Big Think Releases Four-Part Ultimate Survivor Stories Series
September 8, 2010 by admin
Filed under featured, informational
To what lengths would you go to survive in the face of death? Could you amputate your own arm to free it from beneath a boulder? Could you survive 10 weeks in the harsh Australian outback, subsisting just on grasshoppers, frogs, and leeches? At what point would you give up? In its Ultimate Survivor Stories series, Big Think speaks with four people who faced this very question and survived to tell their stories.
Every day this week, Big Think will present a video interview with a different survivor — ranging from journalist Jere Van Dyk, who spent 45 days held captive by the Taliban, to Guardian Angels founder Curtis Sliwa, who clawed his way through the front window of a cab despite having been shot repeatedly by mafia gunmen, to Stanley Alpert, a former federal prosecutor who was mugged and kidnapped and used his wits to convince his captors to release him.
Big Think’s Survival Stories series began Tuesday not with an individual survivor story, but rather with an expert on the limits of human survival. Laurence Gonzales is the author of the bestselling “Deep Survival,” which takes a scientific look at why some people make it through extreme situations while others with the same resources do not. After surveying many cases of extreme survival, Gonzalese has concluded that there are 12 traits of good survivors, including persistence, organization, being well informed, and most importantly the ability to stay calm in the face of possible death.
All of Big Think’s survival stories will show that learning how to be a better survivor can actually help with everyday life, because ultimately survival is about how you think and make decisions. “Reason and emotion work like a seesaw: the higher the emotion, the lower your ability to reason,” Gonzales says in his Big Think video interview. “In a high state of stress, you literally can’t remember your own phone number.” So whether your business is going bankrupt, you’re going through a divorce, or you’re being diagnosed with cancer, learning to deal with stress while remaining calm will lead to clearer thinking and better decisions from mundane to life-and-death situations.
Big Think is a global knowledge network that showcases the cutting-edge ideas of leading experts in a variety of fields. Big Think has interviewed more than 1,500 thought leaders, including economists Paul Krugman and Muhammad Yunus, futurist Ray Kurzweil, biologists Rickard Dawkins, E. O. Wilson, Paul Nurse and Anthony Fauci, filmmaker Ken Burns, novelists John Irving and Paul Auster, business leaders Meg Whitman and Richard Branson, investors Peter Thiel and George Soros, journalists Arianna Huffington and David Remnick, US Poet Laureates Billy Collins and Rita Dove, US senators John McCain and the late Teddy Kennedy, particle physicists Freeman Dyson and Michio Kaku, and artists Chuck Close and Jules Feiffer.
