Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why

3 yaers ago I heard about this book from a radio announcer. Bought it and read it. Since, I have given it as a gift to many friends and colleagues. I teach a college class on brain incorporated teaching and use key ideas from this book on how the brain works. It has helped me to understand my own thinking. I have quoted from it to friends and family who have had accidents because they were in states of stress, where all the mind can think about is the destination but the surroundings, being highly important, are often neglected. Case in point, a relative, while being late to their destination, and giving instructions to their teenager out window of the car while driving, they ran over the dog. Devastated as they were I sent copies of pages from this book to them. They said the pages did ease their distress in understanding how and why these things happen when teh brain is in this state of mind. The stories in this book are unforgettable, not gruesome as one might think, and very personal. Highly recommended.

Once you start reading this book you won't be able to stop! Mr. Gonzales writing is very engaging and his story's will keep you locked into the book that you find yourself wanting to make the chapters last. Highly recommend this book to anyone who loves adventure and strives to understand the human element in nature.

Probably one of the most engaging books I've read this year. Gonzales is an amazing story-teller, bringing together harrowing stories from the headlines with the latest in brain and psychology research to make a highly entertaining book. As an avid outdoorsman myself with a few close calls, every word rings true to the real world. I savored the last few chapters, not wanting the book to come to an end.

Excellent book, different from the beaten path. I could not put it down.
I could relate from the experiences of panicking and letting your emotions out of control, it is deadly because in a survival situation you spend all your energy that way. I learned a lot on how humans behave, and what keeps you alive, and in the end what kicks in to help you until help comes!

There are clearly two ways to approach this book - one for the great stories, the other for the mindset of the people in the stories.

Personally, I found the conversation about how our minds work to be the most compelling . The idea of a plan as a "memory of the future" is a line that sticks with me.

In my work as an NLP practitioner I know that we create pictures and stories in our minds that determine what our experience of the world will be. After a dramatic experience, we decide (unconsciously) what that experience means to us. We translate each decision into behavior, without even realizing it. And our behavior determines our final outcome. In our regular lives, it may be whether we get the new job, or whether we succeed or fail in a relationship. Taken to the edge, it means do we live or do we die?

This book offers outstanding, compelling and edge-of-the-seat (or the glacier) suspenseful accounts of how our lifetime accumulation of unconscious decisions make that determination.

Current neuroscience and quantum physics give us tools to identify and then change our internal, unconscious decisions, specifically and rapidly. This book is a very important piece of personal leverage - it is a doorway into understanding the ultimate consequences of whether we choose to bring our decisions to the conscious level and set ourselves up for DEEP Survival.