Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking

tightened up, and all my senses were directed forward at the man running at us with a gun. My vision was focused on his torso and the gun. I couldn’t tell you what his left hand was doing. I have no idea. I was watching the gun. The gun was coming down in front of his chest area, and that’s when I did my first shots.

I didn’t hear a thing, not one thing. Alan had fired one round when I shot my first pair, but I didn’t hear him shoot. He shot two more rounds when I fired the second time, but I didn’t hear any of those rounds, either. We stopped shooting when he hit the floor and slid into me. Then I was on my feet standing over the guy. I don’t even remember pushing myself up. All I know is the next thing I knew I was standing on two feet looking down at the guy. I don’t know how I got there, whether I pushed up with my hands, or whether I pulled my knees up underneath. I don’t know, but once I was up, I was hearing things again because I could hear brass still clinking on the tile floor. Time had also returned to normal by then, because it had slowed down during the shooting. That started as soon as he started toward us. Even though I knew he was running at us, it looked like he was moving in slow motion. Damnedest thing I ever saw.

I think you’ll agree that these are profoundly strange stories. In the first instance, the officer appears to be describing something that is quite impossible. How can someone watch his bullets hit someone? Just as strange is the second man’s claim not to have heard the sound of his gun going off. How can that be? Yet, in interviews with police officers who have been involved with shootings, these same details appear again and again: extreme visual clarity, tunnel vision, diminished sound, and the sense that time is slowing down. This is how the human body reacts to extreme stress, and it makes sense. Our mind, faced with a life-threatening situation, drastically limits the range and amount of information that we have to deal with. Sound and memory and broader social understanding are sacrificed in favor of heightened awareness of the threat directly in front of us. In a critical sense, the police officers whom Klinger describes performed better because their senses narrowed: that narrowing allowed them to focus on the threat in front of them.

But what happens when this stress response is taken to an extreme? Dave Grossman, a former army lieutenant colonel and the author of On Killing, argues that the optimal state of “arousal”—the range in which stress improves performance—is when our heart rate is between 115 and 145 beats per minute. Grossman says that when he measured the heart rate of champion marksman Ron Avery, Avery’s pulse was at the top of that range when he was performing in the field. The basketball superstar Larry Bird used to say that at critical moments in the game, the court would go quiet and the players would seem to be moving in slow motion. He clearly played basketball in that same optimal range of arousal in which Ron Avery performed. But very few basketball players see the court as clearly as Larry Bird did, and that’s because very few people play in that optimal range. Most of us, under pressure, get too aroused, and past a certain point, our bodies begin shutting down so many sources of information that we start to become useless.

“After 145,” Grossman says, “bad things begin to happen. Complex motor skills start to break down. Doing something with one hand and not the other becomes very difficult. . . . At 175, we begin to see an absolute breakdown of cognitive processing. . . . The forebrain shuts down, and the mid-brain—the part of your brain that is the same as your dog’s (all mammals have that part of the brain)—reaches up and hijacks the forebrain. Have you ever tried to have a discussion with an angry or frightened human being? You can’t do it. . . . You might as well try to argue with your dog.” Vision becomes even more restricted. Behavior becomes inappropriately aggressive. In an extraordinary number of cases, people who are being fired upon void their bowels because at the heightened level of threat represented by a heart rate of 175 and above, the body considers that kind of physiological control a nonessential activity. Blood is withdrawn from our outer muscle layer and concentrated in core muscle mass. The evolutionary point of that is to make the muscles as hard as possible—to turn them into a kind of armor and limit bleeding in the event of injury. But that leaves us clumsy and helpless. Grossman says that everyone should practice dialing 911 for this very reason, because he has heard of too many situations where, in an emergency, people pick up the phone and cannot perform this most basic of functions. With their heart rate soaring and their motor coordination deteriorating, they dial 411 and not 911 because that’s the only number they remember, or they forget to press “send” on their cell phone, or they simply cannot pick out the individual numbers at all. “You must rehearse it,” Grossman says, “because only if you have rehearsed it will it be there.”

This is precisely the reason that many police departments in recent years have banned high-speed chases. It’s not just because of the dangers of hitting some innocent bystander during the chase, although that is clearly part of the worry, since about three hundred Americans are killed accidentally every year during chases. It’s also because of what happens after the chase, since pursuing a suspect at high speed is precisely the kind of activity that pushes police officers into this dangerous state of high arousal. “The L.A. riot was started by what cops did to Rodney King at the end of the high-speed chase,” says James Fyfe, head of training for the NYPD, who has testified in many police brutality cases. “The Liberty City riot in Miami in 1980 was started by what the cops did at the end of a chase. They beat a guy to death. In 1986, they had another riot in Miami based on what cops did at the end of the chase. Three of the major race riots in this country over the past quarter century have been caused by what cops did at the end of a chase.”

“When you get going at high speeds, especially through residential neighborhoods, that’s scary,” says Bob Martin, a former high-ranking LAPD officer. “Even if it is only fifty miles per hour. Your adrenaline and heart start pumping like crazy. It’s almost like a runner’s high. It’s a very euphoric kind of thing. You lose perspective. You get wrapped up in the chase. There’s that old saying—‘a dog in the hunt doesn’t stop to scratch its fleas.’ If you’ve ever listened to a tape of an officer broadcasting in the midst of pursuit, you can hear it in the voice. They almost yell. For new officers, there’s almost hysteria. I remember my first pursuit. I was only a couple of months out of the academy. It was through a residential neighborhood. A couple of times we even went airborne. Finally we captured him. I went back to the car to radio in and say we were okay, and I couldn’t even pick up the radio, I was shaking so badly.” Martin says that the King beating was precisely what one would expect when two parties—both with soaring heartbeats and predatory cardiovascular reactions—encounter each other after a chase. “At a key point, Stacey Koon”—one of the senior officers at the scene of the arrest—“told the officers to back off,” Martin says. “But they ignored him. Why? Because they didn’t hear him. They had shut down.”

Fyfe says that he recently gave a deposition in a case in Chicago in which police officers shot and killed a young man at the end of a chase, and unlike Rodney King, he wasn’t resisting arrest. He was just sitting in his car. “He was a football player from Northwestern. His name was Robert Russ. It happened the same night the cops there shot another kid, a girl, at the end of a vehicle pursuit, in a case that Johnnie Cochran took and got over a $20 million settlement. The cops said he was driving erratically. He led them on a chase, but it wasn’t even that high-speed. They never got above seventy miles per hour. After a while, they ran him off the road. They spun his car out on the Dan Ryan Expressway. The instructions on vehicle stops like that are very detailed. You are not supposed to approach the car. You are supposed to ask the driver to get out. Well, two of the cops ran up ahead and opened the passenger side door. The other asshole was on the other side, yelling at Russ to open the door. But Russ just sat there. I don’t know what was going through his head. But he didn’t respond. So this cop smashes the left rear window of the car and fires a single shot, and it hits Russ in the hand and chest. The cop says that he said, ‘Show me your hands, show me your hands,’ and he’s claiming now that Russ was trying to grab his gun. I don’t know if that was the case. I have to accept the cop’s claim. But it’s beside the point. It’s still an unjustified shooting because he shouldn’t have been anywhere near the car, and he shouldn’t have broken the window.”

Was this officer mind-reading? Not at all. Mind-reading allows us to adjust and update our perceptions of the intentions of others. In the scene in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? where Martha is flirting with Nick while George lurks jealously in the background, our eyes bounce from Martha’s eyes to George’s to Nick’s and around and around again because we don’t know what George is going to do. We keep gathering information on him because we want to find out. But Ami Klin’s autistic patient looked at Nick’s mouth and then at his drink and then at Martha’s brooch. In his mind he processed human beings and objects in the same way. He didn’t see individuals, with their own emotions and thoughts. He saw a collection of inanimate objects in the room and constructed a system to explain them—a system that he interpreted with such rigid and impoverished logic that when George fires his shotgun at Martha and an umbrella pops out, he laughed out loud. This, in a way, is what that officer on the Dan Ryan Expressway did as well. In the extreme excitement of the chase, he stopped reading Russ’s mind. His vision and his thinking narrowed. He constructed a rigid system that said that a young black man in a car running from the police had to be a dangerous criminal, and all evidence to the contrary that would ordinarily have been factored into his thinking—the fact that Russ was just sitting in his car and that he had never gone above seventy miles per hour—did not register at all. Arousal leaves us mind-blind.