My Brain In An Emergency
The summer of my 21st year when I was in university, I was training to be an officer in the Canadian Armed Forces at Base Borden near Toronto. There were a lot of fearful things in that place and I often wondered why my fellow officer cadets didn’t seem as alarmed by them as I was. For one thing, the obsactle course was truly terrifying. It seemed to me that there were at least four of five obstacles that were capable, if you made a mistake, of causing you serious injury like a fractured spine and deep lacerations. We ran the course in pairs because many of the obstacles were impossible for one person to overcome. At one point on the course, there was an assault net, 15 feet in height with two ropes running off at the top. Those in charge decided on our second run through that we should fix bayonets on our FN-C1 assault rifles. My partner went over the top of the net and, as he did, his rifle came off his shoulder and the bayonet cut a huge gash right across his face, running right between his eyes.
My memories of the time were of being frightened all the time but that is somewhat untrue. When I was actually running the course I was fine. It was only after, or before, when I thought about it that I was fearful. What I neglected to remember was that when on the course I probably did better than the rest of my troop.
Quite a few years late I was still convinced that I was a coward, and I had lots of help from the military in coming to that conclusion. One day on a driving vacation I, left the car and was walking down a path at an Amythist mine in Northern Ontario along with an animal control officer that I had run into in the parking lot. As we walked, he allowed that he was there to check out a potentially rabid dog owned by the people who looked after the property. There was no-one else there as the mine was closed and, although it was normally open to tourists, it was end of season and it was closed As he was telling me about the dog on the property that had attacked a tourist, suddenly the dog, a huge German Shepherd, appeared and came running down the path towards us. The animal control officer stepped in front of me raising his metal clipboard, and shouted at me to get behind him. I didn’t need to be asked twice.
What unfolded in the next few minutes turned out to be an important insight into how my brain worked in an emergency leading to the subsequent conclusion that I was anything but a coward. Or perhaps more accurately I was only a coward when I was thinking about something scary. When it actually happened I was fine–more than fine. The dog charged us and the officer hit it on the snout with the metal clipboard and then hit it again before the dog backed off. We continued on down the road because the officer wanted to check with the dog’s owners but it was soon apparent they were not home and the dog was now getting louder and more threatening. The officer told me to pick up a handful of gravel and if the dog got around him, to throw them in the dog’s face. I did as I was told and then once again the dog charged. This time there was no barking and growling. The dog ran straight at us and the officer threw the gravel into its face. It whimpered and ran back to the house. We then walked backwards, as per the officer’s instructions back down the road all the way to the parking lot and then went our separate ways. It wasn’t until half an hour later when I had driven to a tourist information office and stopped to make a phone call at the pay phone and reached out to dial that I realized I was shaking. During the whole time in the confrontation with the dog my mind seemed to be running in slow motion assessing the situation, going over my option. I seemed perfectly calm. That’s what happens to my mind in an emergency.
I have heard people say that ADHD brains run faster. They seem to but I have also heard from more reputable sources that they actually run slower and it seems faster as a result. It’s a bit like film or video. If you want to the image to move slower, in slow motion if you will, you don’t lower the number of frames per second, you actually increase it.
At first I thought that because of the way my brain behaved, I was brave and sometimes when I watch movies on television and the protagonists get into trouble and fall apart in the situation, I feel angry and critical. But I am not really brave and I have no right to judge how others react to danger because, in my case I know that it’s all about brain chemistry and how my brain reacts to emergencies. It is not a conscious decision. I know that heroes will say that it’s not about whether they were afraid or not. They were afraid and they took the appropriate action anyway.