought it was good for ... I kept thinking the ridge—if I can make it. On the ridge I will be safe." William Hellman, the second in command, looked at Dodge's escape fire and reportedly said, "To hell with that, I'm getting out of here." (Hellman did reach the ridge, the only smokejumper who managed to do so, but he died the next day from third-degree burns that covered his entire body.) The rest of the men acted the same way. When Dodge was asked during the investigation why none of the smokejumpers followed his orders to stop running, he just shook his head. "They didn't seem to pay any attention," he said. "That is the part I didn't understand. They seemed to have something on their minds—all headed in one direction ... They just wanted to get to the top."

Dodge's men were in the grip of panic. The problem with panic is that it narrows one's thoughts. It reduces awareness to the most essential facts, the most basic instincts. This means that when a person is being chased by a fire, all he or she can think about is running from the fire.

This is known as perceptual narrowing. In one study, people were put one at a time in a pressure chamber and told that the pressure would slowly be increased until it simulated that of a sixty-foot dive. While inside the pressure chamber, the subject was asked to perform two simple visual tasks. One task was to respond to blinking lights in the center of the subject's visual field, and the other involved responding to blinking lights in his peripheral vision. As expected, each of the subjects inside the pressure chamber exhibited all the usual signs of panic—a racing pulse, elevated blood pressure, and a surge of adrenaline. These symptoms affected performance in a very telling way. Although the people in the pressure chamber performed just as well as control subjects did on the central visual task, those in the pressure chamber were twice as likely to miss the stimuli in their peripheral vision. Their view of the world literally shrank.

The tragedy of Mann Gulch holds an important lesson about the mind. Dodge survived the fire because he was able to beat back his emotions. Once he realized that his fear had exhausted its usefulness—it told him to run, but there was nowhere to go—Dodge was able to resist its primal urges. Instead, he turned to his conscious mind, which is uniquely capable of deliberate and creative thought. While automatic emotions focus on the most immediate variables, the rational brain is able to expand the list of possibilities. As the neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux says, "The advantage [of the emotional brain] is that by allowing evolution to do the thinking for you at first, you basically buy the time that you need to think about the situation and do the most reasonable thing." And so Dodge stopped running. If he was going to survive the fire, he needed to think.

What Dodge did next relied entirely on the part of his brain that he could control. In the panic of the moment, he was able to come up with a new solution to his seemingly insurmountable problem. There was no pattern to guide him—no one had ever started an escape fire before—but Dodge was able to imagine his survival. In that split second of thought, he realized that it was possible to start his own fire, and that this fire might give him a thin barrier of burned earth. "It just seemed like the logical thing to do," Dodge said. He didn't know if his escape fire would work—he thought he would probably suffocate—but it still appeared to be a better idea than running. And so Dodge felt for the direction of the wind and lit the prairie weeds right in front of him. They ignited like paper. The surrounding tinder wilted to ash. He had made a firewall out of fire.

This kind of thinking takes place in the prefrontal cortex, the outermost layer of the frontal lobes.
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Pressed tight against the bones of the forehead, the prefrontal cortex has undergone a dramatic expansion in the human brain. When you compare a modern human cortex to that of any other primate, or even to some of our hominid ancestors', the most obvious anatomical difference is this swelling at the fore. The Neanderthal, for example, had a slightly larger brain than
Homo sapiens.
But he still had the prefrontal cortex of a chimp. As a result, Neanderthals were missing one of the most important talents of the human brain: rational thought.

Rationality
can be a difficult word to define—it has a long and convoluted intellectual history—but it's generally used to describe a particular style of thinking. Plato associated rationality with the use of logic, which he believed made humans think like the gods. Modern economics has refined this ancient idea into rational-choice theory, which assumes that people make decisions by multiplying the
probability
of getting what they want by the
amount of pleasure
(utility) that getting what they want will bring. This reasonable rubric allows us all to maximize our happiness, which is what rational agents are always supposed to do.

Of course, the mind isn't a purely rational machine. You don't compute utility in the supermarket or use math when throwing a football or act like the imaginary people in economics textbooks. The Platonic charioteer is often trounced by his emotional horses. Nevertheless, the brain does have a network of rational parts, centered in the prefrontal cortex. If it weren't for these peculiar lumps of gray and white matter, we couldn't even conceive of rationality, let alone act in a rational manner.

The prefrontal cortex was not always held in such high regard. When scientists first began dissecting the brain in the nineteenth century, they concluded that the frontal lobes were useless, unnecessary folds of flesh. Unlike other cortical areas, which were responsible for specific tasks such as controlling the body or generating language, the prefrontal cortex seemed to do nothing. It was the appendix of the mind. As a result doctors figured they might as well find out what happened when the area was excised. In 1935, the Portuguese neurologist Antonio Egas Moniz performed the first prefrontal leucotomy, a delicate surgery during which small holes were cut into frontal lobes. (The surgery was inspired by reports that chimpanzees became less aggressive after undergoing similar procedures.) Moniz restricted the surgery to patients with severe psychiatric problems, such as schizophrenia, who would otherwise be confined to dismal mental institutions. The leucotomy certainly wasn't a cure-all, but many of Moniz's patients did experience a reduction in symptoms. In 1949, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine for pioneering the procedure.

The success of the leucotomy led doctors to experiment with other kinds of frontal lobe operations. In the United States, Walter Freeman and James Watts developed a procedure known as the prefrontal lobotomy, which was designed to completely ablate the tracts of white matter connecting the prefrontal cortex and the thalamus. The surgery was brutally simple: a thin blade was inserted just under the eyelid, hammered through a thin layer of bone, and shimmied from side to side. The treatment quickly became exceedingly popular. Between 1939 and 1951, the "cutting cure" was performed on more than eighteen thousand patients in American asylums and prisons.

Unfortunately, the surgery came with a wide range of tragic side effects. Between 2 and 6 percent of all patients died on the operating table. Those who survived were never the same. Some patients sank into a stupor, utterly uninterested in everything around them. Others lost the ability to use language. (This is what happened to Rosemary Kennedy, the sister of President John F. Kennedy. Her lobotomy was given as a treatment for "agitated depression.") The vast majority of lobotomized patients suffered from short-term memory problems and the inability to control their impulses.

The frontal lobe lobotomy, unlike Moniz's leucotomy, was a crude procedure. Its path of destruction was haphazard and unpredictable. Although doctors tried to cut only the connections to the prefrontal cortex, they really didn't know what they were cutting. However, over the past several decades, neurologists have studied this brain area with great precision. They now know exactly what happens when the prefrontal cortex is damaged.