Women in particular seem to say things like, I'm sure I'd be the one screaming and not moving in an emergency. I don't think that's the case. People who've been through really horrible life-or-death situations say that nobody behaves the way they would have expected. But that said, there are predictors.

Most Korean parents saw themselves as coaches, while American parents tended to act more like cheerleaders.

The public totally discounts low-probability high-consequence events. The individual says, it's not going to be this plane, this bus, this time.

Boredom is the specter that haunts children from kindergarten to graduation on every continent.

I can't tell you how many times I've been with very smart, knowledgeable Homeland Security experts who are essentially tasked with saving your life who do not trust you with information. They just don't. They kind of dismiss the media and the public in one fell swoop.

People will help each other because there is a sense of camaraderie that springs up, which is a survival tactic. You help them because you know you might need their help later. And that is incredibly reassuring.

People with military experience seem to do very well in these situations. They've been taught that they can control their destiny, which is half the battle. They also have some experience in getting out of bad situations even if just through training. They know they have to make a plan and follow it and execute it.

The health of your family or your office or your city directly affects the health of it after. The better you are at handling high-stress situations with little information, those skills lead to resilience and the ability to recover afterward.

Resilience is a precious skill. People who have it tend to also have three underlying advantages: a believe that they can influence life events a tendency to find meaningful purpose in life’s turmoil and a conviction that they can learn from both positive and negative experiences.

Citizens are not prepared for attacks because there is a bias against the public by nearly every expert and government official. In emergency preparedness, there is this belief that public will panic, that the public is not to be trusted, that there will be looting.

A lot of the time you see a warning, in the subway, or in a movie theater, the main thrust of the warning will be to not panic if there is an emergency. To listen to directions. Now that's a waste. They could have given you information, but you can see their expectation that you're going to screw up.

Most serious plane crashes are survivable. There's a sense that, 'Oh, if we go down, that's it, it's out of my hands.' And that's just statistically not true. I have more optimism and more faith that my own actions can make a difference.

We don't talk about that at all as a country. I think that most people assume that there's nothing they could do if a nuclear bomb went off in their city. And that's just not true. Most people would survive most terrorist nuclear attacks because the bombs would likely be much smaller than those we were dealing with in the Cold War.

My anxiety about disasters is lower. The more you know, the less scary any of this stuff is. And that's my hope for the book. I want to get people's attention and tell them very valuable and ultimately hopeful information, and you find out nothing is as scary as your imagination.

Paralysis seems to happen on the steepest slope of the survival arc—where almost all hope is lost, when escape seems impossible, and when the situation is unfamiliar to the extreme.

Narrative is the beginning of recovery.