How We Decide (17 page)

People with frontal-lobe lesions can never solve puzzles like the candle problem. Although they understand the rules of the game, they are completely unable to think creatively about the puzzle, to look past their initial (and incorrect) answers. The end result is that the frontal-lobe patient fails to execute the counterintuitive moves required to solve the puzzle, even though the obvious moves have failed. Instead of trying something new, or relying on abstract thought, the subject keeps attempting to tack the candle to the board, stubbornly insisting on this strategy until there are no more candles.

Mark Jung-Beeman, a cognitive psychologist at Northwestern University, has spent the last fifteen years trying to understand how the brain, led by the prefrontal cortex, manages to come up with such creative solutions. He wants to find the neural source of our breakthroughs. Jung-Beeman's experiments go like this: he gives a subject three different words (such as
pine, crab,
and
sauce
) and asks him to think of a single word that could form a compound word or phrase with all three. (In this case, the answer is
apple: pineapple, crab apple, applesauce.
) What's interesting about this type of verbal puzzle is that the answers often arrive in a flash of insight, the familiar "aha!" moment. People have no idea how they came up with the necessary word, just as Wag Dodge couldn't explain how he invented the escape fire. Nevertheless, Jung-Beeman found that the mind was carefully preparing itself for the epiphany; every successful insight was preceded by the same sequence of cortical events. (He likes to quote Louis Pasteur: "Chance favors the prepared mind.")

The first brain areas activated during the problem-solving process were those involved with executive control, such as the prefrontal cortex and anterior cingulate cortex. The brain was banishing irrelevant thoughts so that the task-dependent cells could properly focus. "You're getting rid of those errant daydreams and trying to forget about the last word puzzle you worked on," Jung-Beeman says. "Insight requires a clean slate."

After exercising top-down control, the brain began generating associations. It selectively activated the necessary brain areas, looking for insights in all the relevant places, searching for the association that would give the answer. Because Jung-Beeman was giving people word puzzles, he saw additional activation in areas related to speech and language, such as the superior temporal gyrus in the right hemisphere. (The right hemisphere is particularly good at generating the kind of creative associations that lead to epiphanies.) "Most of the possibilities your brain comes up with aren't going to be useful," he says. "And it's up to the executive-control areas to keep on looking or, if necessary, change strategies and start looking somewhere else."

But then, when the right answer suddenly appeared—when
apple
was passed along to the frontal lobes—there was an immediate realization that the puzzle had been solved. "One of the interesting things about such moments of insight," says Jung-Beeman, "is that as soon as people have the insight, they say it just seems obviously correct. They know instantly that they've solved the problem."

This act of recognition is performed by the prefrontal cortex, which lights up when a person is shown the right answer, even if he hasn't come up with the answer himself. Of course, once the insight has been identified, those task-dependent cells in the frontal lobes immediately move on to the next task. The mental slate is once again wiped clean. The brain begins preparing itself for another breakthrough.

ON THE AFTERNOON
of July 19, 1989, United Airlines Flight 232 took off from Denver Stapleton Airport, bound for Chicago. The conditions for the flight were ideal. The morning thunderstorms had passed, and the sky was a cloudless cerulean blue. Once the DC-10 reached its cruising altitude of 37,000 feet, about thirty minutes after takeoff, Captain Al Haynes turned off the seat-belt sign. He didn't expect to turn it back on until the plane began its descent.

The first leg of the flight went smoothly. A hot lunch was served to the passengers. The plane was put on autopilot, with supervision by the first officer, William Records. Captain Haynes drank a cup of coffee and stared at the cornfields of Iowa far below. He'd flown this exact route dozens of times before—Haynes was one of United's most experienced pilots, with more than thirty thousand hours of flight time—but he never ceased to admire the grid of flat land, the farms laid out in such perfectly straight lines.

At 3:16 in the afternoon, about an hour after takeoff, the quiet of the cockpit was shattered by the sound of a loud explosion coming from the back of the plane. The frame of the aircraft shuddered and lurched to the right. Haynes's first thought was that the plane was breaking up, that he was about to die in a massive fireball. But then, after a few seconds of gnashing metal, the quiet returned. The plane kept on flying.

Haynes and First Officer Records immediately began scanning the cluster of instruments and dials, looking for some indication of what had gone wrong. The pilots noticed that the number two engine, the middle engine in the rear of the plane, was no longer operating. (Such a failure can be dangerous, but it's rarely catastrophic, since the DC-10 also has two other engines, one on each wing.) Haynes got out his pilot manual and started going through the engine-failure checklist. The first order of business was to shut off the fuel supply to that engine, in order to minimize the risk of an engine fire. They attempted it, but the fuel lever wouldn't move.

It had now been a few minutes since the explosion. Records was flying the plane. Haynes was still trying to fix the fuel lines; he assumed that the plane was maintaining its scheduled flight path to Chicago, albeit at a slightly slower pace. That's when Records turned to him and said the one thing a pilot never wants to hear: "Al, I can't control the airplane." Haynes looked over at Records, who had applied full left aileron and pushed the yoke so far forward that the controls were pressed against the cockpit dash. Under normal circumstances, such a maneuver would have caused the plane to descend and turn left. Instead, the plane was in a steep ascent with a sharp right bank. If the plane banked much more, it would flip over.

What could trigger such a complete loss of control? Haynes assumed there had been a massive electronic failure, but the circuit board looked normal. So did the onboard computers. Then Haynes checked the pressure on his three hydraulic lines: they were all plummeting toward zero. "I saw that and my heart skipped a beat," Haynes remembers. "It was an awful moment, the first time I realized that this was a real disaster." The hydraulic systems control the plane. They are used to adjust everything from the rudder to the wing flaps. Planes are always engineered with multiple, fully independent hydraulic systems; if one fails, the backup system can take its place. This redundancy means that a catastrophic failure of all three lines simultaneously should be virtually impossible. Engineers calculate the odds of such an event at about a billion to one. "It wasn't something we ever trained for or practiced," Haynes says. "I looked in my pilot manual, but there was nothing about a total loss of hydraulics. It just wasn't supposed to happen."

But that's exactly what had happened to this DC-10. For some reason, the loss of the engine had ruptured all three hydraulic lines. (Investigators later discovered that the engine fan disc had fractured, sending shards of metal through the tail section where all the hydraulic lines were located.) Haynes could remember only one other instance when an aircraft had lost all of its hydraulic controls. Japan Airlines Flight 123, a Boeing 747 flying from Tokyo to Osaka in August 1985, had suffered a similar catastrophe after its vertical stabilizer was blown off by an explosive decompression event. The aircraft had steadily drifted downward for more than thirty minutes, eventually crashing into the face of a mountain. More than five hundred people died. It was the deadliest single-aircraft disaster in history.

Back in the cabin, the passengers were beginning to panic. Everyone had heard the explosion; they all could feel the plane careening out of control. Dennis Fitch, a United Airlines flight instructor, was sitting in the middle of the aircraft. After the terrifying boom—"It sounded like the plane was breaking apart," Fitch said—he visually inspected the wings of the plane. There were no obvious signs of damage, although he couldn't figure out why the pilots weren't correcting the plane's steep bank. Fitch knocked on the cockpit doors to see if he could offer any assistance. He taught pilots how to fly the DC-10, so he knew the aircraft inside and out.

"It was an amazing scene," Fitch remembers. "Both pilots were at the controls, their tendons in their forearms were raised from effort, their knuckles were white from gripping the handles, but it wasn't doing anything." When the pilots told Fitch that they had lost hydraulic pressure in all three hydraulic systems, Fitch was shocked. "There was no procedure for this. When I heard that, I thought,
I'm going to die this afternoon.
"

Captain Haynes, meanwhile, was desperately trying to think of some way to regain control. He placed a radio call to United Airlines' System Aircraft Management (SAM), a crew of aircraft engineers specially trained to help deal with in-flight emergencies. "I thought, these guys must know a way out of this mess," Haynes says. "That's their job, right?"

But the engineers at SAM weren't any help. For starters, they didn't believe that all of the hydraulic pressure was really gone. "SAM kept on asking us to check the hydraulics again," Haynes says. "They told us that there must be some pressure left. But I kept on telling them that there was none. All three lines were empty. And then they kept on telling us to check the pilot's manual, but the manual didn't deal with this problem. Eventually, I realized that we were on our own. Nobody was going to land the plane for us."

Haynes began by making a mental list of the cockpit elements that he could operate without hydraulic pressure. The list was short. In fact, Haynes could think of only one element that might still be useful: the thrust levers, which controlled the speed and power of his two remaining engines. (They are like the gas pedals of the plane.) But what does thrust matter if you can't maneuver? It would be like revving a car without a steering wheel.

Then Haynes had an idea. At first, he dismissed it as crazy. The more he thought about it, however, the less ridiculous it seemed. His idea was to use his thrust levers to steer the plane. The key was differential thrust;
thrust
is the forward-directed force of an airplane engine, and a difference in thrust between the plane's engines is normally something pilots want to avoid. But Haynes figured that if he idled one engine while the other got a boost of power, the plane should turn to the idled side. The idea was grounded in simple physics, but he had no idea if it would actually work.

There was little time to lose. The bank of the plane was approaching 38 degrees. If it got past 45 degrees, the plane would flip over and enter a death spiral. So Haynes advanced the throttle for the right engine and idled the left. At first, nothing happened. The plane stayed in a steep bank. But then, ever so slowly, the right wing began to level itself. The plane was now flying in a straight line. Haynes's desperate idea had worked.

Flight 232 was given instructions to land at Sioux City, Iowa, a regional airport about ninety miles to the west. Using nothing but variations in engine thrust, the pilots began a steady right-hand turn. It had been about twenty minutes since the initial explosion, and it seemed as if Haynes and his crew had restored a measure of control to the uncontrollable plane. "I felt like we were finally making some progress," Haynes says. "It was the first time since the explosion that I thought we just might be able to get this bird on the ground."

But just as the flight crew was starting to gain a little confidence, the plane started to pitch violently up and down in a relentless cycle. This is known as a phugoid pattern. Under normal flight conditions, phugoids are easy to manage, but since the plane was without any hydraulic pressure, Haynes and his crew were unable to modulate the pitch of the aircraft. The pilots realized that unless they found a way to dampen the phugoids, they could end up like the Japan Airlines' Flight 123. They would careen in a sine wave as they steadily lost altitude. And then they'd crash into the cornfields.

How do you control phugoids in such a situation? At first glance, the answer seems obvious. When the nose of the plane is pitched down, and the air speed is increasing, a pilot should decrease the throttle, so that the plane slows down. And when the plane is pitched up, and the air speed is decreasing, a pilot should increase the throttle in order to prevent a stall. "You're looking at your air-speed indicator, and the natural reaction of a pilot is to try to balance out what's happening," Haynes says. But that instinctive reaction is exactly the opposite of what should be done. The aerodynamics of flight contradict common sense; if Haynes had gone with his first impulse, he would soon have lost control of the plane. The aircraft would have entered a steep, unstoppable descent.

Instead of doing that, Haynes carefully thought through the problem. "I tried to imagine what would happen to the plane depending on how I controlled the thrust levers," he says. "It took me a few moments, but that saved me from making a big mistake." Haynes realized that when the nose tilted down and the air speed built up, he needed to
increase
power, so that the two remaining engines could bring up the nose. Because the engines on a DC-10 are set below the wings, an increase in engine throttle will cause the plane to pitch up. In other words, he needed to accelerate on the downhill and brake on the uphill. It was such a counterintuitive idea that Hayes could barely bring himself to execute the plan. "The hardest part," Haynes said, "was when the nose started up and the air speed started to fall, and then you had to close the throttles. That wasn't very easy to do. You felt like you were going to fall out of the sky."