A predator is fast approaching and it’s “game on.” The Fight or Flight response engages. Imagine Ug is out on his daily hunt for food. Perhaps you may recall from previous articles my discussions about your cave dwelling ancestors and their influence on your genetic engineering and your performance under stress. Remember Ug, your cave dwelling ancestor? Under stress, you’ll do better when you process small amounts of information versus a large amount of information over a longer period of time. If I gave you a sequence of seven random two-digit numbers over the course of a thirty second period of time and then asked you to recall the fifth number in the sequence, you’d probably be able to recall it with ease.īut, if I gave you a list of seven different and random two-digit numbers numbers every thirty seconds over the course of five minutes and then asked you to remember the eighteenth number I gave you, your performance would likely be abysmal. Rather, it’s because in a dynamic event the information is changing so rapidly that your brain will quickly become overloaded with trying to process and comprehend the volume of information coming at it. Not because the building will burn down if more time is taken (though as I noted that may happen).
Performing a rapid size up during a dynamically changing event like a structure fire is essential. From the perspective of brain science, the time frame is the same, but the explanation is much different. The answer I most typically get is “ Because they building will burn down.” This may be true. Then I challenge the group as to why they don’t take 5 to 10 minutes to make such a critical, high risk decision. When I ask participants how long they take to size up a single-family residential dwelling fire with no exposures, the answer I get ranges from 10 to 30 seconds. The first step in this process is performing a rapid size up. During my fireground situational awareness classes we talk about the process for making high-stress, high consequence decisions.
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