Impulse

David Lewis

• Publisher: Belknap Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780674729919
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Neuropsychology
• Index: Psychology

"It seemed like a good idea at the time" has been the limp excuse of many a person whose actions later became cause for regret. Although we see ourselves as rational beings, we are far more likely to act according to impulse than logic. Nor is this always a bad thing, David Lewis suggests. Impulse explores all the mystifying things people do despite knowing better, from blurting out indiscretions to falling for totally incompatible romantic partners. Informed by the latest research in neuropsychology, this eye-opening account explains why snap decisions so often govern—and occasionally enrich—our lives.Lewis investigates two kinds of thinking that occur in the brain: one slow and reflective, the other fast but prone to error. In ways we cannot control, our mental tracks switch from the first type to the second, resulting in impulsive actions. This happens in that instant when the eyes of lovers meet, when the hand reaches for a must-have product that the pocketbook can't afford, when "I really shouldn't" have another drink becomes "Oh why not?" In these moments, our rational awareness takes a back seat.While we inevitably lose self-control on occasion, Lewis says, this can also be desirable, leading to experiences we cherish but would certainly miss if we were always logical. Less about the ideal reasoning we fail to use than the flawed reasoning we manage to get by with, Impulse proves there is more to a healthy mental life than being as coolly calculating as possible.

CHAPTER 1

The Impulse That Saved My Life

‘Desires and impulses are as much a part of a perfect human being, as beliefs and restraints: and strong impulses are only perilous when not properly balanced.’ John Stuart Mill, On Liberty

On 4 December 1971, while working as a journalist in Belfast, I went to the cinema on an impulse. That impulse saved my life.

I had first visited Northern Ireland in September 1969, a few weeks after an attempted march by the Protestant Apprentice Boys through the Catholic Bogside area of Derry had led to three days of rioting. Three days later, on 14 August, with civil unrest and sectarian violence on the increase, the British government under Harold Wilson sent in troops for what they claimed would be a ‘limited operation’. It was the start of 20 years of conflict, bombings, murder and destruction that spread to the UK mainland and came to be known, euphemistically, as ‘the Troubles’. Initially welcomed by the Catholic community as a safeguard against Protestant violence, the soldiers soon came to be viewed as a hated army of occupation. By the early seventies, and especially after internment¹ was introduced in 1975, ‘the Troubles’ had developed into a bitter civil war, one fought as much between the Provisional IRA–the ‘Provos’–and British troops as between the two religious communities. The mood of the Catholic community was summed up in a best-selling record of the time, ‘The Men Behind the Wire’, written and composed by Paddy McGuigan of the Barleycorn folk group.² While Protestant groups, such as the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF), Tara, the Shankill Defence Association, the Shankill Butchers and the Ulster Protestant Volunteers, occasionally attacked British soldiers, their violence was mainly directed against Catholics.

By the time I returned to Belfast for my sixth visit, in late November 1971, killings and bombings had become almost a daily occurrence. In the first two weeks of December alone, 70 bombs exploded, 30 people were killed and scores more were injured. During earlier visits I’d come close to a severe beating–or worse–on a number of occasions, especially when taking photographs around the Falls Road.³ On this visit I came within minutes of falling victim to a terrorist’s bomb myself.

An appointment with the McGurks

Among the many friends I had made, on both sides of the sectarian divide, was Dr Jim Ryan. A Catholic GP, Jim had devoted his life to caring for the poor in slums around the Catholic Falls and the Protestant Shankill Roads, irrespective of their religion. At lunchtime on that bright but chilly December day, I met up for a drink with Jim in a bar called Kelly’s Cellars, the city’s oldest licensed premises.⁴ I told him that my latest assignment was to write about the effects of the violence on Belfast’s young people and asked whether he knew of any families with teenagers whom I could interview. Jim immediately suggested I talked with the McGurks.

Patrick and Philomena McGurk ran a public house called Tramore, known to locals as McGurk’s, which stood on the corner of North Queen Street and Great Georges Street. Although this was in a staunchly Catholic and Irish nationalist area of the city, Patrick and Philomena were well known for their lack of religious bigotry. They also had a bright, attractive and eloquent 14-year-old daughter named Maria. I gratefully accepted Jim’s suggestion and he arranged for me to meet mother and daughter at around 8.30 that evening.

I left my hotel shortly after seven to have a meal before going on to my meeting. It was a chilly night and the darkened streets of the city looked especially depressing and foreboding. On the spur of the moment I decided to go to the cinema. The film ended just before nine. I found a taxi easily enough and told the driver to take me to Great Georges Street. We never arrived at our destination.

Approaching the junction with North Queen Street it became clear a major terrorist incident had just taken place. The chilly night air was filled with dense smoke. I could smell the acrid fumes of explosive and burning timbers. The street was filled with fire engines, ambulances, police cars and army trucks. Eerily lit in the harsh white glare of emergency lamps and the occasional flash of a press photographer’s camera, soldiers and civilians scrambled and crawled over the avalanche of rubble, digging and burrowing desperately amongst charred timbers and fragmented brickwork. Of McGurk’s scarcely anything recognisable remained. A solitary, soot-blackened wall. A lone metal arch standing out amidst shattered timbers and twisted steel. The explosion had flattened the old building like a giant’s foot crushing a child’s toy.

At almost the exact moment I left the cinema, a bomb disguised as a brown-paper parcel had exploded in the entrance to the crowded bar. Seventeen people had been killed. Among them Philomena and her daughter. Maria had been doing her homework in the pub’s first-floor living room when the bomb exploded. She was killed instantly. If I had been with them, I too would almost certainly have died.⁵

I will discuss the possible reasons for that life-saving impulse in a moment. But let’s first look at three other examples of people who acted on an impulse and survived almost certain death as a result.

The man who was never late

Fifty-four-year-old Fred Eichler, Chief Financial Officer with the New York brokerage firm Axcelera, prided himself on always being punctual. That bright, sunny autumn morning was no exception. A few minutes before 8.15 he stepped into his building’s express elevator and rode it to his office on the 83rd floor of the World Trade Center’s North Tower. The date was 11 September 2001 and the lives of more than 2,800 men and women in the offices around him were about to be brutally ended. At 8.40 he left his desk to go to the lavatory. On his way he met a group of colleagues and made a sudden decision to stop in a nearby conference room for a chat. While talking, their eyes were suddenly transfixed by the sight of a Boeing 767 passenger jet heading straight towards them through the cloudless blue sky. One of them said in alarmed amazement: ‘Gee, that plane is flying awful low!’

‘It must be a plane from Kennedy that’s got into trouble,’ Fred replied.

Afterwards he recalled: ‘It was all in slow motion. I am told that the plane was flying towards us at 600mph, yet it seemed like an eternity getting to us. I suppose it was 15 seconds. None of us really expected it to hit the building. But it just kept coming and coming. Most of the time it was . . . right in line with the window we were staring out of. Then it was almost on us. I could make out the seams on the wings and all the American Airline markings. I looked right into the cockpit but I couldn’t really make out the figures. They were tiny windows and the sun was shining on them. Maybe I eyeballed Mohammed Atta, the hijack pilot, but I can’t be sure.’

When it was within 200 yards of the building, the aircraft reared up suddenly and banked abruptly to the right. Fred now found himself staring in astonished disbelief at the Boeing’s gleaming silver belly. A moment later, at 8.46 and 26 seconds, the tip of the wing struck the offices some 70 feet above them. It ploughed through floors 94 to 98, smashing steel columns, shredding metal filing cabinets and crushing computer-laden desks. Almost instantly the aircraft’s 10,000 gallons of fuel ignited into a vast fireball, incinerating everything and everyone in its path. So massive was the impact that the aircraft’s landing gear was flung through the south wall of the tower to come crashing down on a street five blocks away. The shock wave from the initial explosion flung Fred and his companions to the ground. Flames and dense black, acrid smoke billowed through the corridors outside the room. Had he still been standing there, Fred would have been killed instantly. But it was not until much later that he appreciated how narrowly he had escaped death. Despite the fact that more than a thousand are thought to have survived the initial impact, not a single person working only seven floors above him got out of the building alive. In the inferno that swept through the North Tower they were either burned alive, suffocated by smoke, killed when the building collapsed or driven by the unbearable heat to leap to their deaths. ‘No one could comprehend it,’ says Fred. ‘I still can’t.’

Corridors filled with dense smoke and flames, shattered stairwells filled with water cascading down from broken sprinkler pipes made escape from the doomed building far from straightforward. In the hallway immediately adjoining the conference room where Fred and the others were taking refuge, the fires had been beaten back by jets of water from the sprinklers and the lights still burned brightly. At 9.30 they suddenly saw a flashlight held by a fireman accompanied by a building worker. Guided by the fireman they made their way down the stairs, stumbling through vast puddles of water and passed by firefighters making their way up towards the blazing floors above them–and to their deaths. As they reached the ground floor a lift shaft shattered into fragments and came crashing down. Ahead of him Fred saw a broken window and scrambled through it to the street. Four minutes later, at 10.28 a.m., the North Tower collapsed. ‘I can’t get away from it,’ Fred says sadly. ‘On our floor there were 15 people killed, ten seriously burned–one of them in the men’s room. If I had gone in there, where I had been heading at the time, I might not be here now.’⁶

Both Fred Eichler and I undoubtedly owe our lives to an impulse. But in neither case was this the result of any sense of impending danger. The next two stories, however, are different. In each an intense if inexplicable fear motivated boy and man to act in the way they did.

The boy in the tunnel

At one stage of my career, while lecturing in clinical psychology and psychopathology at the University of Sussex, I was running a registered charity–Action on Phobias–which helped people suffering from a range of anxiety and phobic difficulties. I also saw patients privately and the two accounts below, with names and certain minor details changed to protect confidentiality, illustrate how a subconscious sense of danger can trigger life-protecting impulses.

Eleven-year-old Tony and his 14-year-old brother Michael lived on a West Country farm managed by their father. The farm had a very large Dutch barn filled, during the summer, with hundreds of straw bales. The two lads had constructed a secret camp by hollowing out a space between the bales in the centre of the barn. This could only be reached through a long, narrow passage between the bales. It was just high enough for a small boy to crawl through on his hands and knees. One night they decided to spend the night in their secret hidey-hole. As darkness fell, Michael wriggled his way in first, pushing their sleeping bags before him. Tony was about to follow when Michael reappeared saying he had left the food for their midnight feast behind in the kitchen and would run to fetch it. Tony decided to go ahead without him. Thirty-four years later he could still remember every detail of scrabbling on all fours along the darkness of the tunnel.⁷ The straw pricking his bare knees, scratching at his arms and brushing his head as he crawled through the musty, straw-scented pitch blackness to their hideaway deep in the barn. He had gone about ten metres down the tunnel when he froze abruptly, suddenly incapable of moving forward. Rooted to the spot by an inexplicable sense of danger. The onrush of fear surprised Tony. He had never previously felt fearful while in the tunnel and was not in the slightest way claustrophobic. On an impulse, and propelled by this unexpected sense of dread, he began a hasty retreat. Since there was no way he could turn round in the narrow passage he had to crawl out backwards. When he was about three metres from the fresh air he saw an orange glow at the far end of the tunnel. A glow that raced towards him at lightning speed preceded by a wall of heat more intense than he had ever experienced. Tony could vividly remembered seeing, in stark detail, the straw forming the roof and walls of the tunnel, all brilliantly illuminated as by an arc lamp. He later learned that his brother had taken a candle into the secret hideout and left it burning while he went back to fetch the food. It must have ignited the straw and started the blaze that destroyed the barn. As Tony scrambled, now in a state of total panic, into the moist night air, a geyser of flame and smoke erupted from the tunnel, singeing his hair and burning his face. Within moments the barn was a blazing inferno. Had he not retreated when he did there can be little doubt that he would have been incinerated by the blaze.

The man who didn’t change trains

Peter came to see me suffering from what, today, we would call post-traumatic stress disorder. A mixture of severe anxiety mixed with guilt, it was the result of a remarkable escape from death he had experienced a year before. On the evening of 18 November 1987, 32-year-old Peter had left his office in central London slightly later than usual and hurried to catch the Piccadilly Line train for the first stage of his journey home. He would travel to King’s Cross station then change to the Circle Line. It was a commute he had done hundreds of times before. The train pulled into King’s Cross shortly before 7.30 and Peter hurried onto the escalator. This would take him up to the ticket hall from which he could transfer to the Circle Line.

The main-line station was, as usual, extremely crowded but everything appeared perfectly normal. As the escalator began to take him towards the ticket hall, however, Peter was suddenly overcome by an overwhelming impulse to go back the way he had come. So intense was this feeling that, ignoring the angry protests of other passengers, he turned around and forced his way back down the escalator to the platform he had left only moments earlier. A train was just pulling out. He jumped on it and collapsed panting into a seat, completely unable to explain his irrational behaviour.

A few seconds after he left the station it was engulfed by fire. Within minutes the whole place was a raging inferno. The ticket hall and the escalator on which he had been travelling were destroyed and 31 people were killed. Many who died were those ahead of and behind him on the escalator from which he had so precipitously and inexplicably fled.

How can we explain such fortuitous impulses? In my own case, I had no particular premonition of danger above the nagging sense of foreboding that was my constant companion while in Belfast in those days. Perhaps it was the contrast between the dark and gloomy December streets and the brightly lit cinema foyer, cheerfully decked out for Christmas, that caught my eye. Maybe it was the prospect of being able to lose myself in a film–of which I can no longer recall even the title, let alone any details of the plot, such was the impression it made–that was so inviting. Certainly compared to the alternative of a solitary supper in a drab restaurant. In his powerful and moving account of escaping from the North Tower, Fred Eichler makes it perfectly clear there was nothing untoward in his mind when he decided to delay a visit to the restroom in order to chat with colleagues. As for Tony and Peter’s life-saving impulses, although they were unable to explain their behaviour, my hunch is that they were responding to the smell of danger, albeit below their level of conscious awareness. They responded instinctively, using what I describe in the next chapter as their ‘zombie brain’, to subtle and virtually imperceptible indications of danger. The fire started by the older boy’s candle, for example, would have been burning for a while before it produced that gush of flame that chased Tony down the tunnel. Similarly, reports show that the fire at King’s Cross station initially started below the escalator. Probably the consequence of a carelessly dropped match or lighted cigarette, it had been burning for some while prior to engulfing the whole place in flames. The fire brigade, who were already on the scene when Peter’s train pulled into the station, believed it posed little or no danger to the public. Although Peter, possibly because he was so focused on getting home, had no recollection of seeing anything untoward prior to his sudden decision to flee, subconsciously he may have smelled, seen or heard something that triggered an alarm bell deep in his brain.

Now of course, had McGurk’s not been bombed that night, if a fallen candle had not turned the Dutch barn into an inferno and had the tragedy at King’s Cross never occurred, then Tony, Peter and I would probably have quickly forgotten our actions. Tony might have been momentarily ashamed of his loss of nerve and probably teased about it by his older brother. Peter might well have occasionally recounted his precipitous flight down the upward-moving escalator with an embarrassed and self-deprecating chuckle. It is most unlikely, however, that any one of us would have long remembered the incident in such vivid–if possibly inaccurate–detail. Which brings me to an important point about impulses. They only ever become significant in the light of subsequent events. Take, for example, the happier impulse that led grandmother Maire McKibbin, from Kilkeel, Co Down, to buy five lottery tickets rather than her usual one. She won over a million euros⁸ with the fifth ticket, making her spur-of-the-moment decision both memorable and newsworthy. Had she had failed to win anything Marie would very likely have forgotten all about it. As William James commented in his 19th-centur...