Jack Laurence

But here's where things get even stranger and remarkable.

When you're in a life-threatening situation, your brain doesn't just shut down the prefrontal cortex and hand control over to the amygdala, which is part of the limbic system.

It's the emotional processing center of the brain, so when we talk about fight or flight.

It also does something fascinating with memory retrieval.

The same stress hormones, the cortisol, the adrenaline that impair your ability to think rationally can actually enhance certain types of memory retrieval, particularly in these cases, memories related to survival.

Your brain essentially goes into search mode.

It's scanning your entire memory bank for anything, anything at all that might be relevant.

Prior experiences with danger, information you've learned about similar situations, stories you've heard, articles you may be read.

It doesn't matter if you consciously remember them or not.

Under extreme stress, your brain can pull up semantic memories, factual knowledge, learned information that might give you an edge.

And that's exactly what Sean says was happening to him.

Chapter six, becoming the gray man.

And one of those things the brain gave him was the memory of a book he'd read called Bravo 2-0, which is a true story of a British special forces soldier who was taken hostage, as well as another article he'd read about these types of situations and how they talk about you needing to become what they call the gray man.

So although these memories were flooding into his brain, and some of them were trying to help him survive, there were other areas of his thoughts that he would need to shut off.

One of those was the obvious elephant in the room.

The very real possibility that this could all end with him becoming yet another propaganda video on the internet.

But he couldn't think about that.

One other thing that Sean would rely heavily on in captivity to keep him going was routine.

We all know how important routine is in our day-to-day lives for all of us.

As soon as we're out of routine, we lose it.