When I worked at Time magazine / I ended up covering disasters / all kinds of disasters / sort of by accident / but also because of 9/11. // I ended up covering terrorism / attacks / hurricanes / wildfires / and after a while / I felt like I was just doing the same story / over and over. // Those were important stories / like stories of grief / and blame / and stories of loss. // But there were also other things / that I was hearing / from the survivors of these disasters / that weren't making it into the stories / — like really interesting / surprising / useful things / that also weren't making it into / you know / official conversations about how to prepare for disasters. // People // found that when they were in a life-or-death situation / it was not anything like they'd expected. // In some ways / it was better / and in other ways / it was worse / but their brain behaved differently / than what they expected / based on movies and news coverage. // And these survivors had things / that they wanted the rest of us to know / — things that they wish they had known — that would really help us / to meet our disaster personalities / before we need them. // We all have ideas / about how we're going to behave / in a crisis or emergency. // It's almost never / how things actually go. // What you learn in a real disaster / is that you have another personality / — a disaster personality / — and it's helpful / to understand it better / before you need it. // So / if you look at human behavior / across all different kinds of disasters / across all of history / you see a huge spectrum of responses / some of which are understandable / right? // Sometimes / people start / you know / hysterically screaming. // Other times / — most often — / people shut down. // They freeze / they stop moving altogether. // Sometimes people fight / sometimes people flee. // Sometimes / — believe it or not / people laugh / in the face of a life-or-death situation. // Sometimes / — maybe most often / — people carry on doing whatever they were doing before. // Our brains can become incredibly creative / in helping us pretend / that whatever's happening / is not really happening. // And sometimes / people rise to the occasion / and do incredible things. // They're — they're heroes / right? — who lead hundreds of people out of mayhem / who save lives / at great personal risk. // So / there's a huge range of behaviors / and it's really hard to predict / just looking at the person / how they're going to behave. //