Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why

The author considers the importance of planning, claiming that all living creatures try to predict the future to maximize their chances of survival. Humans are particularly adept at making plans, which are stored in the hippocampus alongside memories, making the future “as real as the past” (84). Memories are not emotions, but they tend to work together in survival situations. Human beings often project past experiences into the future, creating a mental model of what might occur based on what happened previously. For example, climbers who have enjoyed climbing mountains may predict that a new mountain climb will be similarly enjoyable. While it’s natural and even beneficial for the human brain to construct these plans, when they go wrong, the planner must “dislodge the imagined world in favor of the real one” (85). Gonzales’s bias toward his own plan almost caused him to have an accident during a motorcycle trip. He rode through a dust cloud, expecting to see his fellow motorcyclists ahead of him when he emerged. Instead, he almost smashed into a bus.

Gonzales claims that “rule followers” tend to do more poorly in survival scenarios than “independent” thinkers who can continually take in new information and change their minds (85).