29 February 2020 | New Scientist | 41The urge to move is triggered by fear, which
readies the body for flight from a threat by
releasing hormones such as adrenaline into
the bloodstream. Fear of being lost is as visceral
as our response to snakes, and appears to be
hardwired in the human brain: millions of
years of evolution have taught us that the
experience tends not to end well. People who
are truly lost are often convinced they are
going to die. Understandably, they are terrified.
This helps explain their erratic behaviour.
The extreme stress of being lost makes it
almost impossible to reason or figure out what
to do. When fear kicks in, even experienced
hikers fail to notice landmarks, or fail to
remember them. They lose track of how far
they have travelled. They feel claustrophobic,
as if their surroundings are closing in on them.
“It’s essentially a panic attack,” says Robert
Koester, a search-and-rescue specialist based
in Virginia with a background in neurobiology.
“If you are lost out in the woods, there is a
chance you will die. That’s pretty real. You feel
like you’re separating from reality. You feel like
you’re going crazy.”
It is pretty much impossible to run
controlled experiments on people lost in the
wilderness because of the genuine risk they
could die. But there is plenty of evidence
that high levels of stress affect the cognitive
functions needed for wayfinding. Much of
it comes from research on military recruits.
In one study, Charles Morgan, a forensic
psychiatrist at the University of New Haven
in Connecticut, and his colleagues tested the
mental performance of pilots and aircrew
while confined in an oppressive mock
prisoner-of-war camp. Their working memory
and visuospatial processing – both of which are
necessary for map-reading, spatial awareness
and other navigation tasks – were found to be
so poor that they were performing at a levelA
BOUT 30 years ago, Ed Cornell,
a psychologist at the University
of Alberta in Edmonton, took a call
from the police officer leading a search for
a 9-year-old boy. The boy had gone missing
from a campsite some days earlier, and his
footprints suggested he had headed in
the direction of a swamp a few kilometres
away. The officer had one question: how
far do lost 9-year-olds tend to travel?
Cornell and his colleague Donald Heth
had been studying wayfinding behaviour for
several years, so they were the obvious people
to ask. But when they started pondering it,
they realised how little they knew – how little
anyone knew – about lost children: how they
behaved, the routes they took, the landmarks
they used, how far they went. Cornell and Heth
quickly reviewed relevant studies and told the
officer as much as they could. “His response
shamed us,” they wrote afterwards. “ ‘Well,
that’s not much. Don’t worry, doc, we may
get a psychic out here today.’ ”
The way people behave when they are lost
has always been a mystery, and searches were
for a long time essentially random. But over
the past decades, Cornell and other experts
have dissected the available data in an attempt
to understand how adults and children
behave when they lose their way. Their aim
has been to bring science to bear on searches,
combining behavioural studies, statistics and
probability theory to increase the chances of
finding people before it is too late. Although
they have discovered that lost people behave
in extraordinary and irrational ways, they have
also found that such individuals share certain
habits that might help others to find them.
Search-and-rescue operations often involve
scouring vast expanses of wilderness with
limited resources, so anything that can help
whittle down the area in which someone is
most likely to be found is vital. That means
knowing the landscape, of course, but also
understanding how people behave when they
are lost. The job of finding them is as much
a psychological challenge as a geographical
one. The trouble is that the behaviour of lost
people is so confounding that predicting
their movements is extremely hard.
What is clear is that lost people rarely do
much to help themselves. In fact, they are likely
to make things worse by continuing to move,
which substantially reduces the chances of
being found alive. Kenneth Hill, a psychologist
at Saint Mary’s University in Canada, says
most lost people are stationary when rescuers
reach them, but only because they have run
themselves into the ground and are too tired
or ill to continue. In a review of more than
800 search-and-rescue cases from his home
state of Nova Scotia, Hill found only two in
which the person had stayed put: an 80-year-old
woman out picking apples and an 11-year-old
boy who had taken a survival course at school.>“ The extreme
stress of being
lost makes it
impossible
to reason”