Psychobiolo-Gee! Isn't This Great?!

Dr. Sarita Robinson is a psychobiologist. She looks at how people’s brains react when they are in certain situations and how that can affect behaviour. One of her biggest work themes that she looks at is why people die when they don’t need to. Dr. Robinson researches people who train for hostage and riot situations and military in stressful situations.

For a real life example the audience was introduced to case study: Juliane Koepcke. She was flying over a jungle when her plane was hit by lightning and it disintegrated. She fell two miles and she miraculously survived!

The psychobiologist then moved away from the case study to talk about the difficulties of her job. How do you define a disaster? Is it an earthquake or tsunami, or is it building fires or plane crashes? Dr. Robinson describes a disaster in five key phases: pre-impact, impact, recoil, rescue, and post-rescue. These are the features that decide life or death in this type of situations.

After explaining that having knowledge of survival training could potentially save you, the doctor went back to Juliane who made correct choices. She overcame cognitive paralysis – when you freeze with fear and anxiety. Another example was then included when 23 missiles were launched in Kuwait. 22% of hospitalisations came from the missiles themselves and 78% from inappropriate actions. For example, 40 people had to go to hospital because they ran into a door! Juliane Koepcke survived 11 days alone in the jungle even cleaning an infected wound of 30 maggots. On the 11th day she heard fisherman and managed to save herself with clear thinking and level headedness.

Dr. Sartia Robinson says that she often goes out to experience what her ‘patients’ go through, such as camping for long periods of time and doing helicopter crash simulations.

“Who says science can’t be outside the lab.”