Thinking Outside the Box: Trusting Your Intuition Can Save Your Life

At some point, you might have heard of the old tale that if you throw a frog into a pot of boiling water, it will immediately jump out. However, if you put it into lukewarm water and gradually increase the temperature, the frog will die. It lacks the ability to rethink the situation and fails to perceive the imminent danger until it’s too late.

I recently conducted some research on this widely circulated story and discovered a problem: it’s not true.

Throwing a frog into boiling water would severely scald it, and it might not escape. A frog actually fares better in slowly heating water: when the temperature becomes uncomfortably hot, it will promptly hop out.

It’s not the frog that fails to reassess, it’s us. We hear this story, believe it to be true, and seldom bother to question it further.

When the Mann Gulch wildfire engulfed them, firefighters had to make a crucial decision. In an ideal world, they would have enough time to pause, analyze the situation, and evaluate their options. But with the fire raging less than a hundred yards behind them, there was no chance to stop and contemplate.

“When the fire comes, there wasn’t time for the fire boss and his crew to sit beneath a tree and hold a Platonic dialogue about a great catastrophe,” noted scholar and former firefighter Norman Maclean in his award-winning disaster chronicle “Young Men and Fire.” “If Socrates had been the boss of the Mann Gulch fire, by the time he and his crew sat down to think, they’d have been burnt to a crisp.”

Dodge

survived not because he was slower to think, but because he possessed the ability to rethink the situation quickly.

Twelve firefighters perished because Dodge’s actions seemed irrational to them, and they couldn’t promptly reassess their assumptions.

Under intense pressure, people often revert to automatic and familiar responses – a result of evolutionary adaptation, as long as you find yourself in the same circumstances that require those reactions. If you’re a firefighter, your familiar response is to extinguish a fire, not ignite another. If you’re fleeing for your life, your instinct is to flee from a fire, not run toward it. In general, those instincts may save your life.

Dodge survived the Mann Gulch fire by swiftly overturning those two responses.

No one had ever taught Dodge to create an escape fire, and he had never even heard of the concept, it was entirely improvised in the moment. Later, two other survivors testified in court that their training did not include any content similar to escape fires. Many experts dedicated their lives to studying wildfires but had never conceived that creating a hole in the flames could be a lifesaver.

When I share Dodge’s escape story with others, they often marvel at the ingenuity he displayed under pressure, calling it sheer genius!

Their amazement quickly turns to dismay as they conclude that such moments of epiphany are unattainable for ordinary folks – my fourth-grade math homework already leaves me flummoxed. However,

most acts of reevaluation do not require any special skills or creativity.

(news article, no reprinting allowed)

Editor: Zeng Zhen