A hero is no braver than an ordinary man, but he is brave five minutes longer.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
Dave Henson is a powerful man: lantern jaw, massive torso; a former army captain. Big Dave Henson, as he’s known. You’d want him on your team. He was a bomb disposal officer in the British Army Royal Engineers. It was his job to look for improvised explosive devices (IEDs) planted by the Taliban.
US military data released by Wikileaks shows that in the aftermath of the US-led invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, IEDs gradually became the Taliban’s go-to weapon. Between 2004 and 2009, Taliban fighters planted more than 16,000 homemade bombs across the country, the numbers increasing each year of the conflict. Detonated remotely, or by timer, or by a trip wire or pressure plate, IEDs killed many hundreds of civilians, and soon became the biggest killer of coalition forces. As well as the hundreds of deaths, thousands of soldiers lost limbs in surprise blasts. People joked darkly that at least the Paralympics teams would benefit.
War is hell, yes, but the threat from IEDs, the danger they pose, and the pall of fear they cast across both the armed forces and the civilian population created a particularly tense atmosphere in the country. By 2014, there had been more than 70,000 cases of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in the US Army alone. Whatever you think of the political decision to go to war, for a soldier to choose to serve in Afghanistan to look for IEDs takes a particular kind of courage.
I’ve chosen Dave Henson’s story to examine what bravery is, but it could equally well feature in the chapters on endurance, resilience, and even happiness. His story, as an aside, also works to illustrate the peculiar, fateful path that our lives can take.
Henson grew up in Southampton, on the south coast of England. He studied mechanical engineering at the University of Hertfordshire, and as part of that degree you have to work for a year in industry. Since the army offered placements, he did a year with the Royal Engineers. When he had to decide a subject for his dissertation, one of the garrison engineers suggested doing something on injured soldiers. “This was 2006, things were kicking off in Afghanistan, and people were starting to come back with no legs,” Henson says. So his project was about getting disabled people back into sport—specifically, about amputees taking up go-karting. “I had a wheelchair in my student flat I went around in. I figured I wouldn’t know what it was like to get into a go-kart from a wheelchair if I hadn’t tried it, so I went around in this wheelchair—it was an absolute pain in the arse. But as a result I got quite good in a wheelchair.”
That skill would come in useful. After graduating, Henson stayed with the army, going to the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, the army’s officer-training college. Having graduated from Sandhurst, he joined 22 Engineer Regiment, and then a position came up in the Royal Engineers as a search advisor in the Explosive Ordnance Disposal (EOD) unit. “When the job came up it did have the element of risk, but I saw it as something intrinsically interesting,” he says. The element of risk, he tells me later, with as much drama as if forecasting the chance of rain next week, is that there’s a one in six chance that someone on a team will be injured or killed on a tour. One in six. How many people accept those kinds of odds at work?
Henson and his team trained extensively for various casualty scenarios, as they are called in the army. But he saw firsthand what blast injuries can do to a person. This was no scenario, it was real-life blood and gore. “An Afghan laying IEDs triggered his own device and was brought into our base,” Henson recalls. “So seeing his . . . remains . . . he was still alive but didn’t survive. That was quite horrendous.”
In February 2011, Henson was in Helmand Province, tasked with making areas safe for families displaced by the Taliban to return to their homes. Methodically checking and clearing the ground of bombs is often protracted and mundane work, but February 13 was more memorable. Henson’s EOD unit was in the south of Nad-e Ali district, an agricultural region about 100 kilometers west of Kandahar. It had been raining for a couple of weeks, and this was the first dry day they’d had in a long time. The team cleared the first compound and moved on to the second. Tensions were high, as four days earlier in the north of the district two soldiers from the Parachute Regiment had been killed in a gun battle.
“I crossed the outer compound to get visual contact with infantry soldiers guarding us, walked back, and that was it,” he recalls. “There was no click, nothing like that. I just remember landing on the floor, and sitting up. It felt like someone had hit me with a spade: my head was ringing, I had tunnel vision. I looked down at my legs. They were attached but were hanging on by strips of skin, with bones poking out.” His feet were still in their shoes, which was nice, he says. “I just remember screaming and backing away against a wall. One of the soldiers came into view and that shook me into level-headed thinking and suddenly it was back to reality.”
He’s a powerful man, as I said, but I didn’t mention that his legs end just above where his knees ought to be. His Twitter handle is @leglessBDH. When I meet him, it’s a cold winter day and he’s wearing steel prosthetic legs with latex-pink bare feet. He doesn’t need to wear shoes indoors as the rubber feet give a good grip. Ridiculously, I have to stop myself asking if his feet aren’t cold in this weather.
Most injuries such as Henson’s result in death, but on this occasion the helicopter arrived within twenty minutes of him being blown up. He spent the time, jabbed with morphine, smoking cigarettes with his team, as if whiling away the day. Nevertheless he was in considerable pain. “It felt like someone had parked a car on my legs. It was an unmoving pressure pain that just wouldn’t go away.” Henson managed to distract himself from the pain until the helicopter came, and he was on the operating table at Camp Bastion after thirty-seven minutes. There’s no doubt that this rapid reaction saved his life. Back in the UK by the next day, he had his right leg amputated above the knee, and the left through the knee.
“I knew it was a risky job,” he says now of his choice of occupation. “I’d assessed the possibilities and even the likelihood of coming back with some kind of injury like this, so it wasn’t altogether surprising that it happened. It wasn’t necessarily a shock.”
Speak to fire and police officers and you hear a similar thing: dealing with danger becomes just part of the job. As Henson explains, you don’t allow yourself to be consumed by fear of what might happen, else you’d never get anything done. There is an ever-present underlying tension as the potential for disaster is always there, but you learn to live with it.
What I find extraordinary about people like Henson is that they can go into a job such as this with the full knowledge that something bad is quite likely to happen. They know the risks and do it anyway.
Bravery comes in different forms, but bomb disposal seems to require a particular kind. Operatives in this field are brave in a way that marks them out even from other members of the military. They knowingly choose a career that exposes them to a constant and particularly insidious kind of danger, invisible and potentially lethal. One of the commanding officers of the engineers said as much when the British Army introduced a new badge to be worn on the uniforms of EOD personnel: “To do this all day, every day, for six months demands a certain kind of mettle—a persistent courage.”1
• • •
Henson is the epitome of the modest British officer. They view the use of understatement as a kind of competition: sure, there’s an “element of risk.” At one point Henson refers to his double amputation as “just a flesh wound.” But he is serious about what he regards as bravery. He says that if what he did was brave, it was a collective bravery. “It’s not me going out on a lonely walk on my own to find bombs, it was me and a team of people—and that made all the difference.” It’s similar to other high-risk military roles, he says, in that you’re rarely doing them on your own. You don’t have to worry so much about the immediate risks to yourself because you’ve built up a trust and a cohesion and a belief that you’ll get through it together.
He cites the army slogan: the team works. “It means immediate risks or the extent to which you think of them are lessened,” he says. “If you dwell too much on how much this could hurt or what the potential consequences are you’d never get out the door. But together as a team you can get through it.”
I begin to see how bravery can be collectively bolstered by being in a team. But what is the motivation driving people to do these things? Where do they get the guts to do what they do? I don’t think I could do it, and I’ll side with Falstaff on this. His rejection of honour is effectively the same as rejecting bravery:
Can honour set to a leg? no: or
an arm? no: or take away the grief of a wound? no.
Honour hath no skill in surgery, then? no. what
is honour? a word. What is in that word honour? what
is that honour? air. A trim reckoning!
Fortunately for the army, there are many people who think differently. Julie Carpenter interviewed twenty-three US Explosive Ordnance Disposal personnel (all but one of them men) for her 2013 doctorate at the University of Washington, Seattle. “One thing that I discovered strongly attracted people to EOD,” she explains, “was the fact they believe their role is ‘helping’ as opposed to harming, because their work is to render safe unexploded ordnance.” This is similar to what Henson told me about his motivation.
Teamwork is absolutely key, Carpenter says. “EOD are regarded as a little rebellious in spirit; they are viewed as confident, smart, and close-knit even compared to other military.”
You, like me, may have been reminded of the movie The Hurt Locker during all this, but if so, here comes an admonishment. That film gave an inaccurate Hollywood version of bomb disposal, says Carpenter, focusing as it did on a renegade main character who was not a team player. Real EOD work, both Carpenter and Henson emphasize, relies on close communication and teamwork. “EOD have incredibly strong teamwork and they exhibit this every day, but they enjoy their reputation as rebels within the military,” Carpenter says. “EOD must have not only the willingness to work well in a team, but strong abilities to communicate as it is essential for the team members, who are in almost constant communication during a mission.”
According to Henson there are various reasons why you sign up to serve, but the baseline is always to make a difference. His team, he explains, were conducting work in an area that had seen intense fighting. In an effort to further the political aim to create peace and stability, their task was to clear compounds so farmers could return to their land.
He takes pride in saying he was a Royal Engineer Explosive Ordnance Disposal officer. “It was our job to look for bombs, and bombs were what was killing troops. Of course there’s also a status to it, an ego attachment to it.”
Other sources of motivation inevitably include the excitement. Henson admits he joined the army to experience risk. “Perhaps it was adrenaline, a rite of passage, a need to prove myself—there are a whole load of reasons why people join the military.” When the job came up he saw it as something intrinsically interesting, but was also attracted by the element of risk. “The risk added to the enjoyment factor. The adrenaline rush you get from it is part of the buzz.” Youthful bravado is certainly a factor: Henson says these days he’s not like that.
As an evolutionary biologist, my first thought when I encounter a behavior is often to wonder how it might have evolved. In the case of bravery, there are a number of possibilities corresponding to the various forms that courage can take: brave acts protect your family and friends, perhaps rescue loved ones and, in ancestral times, provide food. Brave acts may also demonstrate credentials for leadership and perhaps suitability for a partner. Bravery, all told, is an impressive and attractive trait.
Falstaff will have none of it. And I won’t argue with one of the greatest wits in literature except to say that Falstaff isn’t renowned for his sex appeal. Bravery may be just a word and have no skill in surgery, but people who exhibit bravery are nevertheless considered more attractive by the opposite sex. Firemen certainly enjoy this reputation. Henson isn’t convinced:
“I don’t reckon the lads got any extra action because they were in EOD.” But, he allows, “If you say you’re an EOD operator or bomb disposal operator, it certainly gets you into dinner parties.”
Thanks to the strong relationships forged in the military, people are willing to do almost anything to help another person. How do we explain that, from an evolutionary point of view? Laurent Lehmann, of the department of ecology and evolution at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland is, like me, an evolutionary biologist. Lehmann and his colleagues build mathematical models to explore how behaviors such as bravery, altruism, leadership, and despotism may evolve.
The simple explanation of bravery, in evolutionary terms, is that we are predisposed to take risks when our family are in danger. Lehmann puts it more technically: if bravery is costly for an individual and puts him or her at risk to an extent that its action can never be repaid during the individual’s lifetime, then the only way it can evolve and be hard-wired is by kin selection. This, in other words, is when you do something that has no direct benefit to you but does benefit your family. Examples in animals include birds that spend time and energy feeding the chicks of their siblings.
“The platoon is like a family as it creates the same physical proximity and maybe the same kind of sensory inputs—it creates ‘bands of brothers,’ ” says Lehmann. “So maybe the action of soldiers in the environment created by the military leads them to take actions as if they were helping their kin.”
For thousands of years, military leaders have recognized the psychological value of creating tightly knit groups of men. Perhaps they’ve been tapping into deep evolutionary behaviors, too. Once bravery has arisen in people by this process of kin selection, it can be co-opted by the military in ways that mimic the conditions under which it evolved. While most of us feel we wouldn’t be able to exhibit such persistent bravery, the evolutionary argument and the team bonding dynamic goes some way to explaining it. It also suggests bravery can be learned, to some extent, or, in the case of the army, instilled. It can also lead to extreme cases of bravery.
• • •
The protocols of the team and the intense training he and his colleagues had been through helped Henson stay calm during the wait for the helicopter. It’s the team, the camaraderie, that makes the whole endeavor possible. “Genuinely in these situations you’re next to people you’re desperately fond of,” Henson says. “It makes you do strange things. It’s hard-wired into us to do these things for other people.”
Indeed, in those situations people do strange and remarkable things. Peter Singer, a warfare expert at the New America think tank based in Washington, DC, has described the case of a US soldier in Iraq—also an EOD soldier, as it happens—who ran fifty meters under machine-gun fire to rescue a team member. Remarkably brave in itself, but then consider that the team member was a robot that had been knocked down. Why would you take such a risk for a robot? Could it be that the robot has become part of the band of brothers?
Julie Carpenter considers these sorts of reports in the light of what she calls the Robot Accommodation Dilemma. It is something EOD soldiers in particular are prone to. Bomb disposal soldiers have a relationship with robots that is unlike other military or civilian human–robot relationships. The dilemma is that the robot is a tool, and an expendable one—but it exists to save human life, and works and travels with the team. Inevitably the robots are anthropomorphized; they “go through a lot.” One soldier told Carpenter how a younger guy in the team named their robot Danielle and slept cuddled up next to “her” in the Humvee. Carpenter’s studies show that soldiers quickly gain familiarity with their robots, they learn their mechanical quirks and “personalities,” and start to view the robots they use as extensions of their own bodies. EOD soldiers she interviewed said they viewed the robot as their avatar—the soldiers place themselves into the robot’s body and physically associate themselves with the robot. They are emotional when a robot is lost in action. Carpenter quotes an interview with an EOD soldier named as Jed, describing his feelings after a robot team member was blown up. “You know, here’s a robot that’s given its life to save you, so it’s a little melancholy,” Jed says. Perhaps it’s not so strange that soldiers would attempt to rescue a trapped robot they’d grown close to. It’s another example, Lehmann points out, of the path to bravery being co-opted in an evolutionarily novel situation.
The team bonding and intense camaraderie in the army facilitates bravery, but you probably have to be a risk taker to apply for the military in the first place. So what of examples of individual, one-off bravery—how do we explain that?
• • •
In the spring of 2012, an unexpected heat wave baked parts of southern England.
On May 26 of that year, a Saturday, a Bulgarian-born British electrician named Plamen Petkov, who lived in the south-west London suburb of Sutton, headed to the coast with his girlfriend to make the most of the weather. They chose West Wittering beach, a long stretch of fine sand and clean waters near Chichester, renowned for both its surfing and its beauty. With the temperatures hitting 28 degrees Celsius, hundreds of other people had had the same idea. One was San Thidar Myint, from northwest London, who had brought Darlene, her five-year-old daughter.
What happened that day simultaneously illustrates two extremes of the human response to disaster. Darlene was in the sea on an inflatable ring when a rip current dragged her far from shore. The girl screamed, and her mother, panicking, begged someone on the beach to help. The waves were suddenly intimidating, the currents treacherous. What would you do? You would have to balance the risk to your own self, after all. Perhaps you would tell yourself that someone else will help, or that the situation will resolve itself without you. You can imagine people shifting uncomfortably in the sand. No one on the crowded beach answered the mother’s cries.
San Thidar, who couldn’t swim, became even more distraught. This was when Petkov, aged thirty-two and happy at having recently moved in with his girlfriend, happened to walk by. Witnesses stated that he charged into the water without a second thought, despite Darlene being in a red-flagged zone with “do not swim or enter the water” signs.
When he reached Darlene, she abandoned the rubber ring and climbed on his back, and he started swimming to shore, keeping her head above the waves although the wind and current and the girl’s weight meant his head kept submerging. Petkov managed to carry Darlene closer to the shore, where he passed her to a woman who took her safely to her mother. But Petkov was sucked back in and dragged under. By the time he was brought to dry land he was unconscious, and the bystanders who attempted CPR failed to revive him. He was pronounced dead. The cause of death was cardiac arrest.
The coroner’s officer who dealt with the case said it was the most unselfish act she had seen.2 Petkov was posthumously awarded the Queen’s Gallantry Medal for bravery. Noting that his selfless actions saved the girl’s life, the citation ends with this line: “Once he had reached the child, he did not release her to save himself, even when he got into difficulty.”
Reports such as these leave us in awe of the human capacity for bravery. You hear these stories and think: what would you do in a similar situation? It might be enough to say, “he was an incredible person, he was one in a million”—but I want to try to understand these people at the peak of their potential. Why did Petkov risk so much, ending up giving his life for a total stranger? What was different about him?
We now know a lot about what happens in the brain when people are brave, and about what happens to their hormones. We can start to explain what happens biologically. Scientists are also figuring out how to induce bravery, and how to use what we know to treat people suffering from PTSD and other kinds of stress and anxiety.
Faced with disaster or a sudden desperate situation, the brain produces a corticotropin-releasing hormone (CRH). This starts a chain reaction which primes the body for action: adrenaline gets the heart pumping faster and blood sugar levels increase in anticipation of activity. CRH also interacts with the amygdala, the almond-shaped paired structure in the brain responsible for generating feelings of fear and anxiety.
For some people, fear prevents them from taking action. For others, as we’ve seen, fear can be overridden. It may be a case of accommodating and living with a slow-burning fear, such as that experienced by Henson and EOD operatives, or dispelling an immediate fear, as we saw with Petkov.
After he died, Petkov’s friends said his act was typical of his selfless nature. This explanation is an appeal to personality, something that Bryan Strange, who runs the Laboratory for Clinical Neuroscience at the Reina Sofia Centre for Alzheimer’s Research in Madrid, Spain, says is one of the two main parameters that scientists are exploring to understand why some people are individually brave even on behalf of people they don’t know. The Strange Lab, as it is called, is concerned with how the memories of traumatic events are stored in the brain—and how they can possibly be erased.
The other parameter is genetic polymorphisms. “There are genes under study, such as the ADRA2b gene in the adrenaline system,” Strange says, “but much like the pathogenesis of mental illness, it is likely that a combination of genetic polymorphisms are behind differential fear responses.” It reminds me of what geneticists told me about intelligence: there are likely to be many different gene variants that influence a complex behavioral trait such as this.
Gleb Shumyatsky is a geneticist, with his lab at Rutgers University in New Jersey. His research area is the molecular and cellular analysis of fear and memory, but Fear and Loathing in New Jersey would seem to fit—Shumyatsky studies the genetics of fear. His team have identified a protein, stathmin, that plays an important role in the amygdala, linked to regions known to influence the fear response. Stathmin is produced by the STMN1 gene, and mice bred without it explore more of a new environment and show more “boldness” in entering open areas. As well as this lack of what the researchers called innate fear, experiments showed that the mice were unable to form memories about fearful events. And female mice without the stathmin gene showed different maternal behavior: they did not retrieve pups from harmful situations, and in experiments didn’t bother locating safe places to hide in the face of a threat.
Fear is an adaptation—we need fear. In the wild, of course, fearless mice would not last long, but making a mouse in the lab without the stathmin gene allowed the scientists to examine how fear is generated and processed. The aim is to find treatments for people who have pathological fear or suffer from conditions such as PTSD.
Would this allow us potentially to tamp down the fear response? “One can train certain simple behaviors as a response to dangerous situations,” says Shumyatsky. We know, he tells me, that mice can change the activity of the stathmin gene. As we’ve heard, mice without the gene are braver, and ramping the “volume” of the gene up or down modulates their levels of fear. Shumyatsky points out that in people who have an exaggerated response to fear, there are mutations in genes that control this volume switch. So might particularly brave people such as Petkov have variants of stathmin that make them innately more courageous than the rest of us? The problem, Shumyatsky says, is that scientists generally study people who are inordinately fearful rather than those who are super brave. “I have not heard of stathmin gene variants found in brave people, but potentially it is possible.”
• • •
Some people act without apparent fear. Bomb disposal soldiers, as we’ve seen, learn to live with it. As the slogan has it, they feel the fear and do it anyway. Some people, such as Plamen Petkov, are able to show remarkable bravery and it’s not because they don’t feel scared, it’s because they can override their fear. But there are some people, very few worldwide, who are biologically incapable of feeling fear. Are these people brave as well as fearless?
Justin Feinstein is a clinical neuropsychologist at the Laureate Institute for Brain Research at the University of Tulsa in Oklahoma. Feinstein works with three women famous in neuroscience literature, but known only by their initials: SM, AM, and BG. These women have Urbach-Wiethe disease, a rare genetic disorder that has various effects on the body, such as the thickening of the vocal cords, but which also causes calcium deposits to build up in the brain. In SM’s case, the disease is caused by the deletion of a single letter of the DNA code in the gene coding for extracellular matrix protein 1—a protein with a number of jobs in the body, which when it goes wrong in other ways can cause breast and thyroid cancer. For an unknown reason, the single-letter deletion in Urbach-Wiethe disease causes calcifications that seems to target and destroy the amygdala but nothing else in the brain. What happens if you lose the structure that generates fear? You lose fear itself.
Feinstein has now known SM for many years. Before the disease progressed, as a child, SM recalls being scared by a vicious Doberman that cornered her—it caused a “gut-wrenching terror”—but in her adult life she has never experienced fear. For example, on one occasion a man she had never seen before held a gun to her head and shouted “BAM!” Someone else witnessing the menacing scene reported it to the police but SM was perplexed when they arrived, saying only that she found it strange that someone would do that.
On another occasion, a man, probably demented on meth or crack, put a knife to SM’s throat and threatened to kill her; and once she was tricked into getting into a car with a stranger who took her to a deserted farm and attempted to rape her. She shouted at him to take her home, and the appearance of a dog attracted to the noise caused the man to give up his attempt. Asked later by a shocked and worried Feinstein if she’d been scared, SM said no; she’d just been angry. Her complete lack of understanding of danger meant that she got back in the man’s car and let him take her home, even directing him to her apartment so he knew her address. In many ways it’s lucky her fear deficit has not caused her greater harm. “Her impoverished experience of fear repeatedly leads her back to the very situations she should be avoiding,” says Feinstein. As it is she has survived for more than fifty years.
Feinstein and some colleagues once took SM to a famous haunted house at a theme park. She led them along dark passageways, excited and curious but showing no signs of trepidation nor feeling any fear. Other people in their group shrieked and jumped at the surprises, but SM was unmoved—she never screamed or jumped back or even flinched. “In the haunted house I had a distinct impression that she was leading me into battle,” Feinstein says, “although I am afraid we would not have survived very long with SM leading the way.”
Bravery without danger is showboating. Action without fear is foolhardy. But trauma without fear goes unlearned. Feinstein notes that after some traumatic event, even the assault and having a knife held to her throat, SM shows no sign of dwelling on it. She doesn’t start avoiding similar situations, nor does she remember the event with any drama or emotion. It seems that without her amygdala, her memories lack any fearful dimension and she fails to learn from them. Feinstein points to a study in 2008 showing that veterans of the Vietnam war who suffered brain injuries in battle—and specifically, damage to the amygdala—did not develop PTSD.3 So in extreme examples, it might be beneficial not to have an amygdala, but what neurologists and psychiatrists take from this—and the dozens of scientific papers inspired by SM over thirty years—is that if we can modulate the action of the amygdala, we may be able to develop better treatments for PTSD and other disorders.
PTSD is a big problem. According to the US National Center for PTSD, 7 to 8 percent of the population will experience it at some point in their lives. Symptoms include persistent terror, reliving and remembering the traumatic event, problems sleeping, a feeling of detachment, and a propensity to be easily startled. Women are more susceptible than men, and about 8 million adults will have it in a given year.
Eventually Feinstein hit on a way of scaring SM: he had her experience suffocation. In the safe but undoubtedly terrifying experiment, SM donned a mask that fed her air containing 35 percent carbon dioxide—that’s some 875 times the amount in the air we breathe normally. As soon as she began breathing the suffocating mixture, she started gasping. After eight seconds she was waving frantically; after fourteen seconds she exclaimed “Help me!” The scientists removed the mask. Two minutes later SM stopped talking and started having more trouble breathing. She tapped at her throat and gasped, “I can’t.” She was having a panic attack, the first in her life. Five minutes after the start of the experiment, she had recovered, and reported that she had felt genuine fear, the worst in her life. “After many years of attempting to scare SM,” says Feinstein, “we had finally found her kryptonite: carbon dioxide.”
Feinstein later repeated the experiment on an identical twin pair of German women, AM and BG, with severely damaged amygdalae, and got the same result. It’s odd to think how deliberately inducing a panic attack in women can be celebrated and seen as a scientific breakthrough, but until then, the amygdala was seen to be absolutely key to the experience of fear. How then could these women feel fear without the amygdala? The answer seems to be that there are other, more primal pathways to fear in the brain. Although the amygdala is important in conducting fear responses, it is not essential.4 And although without the amygdala we don’t feel fear, being fearless is not the same as being brave.
• • •
Before his work with the Urbach-Wiethe patients, Feinstein treated US military veterans who were suffering from PTSD. “I did psychotherapy to get them to overcome some of the fears they’d acquired during war,” he says, referring to deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan. One way to treat PTSD is to assist the patient to remember and re-experience, to a small degree, the stimulus that caused the trauma. Prolonged exposure therapy, as it’s known, involves both discussing the memory and revisiting it in a controlled and safe way. For example, Feinstein recalls veterans with PTSD who had been in vehicles blown up by IEDs in Iraq. Typically sufferers are unable to drive or even to go near cars because vehicles trigger anxiety and panic. And if that’s not enough of a life-ruining, miserable disorder, it means you can’t have a car. “If you can’t drive in America, you’re screwed,” Feinstein says. “You might start treatment by having the veterans look at cars on computer monitors. That was fine, but they freak out in parking lots. Or they are okay as passengers but freak out as drivers.” So you build up slowly and safely, over months. “It’s a fascinating treatment to deliver because essentially what you’re trying to teach them is how to overcome their fear. It’s done systematically; it’s like a class, and you have to have intuition about their limits. You have to make sure when you induce the fear response it’s in a safe context. And continue inducing it until it’s no longer there.”
The opposite works, too—you can prepare the brain to guard against fear. It’s why training works. I’m recalling stories of cabin crew evacuating crashed aircraft, and firemen rescuing people from burning buildings. “You can damp down fear through training,” says Feinstein. But instead of the cabin crew airline training I was imagining, he tells me about the extraordinary training undergone by elite military units. At the Little Creek naval base in Virginia Beach, Virginia, for example, candidates hoping to become Navy SEALs are put through one of the most demanding and dangerous training courses imaginable. The Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL (BUD/S) component of the course lasts twenty-four weeks. One notorious activity is known as “drown proofing,” whereby candidates must swim 100 meters with their arms and legs bound. Another exercise simulates drowning. The dropout rate is huge, up to 90 percent, and the training is so demanding and dangerous that, tragically, deaths sometimes occur. “All these kinds of training are forms of exposure therapy,” Feinstein says. “With repetition you habituate the fear response.” With repetition you can even get used to the horror of near-drowning.
After intense training, actions and operations can be carried out “unconsciously.” Hence the phenomenon many of us have experienced, when we drive home by a familiar route and find that we have no memory of the journey. The operation is being conducted not by the cortex, where most of our decision making and executive function resides, but by the basal ganglia at the base of the forebrain. This region is basically our autopilot, and it isn’t influenced by the fearmongering of the amygdala.
That’s not to say dragging children out of a burning house is like driving home on a quiet road. Even with training, these feats are impressive. But the point is that bravery can be trained. Courage can be practiced, like a discipline.
Bryan Strange explains how training apparently makes people braver. He says that fear responses can be dampened down consciously, by processes such as cognitive regulation or active coping. In Frank Herbert’s sci-fi novel Dune, the main character is put through a terrifying and painful test. He copes with it by repeating “the Fear Litany”: “I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me.” I remember a couple of times, after reading this as a child, repeating these lines when I was woken by a nightmare or faced some fearful situation.
My recollection is put in perspective when I mention this to Dave Henson. When he was blown up, he says, he automatically started listing the process that needed to be followed in the event of a casualty scenario. “The training definitely kicked in and I think providing a little direction, even if it wasn’t needed, perhaps provided a level of reassurance for those that were dealing with the immediate situation.” It distracted his mind from the pain, too. The kinds of injuries he suffered, more often than not result in death, he says, and it is drilled into soldiers from all their medical training that time is of the essence. Possibly, he reckons, by demonstrating that he was still in control and thinking clearly—even if the instructions he’d been given were not necessary—he enabled the actions required to save him to be carried out in a more calm and collected fashion. The army version of the Fear Litany works. “I did feel strangely calm,” says Henson, “once the initial shock had died down.”
According to Strange, trained habits and practiced behaviors are more easily accessed by the brain during terrifying situations: “There is accumulating evidence that fear—or stress in general—favors the retrieval of habit memory at the expense of flexible hippocampus-dependent memories.” That is, the brain prefers to go into autopilot at times of fear and stress.
Training can change the brain and make us braver. And there’s another way this can happen, but it’s available only to women, and you have to change your body too: through pregnancy.
• • •
Can you imagine how you would react if, out of the blue, a masked man pointed a gun in your face?
In January 2016, Angie Padron stopped with her children, aged one and seven, at a Tom Thumb gas station in Hialeah, Florida. Padron, then twenty-one, parked in such a way that the pump was opposite the driver’s side, so she walked around the car to fill the tank. At this point, as can be seen on film from the gas station security cameras, a masked man approached and leveled a gun at her head. Another masked man ran to the driver’s side and opened the door. The men were carjackers.
“Instincts kicked in,” Padron told Good Morning America.5 “I was yelling at him, ‘My kids are in the car. Don’t get in the car,’ and he got in anyway.” Her son, Evan, was in the backseat. “My mom was yelling at him, saying, ‘Get out of the car, get out of the car, get out of the car, right now,’ ” he says.
When her screams proved ineffective, she opened the door on the driver’s side and leapt on the man trying to steal her car. In a brief struggle she ripped his mask off and managed to drag him out of the car. Both men fled. (They were soon caught by police.)
Her story made national TV and got international coverage, and it’s obvious why: here’s an ordinary young mother performing an act of remarkable bravery. We see Padron doing something that we hope we would also have the capacity for, if we were ever tested. We like to be reminded that there is valor potentially available to us all, even as we go about our regular lives. A hidden superhero within. So she was rightly feted for her bravery. But just as with Plamen Petkov and Dave Henson, I want to know what’s going on inside.
Oliver Bosch, a neurobiologist at the University of Regensburg in Germany, studies maternal instinct in mammals. He explains what we know about how being a mother can influence behavior. First, he says, it’s well known among biologists that while lactating, rodents as well as human mothers are less anxious. (When talking about rodents, scientists prefer to say the mothers are less anxious rather than more brave, and if you’re wondering how scientists assess anxiety in mice, they measure things such as the animal’s tendency to venture into open or brightly lit spaces.) So mothers are less anxious, our proxy for bravery, and this calming effect comes about through the action of the hormone oxytocin. You might have heard that oxytocin has a role in promoting mother–infant bonding, which has given it the nickname the cuddle chemical, but there’s far more to it than that.
Before birth, oxytocin has an important role in triggering the contraction of the smooth muscles of the uterus and inducing labor, and when the mother is nursing, the sucking stimulates the release of oxytocin which causes the milk ejection reflex from the nipple. “But what also happens is that oxytocin gets released within the brain and facilitates maternal care and maternal defensive behavior,” Bosch says.
His work in rodents has shown that oxytocin is released in the amygdala when the mother is in danger. “There is a strong release of oxytocin when the mother is facing a threat, such as a potentially dangerous intruder rat that might kill the offspring.”
Oxytocin in the amygdala of men makes them brave, and Bosch speculates that this same stimulus in lactating females is responsible for maternal bravery. Oxytocin also changes the way mothers react to stress. When Padron said “instincts kicked in,” what was happening was that the encounter with danger and a threat to her children caused her brain to release oxytocin in the amygdala. This then blocked the production of the corticotropin-releasing hormone. This hormonal override gave her the courage to confront her assailants.
When a rodent’s pups are weaned, the mother’s behavior returns to normal and her maternal responses disappear. That’s not the case in humans. Rats can have sixteen pups every eight weeks, whereas women are currently having fewer than two babies in a lifetime. Plus human babies need far more care for longer.
“The maternal feelings of the human mother need to be present for a much longer time in order to ensure the proper development of the kids,” says Bosch. It makes a big difference between us and mice, and having children could even structurally alter your brain. “I’m not sure if the maternal feelings ever go away once a woman has had a baby.”
• • •
In this exploration of bravery, I’ve realized that it comes in many forms. There’s what we might call learned bravery (such as that demonstrated by Navy SEALs and cabin crew); there’s maternal and familial bravery (protecting a child); there’s social bravery (public speaking); and there’s altruistic bravery (saving a stranger from drowning). As we’ve seen, there are different ways these kinds of bravery can evolve. But that doesn’t mean that they are handled by different parts of the brain. At root, all forms of bravery can be seen as having a common denominator: the voluntary performance of something that is opposed by a current and ongoing fear. So courage in different forms may share the same core brain mechanisms.
Uri Nili and colleagues at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel, set up an experiment to examine this. The team recruited people who were scared of snakes, and scanned their brains while at the same time giving the volunteers the choice to bring a live snake closer to their heads. The snakes were positioned on a conveyor belt that was under the control of the person in the brain scanner; the conveyor belt could be activated to move backward, away from the volunteer’s head, or forward, toward it. By setting up the choice like this, the scientists were able to define a particular act of bravery: the decision to move the snake closer. “The way we define courage, that is, ‘acting in a way opposed to that dictated by ongoing fear,’ suggests that people that are braver than others have a higher ability to control their fear,” says Nili.
He suggests, too, that multiple acts of moving the snake closer show perseverance in the face of adversity, which is another component of bravery. As a control, the team used the same conveyor-belt-and-snake setup to scan the brains of people not scared of snakes. They also performed the scans with only a teddy bear on the conveyor belt.
What they found (and published in the journal Neuron)6 was that the decision to overcome fear was mainly associated with activity in an area of the brain called the subgenual anterior cingulate cortex, or sgACC. The cingulate cortex is a midlevel layer of the brain, and we’re interested in the anterior, front half of it. This region connects to many other parts of the brain, including the amygdala and the hypothalamus, and has roles in pain perception, in the assignation of emotions to internal and external causes, and in guiding social behavior. The sgACC is the front lip of the front half of this part of the brain. The results from the snakes-on-a-scanner experiment point, Nili’s team says, to the sgACC being the region that has to work in order to mount a successful mental effort to overcome fear. When you are marshalling yourself to any kind of bravery, you are tamping down the output of the amygdala and the hypothalamus, and for that it seems you have the sgACC to thank. Brave people have high sgACC activity, and they are better able to inhibit the output of the amygdala and the hypothalamus during times of fear.
There’s a key point I take away from this which doesn’t require us to remember the names of parts of the brain. Nili’s work suggests that although there are several varieties of bravery, there is a common denominator in the brain when it comes to mastering fear. “Any instance of overcoming an acute source of fear, of any type, would be regarded as an act of courage, and is probably mediated by the brain processes described in the paper,” he says.
• • •
Looking back on his career in explosive ordnance disposal, Dave Henson jokes that it’s a stupid job to go and do. Now, he says, he’s a proper pansy. But I don’t believe him. Bravery isn’t just about military valor or one-off reactions to armed robbers. That’s when we see extreme manifestations, but in a smaller way we use it every day. It’s instructive that the rodent biologists use anxiety as a proxy for bravery. The two are linked in the brain. And it’s reassuring that bravery can be trained. We might not be able to display the courage of war heroes, or the extraordinary selflessness of those who dive into dangerous waters to rescue strangers, but we can ratchet ourselves along.
Rehabilitation for Henson was long and painful. “It took me a long time to realize it was hard,” he says. “There were tears in hospital because it was hard.” But he got through it in the same way he got through day-to-day deployment in Afghanistan. He was in the hospital with a lance corporal and two privates from the Parachute Regiment, and they did it together. The team had supported him through the deployment and the accident, and now an impromptu hospital team supported him through rehab. “In that situation one of the lads might be having a really shitty day and I’ll help them out, then I might be having a shit day and he’ll help me out. And that’s how you get through it. It was one of life’s pleasures to be in hospital.”
After Henson was blown up, he was promoted to captain and then obviously had a desk job. At least he could already use a wheelchair, the result of his eerily prophetic decision to learn to use one when writing his dissertation on disabled people taking up sport. It’s mad that for his engineering degree he wrote about amputees and sport. “It’s barking mad,” he says. Team sports played a massive role, and when he was fitted with running blades he became even more motivated. In the army, there are twice-yearly fitness assessments, for which you must be able to run 2.4 kilometers in under 10 minutes and 30 seconds. Henson decided he would leave the army once he was able to pass this test, and in 2014 he ran 10:28. Two years later he was in the Paralympics in Rio de Janeiro, and he won bronze in the 200 meters. He ran it in the extraordinary time of 24.74 seconds.
By his own reckoning, Henson is lucky. But he’s not referring to his survival after being blown up. It’s the re-establishment of his character and the redefining of his purpose. “Everyone cares what people think about you,” he says. “It doesn’t matter what they say, they care. For me, there was that pride in being an army captain. I knew that people understood that role. But after I left the military, I became a wounded veteran, and I didn’t have that definition anymore. And then through the Invictus games and the Paralympics—I wasn’t just a wounded veteran, I was a former serviceman and a medal-winning Paralympian.” He is lucky he had something he could do. As well as sports, he’s currently doing a PhD in biomechanical engineering at Imperial College London. He’s researching how to build bionic knee joints for amputees, and hoping to use that little bit of his left knee he still has in a new kind of prosthetic. “Suddenly that redefinition is almost complete,” he says. “The proper redefinition will happen here at Imperial. I’m starting to make a difference in people’s lives again.”
Have we covered all forms of bravery? I feel I am much clearer now about what bravery is, how it evolved, and what the body needs for it to happen, physiologically and neurologically. My fuzziness over bravery has decreased, but my awe at its power hasn’t. If anything, thinking harder about what makes people brave has only increased my admiration. About random acts of bravery, Feinstein says he’s always been struck by how quickly people can act without conscious thought, seemingly without deliberation. “It seems primal and instinctive. It might be more ubiquitous than we imagine.” We might all have it inside us. Now that’s a nice thought.