It Takes Hope to Save Yourself

"If I drifted away from my dive boat alone and night came, I don't see how I'd survive," said an old dive friend of mine as we shared pints in our favorite Sausalito pub. We were talking about the two divers who floated for a day and a half in July before being rescued.

I, too, wondered what I would do adrift as darkness fell. How long could I last floating on the surface with not a speck of land or a boat in sight? I'd be damned frightened, and I hoped that for days on end, I'd be determined to save myself, but would I? I don't know. I've never faced such a test. Few divers have, thankfully.

As we talked over a second pint, I remembered an early '50s Harvard study I read years ago and tracked it down the next day. It's a cruel experiment led by Curt Ritter, an American psycho-biologist. To study rats' determination to survive, he let them drown. Good thing he wasn't studying humans.

His crew put a dozen domesticated rats in a water tank. Three floated around for a short time, then dived down as if to look around, maybe find a way out, but they drowned in a little over two minutes.

The other nine explored the tank more casually and stayed afloat for several days but eventually grew tired and drowned. [Why didn't the researchers latch on to them when it was apparent they wouldn't make it? No wonder people are opposed to live animal research.]

For part two of the study, they trapped 34 wild rats. Richter believed that because they lived in nature, they knew the wild world and could swim well, so they would fight to stay alive. All the wild rats drowned within a few minutes.

So, he hypothesized that domesticated rats had a support system (in contrast with the wild ones), which perhaps led to a will to live. He figured that hopefulness would make the domesticated rats fight for their survival. So, he put a second batch of domesticated rats in a water tank. When they were on the verge of drowning, the researchers saved them and let them recover.

But then, he put them back in the tank. This time, the rats swam on and on. The duration for which they could survive surpassed the earlier time lengths. The only variable that had changed was that the drowning rats had been saved, making them aware, he concluded, of the feeling of hope. He concluded, "After eliminating hopelessness, the rats do not die."

This brief reprieve seemed to mean that these rats "learned that they were not doomed, that the situation was not lost, that there might be a helping hand at the ready - in short, when they had a reason to keep swimming - they did. They did not give up, and they did not go under, " wrote Joseph T. Hallinan in Psychology Today.

We've written a few pieces on divers who spent nights adrift. In the Gulf of Mexico, Kim and Nathan Maker relied on hope for the future, chatting about the restaurants they would visit and the diving they would do, and when they spotted distant planes, they knew the next one would get closer. In the distance, they saw an oil rig and, full of hope, swam that way.

All abandoned divers rely on hope, seeing shorebirds, the stars in the sky, and maybe a distant land mass. They talk to their distant families and friends, promising they'll return.

And they do. It's hope that saves them.

- Ben Davison