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Thinking under heavy stress
Apr. 16th, 2008 12:19 amWow... a guy was mugged just outside my house. Two people hit him, grabbed his stuff, and then hopped into a getaway car driven by another person. He ran after them, grabbed onto the rear passenger door of the car, and was dragged about 20ft as they drove away. It's sad. I feel bad for the guy -- he seems to have been a recent US immigrant.
I caught the last 10 seconds of it when I heard screaming outside the house.
I was thinking about it afterwards. He nearly got himself killed when the car dragged him -- if he had let go in a different way or if the car had turned differently, he could have been run over. (Fortunately, he seemed uninjured) In the end, he would have had a far better chance of getting his laptop back, and would have not have put his life in danger, if he had stood back and looked at the car's license plate.
Unfortunately, I don't know if I would have been much smarter had I been in his place. People behave very strangely and irrationally when they've just been robbed and punched in the face.
It all raises the question of how people can better learn to deal with extreme stress. While it may be possible to learn how to deal with very specific emergencies through things like fire drills, how does a person lower their stress enough in an unfamiliar emergency in order to think properly?
I caught the last 10 seconds of it when I heard screaming outside the house.
I was thinking about it afterwards. He nearly got himself killed when the car dragged him -- if he had let go in a different way or if the car had turned differently, he could have been run over. (Fortunately, he seemed uninjured) In the end, he would have had a far better chance of getting his laptop back, and would have not have put his life in danger, if he had stood back and looked at the car's license plate.
Unfortunately, I don't know if I would have been much smarter had I been in his place. People behave very strangely and irrationally when they've just been robbed and punched in the face.
It all raises the question of how people can better learn to deal with extreme stress. While it may be possible to learn how to deal with very specific emergencies through things like fire drills, how does a person lower their stress enough in an unfamiliar emergency in order to think properly?
