[Glenn E. Meyer]

Actually to an earlier response there is much know about emergency and critical issues responses. There aren't different types of adrenaline as a chemical - that's a wrong way to put it.

The current breakdown of responses is:

Fright – Tonic immobility generating parasympathetic overdrive, You are dead and stinky – poop your pants, don’t eat me. Incapable of voluntary action but quickly reversible. Stay in it too long and die the Voodoo death

The idea is that you are unattractive to an animal that wants to kill what it eats. Many emergency works suffer from this kind of stress incontinence.

Fight – full sympathetic overdrive
Hard to control
Suggested mechanism on sympathetic shootings or contagious shootings – FOF can diffuse panicked fighting actgions.


Freeze – threat not immediate, ventral periaqueductal gray cause ‘attentive immobility – prime for action but trying to hide, hypervigilant

Flight – panic, reason and will power fade, stampedes. Military have overtrained motor routines to avoid. Those who break, lose.

The neural pathways have been worked out for these. The tendency to be prone to one more than the other (although all of us can fall into any one of these and shift between them). There are some indications of personality traits or genetic dispositions for them.

The professional training literature for critical jobs - pilots, LEOs, military, fire, surgeons, med. personnel - is pretty clear that intensive simulation training can separate out those who can't cope and for those who can is very successful. It give a sense of an automatic and fast evaluation of a situation and a good set of fast perceptual and action heuristics.