"HEADS, YOU WIN"
| "HEADS, YOU WIN" | |
| MAP |
| The chapters so far have been written in a manner so as to present a river that winds it way through fields of information, gathering in tributaries of facts as it flows towards a vast sea of knowledge whose depths are still unplumbed. Along its meandering path it has encountered many small stories that, at the time, had no place in the mainstream. Yet it is these cameos that illustrate the direction in which we are moving. In this chapter I intend to relate a few of the stories of people who, by their actions, have unquestionably demonstrated the importance and incredible power of attitude. Some of these stories are impressive, others pass far beyond what one might think of as being humanly possible; yet the people involved are neither more nor less human than you and I. Nota: The case histories given below, are taken from my own notes collected from a wide range of publications over a number of years. It is for this reason that I regret that I am unable to give credit of copyright to the original authors and publishers. I can only hope that they will excuse any plagiarism on the grounds that I only seek to convey their works to a wider audience. |
| Before they are licensed to drive a London taxi cab, prospective drives are required to spend up to two years in riding around the capital on a bicycle. The purpose is for them to build a mental picture of each of its thousands of streets, and their relationship to each other. It is known as "The Knowledge". Squirrels, during the heydays of summer, will bury up to 4,000 nuts in separate caches around the forest. Yet they are able to find those cached food stores when the whole landscape has changed in the depths of winter. Scientists have found that, in squirrels, the hippocampus - that part of the brain involved in memory - was 3 to 4 times larger than in mammals of similar size. The connection? Studies of the brains of potential cab drivers showed that comparisons between the size of their hippocampus before and after their apprenticeship, revealed that it averaged 3 times the size of comparative people. They had increased the physical size of their brains, by thinking. |
| Sports physiologists have demonstrated that, by sitting still and going through their exercise routines in their heads, athletes are able to increase the size of their muscles by 50% of that which they would have gained by actually doing the exercises. |
| 1954, a milestone year in the world of athletes, and a year in which a single event was causative in triggering off the whole realm of sport psychology and the ripple-on that affects the way we think. From high powered corporate directors to kids kicking a ball around on a mean street, all are familiar with the basic concepts and the resultant terminology that sprang from that event. At the beginning of 1954 it was KNOWN that it was impossible to run a mile in less than four minutes. There was even a body of medical 'evidence' to support the belief. Then Roger Bannister did it. Writing of the event, he said, "My legs seemed to meet no resistance at all, as if propelled by some unknown force. I was relaxing so much that my mind seemed almost detached from my body. It (my mind) raced well ahead of my body and drew my body compellingly forward. There was no pain, only a great unity of movement and aim. I felt at that moment that it was my chance to do one thing supremely well." Bannister, Roger. "The Four Minute Mile". New York. Dodd Mead. 1955 In no way do I mean to belittle Bannister's achievement, but, what I see as the main focus is the fact that within the same year 52 other runners also broke the 4 minute 'Barrier'. The mental block of that wrongly perceived barrier had prevented a generation of athletes from achieving the possible. |
| After polio, Marsha Shenk aged 9, was confined to an iron lung because the disease had paralysed her chest muscles. She was apparently condemned to spend the rest of her life there, until the day that she overheard doctors telling her parents that it was unlikely that she would long survive. Unaccepting of their prognosis, Marsha began to picture herself as a well and fit child running in the sunshine. Step by step, her imaginations became reality. |
| North Dakota. A young farm boy, John Thompson, was working alone when a grain rotor tore off both of his arms. The resultant pain and shock to his mind and body are almost impossible to conceive, and death was close at hand. Yet five months later, with his replaced arms supported by splints, he was able to joke about it. Despite the incredible pain, John had taken a pencil in his teeth and used it to dial a phone and call for help. By the time that the medics arrived he had lost half of his total blood supply, but he had the presence of mind to remind them to gather up his arms. |
| 1964, Boulder, Colorado. It had been a fine day when novice climber Rob Scultheis set out from his halfway camp to climb Mount Neva. Now, standing on its summit, 4 kilometres above sea level, he was suddenly pelted by wind-swept hail as a storm roared up from the valley. After a quick study of his topographical map he made the decision to follow a more direct but more difficult route down from the mountain. In his account of the ordeal that he had brought upon himself, he wrote, "Anyone in his right mind would have turned and gone down the same way he had come up. But I was not in my right mind that day, I had left logic far behind." He pressed on along the narrowing ridge until he came to the point where he was flanked by precipices that fell away on either side. Lowering himself over the edge he began the perilous descent. Then he came to the point where he could go no further down and lacked the strength to haul himself up. "I hung there for I don't know how long ... The blood drained from my arms; my fingers went dead. Finally, without meaning to, I let go." Crashing down the mountainside he was constantly wounded by his own ice axe and by the spikes of his crampons that he had slung over his shoulder. "Suddenly it all stopped: I was lying on a narrow, sloping ledge; my head lay next to the emptiness, and I was staring down into at least 200 feet of thin air." Bleeding from dozens of puncture wounds, and without supplies or shelter, he knew that he could not survive the night on the mountain. He had to make it back under his own steam. " .... slowly, painfully, I put together the elaborate series of moves that got me up on my knees." Once he had made the decision to save himself he found that all pain and fear had left him and he had entered into a state of heightened awareness wherein all of his senses had become acute and he saw, " ... the brilliant crystals in the granite, the drunken calligraphy of ice crystals." He writes of moving across the sheer face in a, "dance in which a single missed beat would have been fatal. I moved without regrets or hesitation. There were no false moves left in me. I couldn't miss because there was no such thing as a miss. It didn't matter whether I fell or not, because I could not fall, any more than two plus two can equal three. It was all sublime nonsense, of course, but I believed it, down in my very cells: if I hadn't believed it, I would have been hurled into the pit below." After a night of bitter cold in his halfway camp, Rob limped back to town and fell into a 48 hour sleep. He looked back on his experience as a time when he had been filled with a brand of grace. Scultheis, Rob. "Bone Games: One man's search for the ultimate athletic high" New York. Fromm. 1984. |
| Milarepa, a ninth century Buddhist mystic was wont to wander the Himalayan ranges wearing only a robe of thin cloth. Researchers often tell of watching his modern day counterparts sit, naked, in a snow field and melt the surrounding snow by radiating heat from their bodies. |
| Bela Bartok, the famed Hungarian composer, was dying of leukaemia when he was asked to write a new piece for the Boston Symphony Orchestra. His leukaemia went into remission for the lengthy time in which he was engaged in the new composition. |
| 1954, Oregon. Helen Miller, a young mother, lived on the banks of a fast flowing river, but her fear of water had prevented her from learning to swim. She was at home, nursing her right hand that had been rendered almost useless from being badly damaged in an accident, when her five-year-old daughter told her that Marijane, a three-year-old sibling had gone down to the creek. Racing to the bank, the distraught woman found no sign of her child."From that moment on, my mind is divorced from my body. It has no weight, no feeling, no sense of time or distance." Throwing herself into the freezing waters she found that she could not touch bottom, so grabbed at trailing tree roots with her good hand while scrabbling for the child with the almost useless right hand."Now there is no pain, no weakness. My hand touches Janie, lifts her just above the surface." Although the river's bank was two feet above them she flung the child to safety, only to see her slide back into the water. Again she used her injured hand to lift and throw the child onto the bank, before hauling herself out of the torrent. |
| 1972, Virginia. Gary Hutzell was driving home when he came upon an accident scene. Closer inspection showed the figure of a woman wedged below the engine of an upturned car. Racing forward, Hutzell grasped the bumper of the 2,500 lb. vehicle, lifted it, and walked it clear of the trapped woman to set it down out of harms way. Mr. Hutzell was 5' 6" tall, and weighed in at 150 lbs. |
| California, a snow clad mountain. Lauren Elder turned her back on the wreckage of the plane crash in which all of her companions had met their deaths, and faced her problem of continuing to survive. Looking down from the brink of the granite cliff on which she stood she saw that she would first have to find her way down the sheer rock face Pushing aside all traces of a panic that she knew would kill her, she took her time in surveying the way down, coolly discerning any niche or cranny large enough to provide finger and toeholds. Only when she had mentally mapped out the best choices did she ease herself over the precipice. She described the process as almost flowing down the granite face."Everything was so finely balanced that I could do no wrong." Lauren had broken the barrier by her attitude. Using her powers of observation, she had probed at the problem until the answer emerged. One that her positive attitude had moved her to accept. |
| When Norman Cousins' doctors told him that his ankylosing spondylitis was progressive and would cause his death, he invented a 'miracle cure for himself'. He filled his days with laughter; watching comedy films from old movies and television shows. Against all expert predictions he reversed his disease and returned to a full, active life.. |
| Siula Grande, The Andes, Peru. His first fall down the mountain had broken Joe Simpson's leg. His second fall had separated him from his companion who now believed him to be dead. Joe refused to believe it. Now, on the second day after the last accident, he was dragging himself across a glacier bound for the distant base camp. Stunned with pain, exhaustion, and dehydration, he was barely conscious, but the voice in his mind drove him on. Raising his head he would pick out any feature in the snow-covered terrain and make that his next goal. Checking his watch he would give himself 30 minutes to reach the target, then pick out the next one. Sometimes he would drift off into a daydream but the inner voice would call him out of it to goad him on. And on, and on, and on; until he finally reached safety. When asked to explain how he had achieved the seemingly impossible, he described it as, " ... a mind game." |
| A survivor of a Nazi death camp: "I was in such a state of absorption that I was hardly aware of the sufferings we endured. Neither the hunger, thirst, nor fatigue that we fell heir to during our long trek under a scorching sun, touched anything basic in me. I realised that this was a unique experience and it engrossed me completely." |
| 1979, Milan. Charles Garfield, former world-class weightlifter and holder of a doctorate of clinical psychology tells of his meeting with Soviet sports psychologists. He mentioned that he had once been able to benchpress 365 lbs. but that it had been eight years ago and that he had not seriously trained in all of the time since. Taking him to a gym, they asked him to lift the absolute maximum of which he now thought himself capable of. Garfield tells of how it was with enormous difficulty that he managed to benchpress 300 lbs. They asked him to lie on his back while they used words to guide him into a tension free state of mind. "I was fully awake and alert," he recalls, "yet every muscle in my body relaxed, and I felt more at ease than ever before in my life."The Soviets then asked him to stare at a bench press holding 365 lbs. of weights. They asked him to picture himself lifting the weights. To imagine the sound of them clanging together as he started the lift. To feel his breathing patterns, to hear his grunts as he pushed them off his chest. They constantly repeated their words. Then Garfield moved to the bench and pressed the full 365 lbs. |