LIVING OUR LIMBIC LEGACY 27tors, but some even play dead, which is the ultimate freeze reaction. This
is a strategy that opossums use, but they are not the only animals to do so.
In fact, accounts of the school shootings at Columbine and Virginia Tech
demonstrate that students used the freeze response to deal with deadly
predators. By holding still and playing dead, many students survived even
though they were only a few feet away from the killer. Instinctively, the
students adopted ancient behaviors that work very effectively. Freezing
your movement can often make you nearly invisible to others, a phenom-
enon every soldier and SWAT team operator learns.
Thus, the freeze response has been passed from primitive man to
modern man and remains with us today as our first line of defense
against a perceived threat or danger. In fact, you can still see this ancient
limbic reaction to large felines in the theaters of Las Vegas where big cats
are part of the show. As the tiger or lion walks onto the stage, you can be
sure that the people in the first row will not be making any unnecessary
arm or hand gestures. They will be frozen in their seats. These people
were not issued memos to remain still; they did so because the limbic
brain has prepared the human species to behave that way in the face of
danger for over five million years.
In our modern society, the freeze response is employed more subtly in
everyday life. You can observe it when people are caught bluffing or
stealing, or sometimes when they are lying. When people feel threatened
or exposed, they react just like our ancestors did a million years earlier;
they freeze. Not only have we, as humans, learned to freeze in the face of
observed or perceived danger, but others around us have learned to copy
our behavior and freeze their behavior also, even without seeing the
threat. This mimicry or isopraxism (same movement) evolved because it
was critical to communal survival, as well as social harmony, within the
human species (see box 8 on next page).
This freezing action is sometimes termed the “deer-in-the-headlights”
effect. When suddenly caught in a potentially dangerous circumstance,
we immediately freeze before taking action. In our day-to-day life, this
freeze response manifests innocently, such as when a person walking
down the street stops suddenly, perhaps hitting himself on the forehead