I have lived in the Destino for a number of years now. Not literally. In literal terms, I live in South Wales where the weather is far worse. But the town of Destino, the heart of The Time Of The Fire, arrived in my head four years ago, fully formed. To the extent that I had to check maps to ensure that I had in fact made it up and that I wasn’t experiencing some very oddly specific repressed memory about a heretofore forgotten Californian jaunt. It wasn’t there. The town of Destino, sadly, lives only in my mind. Fortunately, I have a great imagination. Destino, with its protective swathe of mountains, its wide main street and its tumbledown waterfall, is the world as it always has been. And when the world has always been one way, we imagine that it will stay that way.
I often get the question - how does your background as a psychologist impact your writing? The truth of the matter is, I see most things through a psychological lens. And, in writing The Time Of The Fire, I spent a frankly absurd amount of time considering the psychological implications of the tortures inflicted on my poor characters - so, for the next few months, I will be letting you in on my nerdish secrets as we talk about the psychology behind the book…
As a psychologist specialising in trauma and how we function when the world falls apart, there are few things that fascinate me more than who we are during the worst of times. My mentor, a brilliant psychologist who specialised in post-trauma reactions, said to me once “There is always a moment. One single point in time, where the world goes from being what it always has been to something entirely different.” That has always stuck with me, has become a bit of an obsession if I am being frank. That one point in time, the pivot point from who we were to who we are about to become.
In The Time Of The Fire, Robyn’s world is shattered, again and again. First by murder, then by waking up in a Destino that is not her own, then by wildfire - a distant threat that suddenly morphs into an imminent danger that looms above the town. Each of these moments of shattering comes from nowhere. The truth is, such moments often do. A jetliner crossing a pure blue sky, that impacts a skyscraper and changes the world. An arcing electrical current that makes contact with a brittle dry undergrowth. The moments, the ones that change everything, often arrive in our lives entirely unheralded.
That has significant effects on how our brains process it.
Much of our understanding of the world is built on our experiences. As a student, we spent a frankly absurd amount of time discussing nature versus nurture. That age old debate. Is it innate or is it learned? Does our behaviour arise from our genetic inheritance, or rather from the way in which we were raised? In the decades (hard to believe, I know…) since, science and psychology have moved on considerably. We now know that the two are inseparable. That our genetic inheritance creates no more than a potential, which our environment then activates or not. We call this epigenetics (or factors beyond the genetic code). That means that who we are is built by the world in which we find ourselves. Our brain is formed by the experience provided by that world. If our early years are spent in darkness, even once we enter the light, we will not be able to see - the lack of early light exposure means that our visual system will not have received the stimulation necessary to develop. We will, in essence, be blind, even though there is no physiological flaw in our visual system. Being raised in a high-threat environment will turbo-charge our threat response system, making us more likely to experience a stress response, even in a fairly benign environment. Our world takes this clay of who we are and gives it shape.
That shape is partly formed by the schemas we develop. A schema can be thought of as a mental model, a cognitive framework that allows us to organise information about the world around us. Schemas are developed by our experiences. My experience of dogs is that they have four legs and a tail. Ergo, my schema of dogs will include four legs and a tail. It will also contain intense neediness, but I accept that just be my dog experience…
These schemas also inform our understanding of what will come next. That means that if something is wildly outside of the predictions of our schemas, we may simply fail to register it at all.
Take, for example the famous gorilla basketball video from Harvard University. Have you seen this one? It’s a fabulous example of how psychologists like to mess with people. Observers are shown a video of two teams of players passing a basketball between them. They are asked to count how many times the players in white passed the ball. Then, at the end of the video, they are asked if they noticed the gorilla? When the video is replayed, it becomes absolutely blindingly obvious that a figure wearing a gorilla suit wanders through the players, looks to camera and beats on his chest. As you do. The video is a test of selective attention. But it also serves as a great example of a schema and how our expectations can influence our perceptions. For most of us, our basketball schema tends not to include gorillas. When we are presented with an unanticipated event that does not match with our expectations, our brains will often fail to process it.
Our schemas have other impacts… We are more likely to pay attention to things that fit with our schemas. That means that, while many voices can warn us of incoming danger, we may pay more attention to the lone point of reassurance, the one who says it has all been blown out of proportion. One of the great things about schemas is that they are relatively effortless, allowing our thought processes to move swiftly and easily. However, that means that when we come across schema-incongruent information, we may find our thoughts becoming sluggish, effortful, as we expend cognitive energy to understand what we are seeing. This may be even harder in a high cognitive demand environment. These life changing moments tend to be busy events. Whether we find ourselves confronted with a murder, an alternative hometown or a looming wildfire, we are likely to be exposed to multiple sources of stimulation, a high level of sensory information, all of which is compounded by the stress inherent in such a traumatic event. The desire to short circuit this then is likely to be intense. Any opportunity to fall back onto our pre-existing schemas will offer a sense of cognitive relief.
(As a sidenote, please don’t panic. I am speaking largely of Robyn’s experiences. The odds that you will find yourself confronting a wildfire, an alternative hometown or a murder are rather slim. Although, the Many Worlds Theory would suggest that in one world or another, we are likely to experience all of the above. Whilst also simultaneously not.)
Our brains also find it easier to incorporate schema congruent information into our understanding of the situation. If we are operating on the assumption that everything is fine and that nothing catastrophic can possibly happen to us, we likely will find it difficult to interpret a retreating tide as evidence of an incoming tsunami. The information just doesn’t fit with the way in which we perceive the world to be. We also have an unfortunate tendency to adapt incoming information that doesn’t fit with our schemas. The weather isn’t that hot. The forest isn’t that dry. We also look for disconfirming evidence - the cloud passing in front of the sun bringing with it a sense of relief. See? It’s all going to be fine.
It can be especially difficult to recognise danger when we have experience with a non-threatening version of the situation. Consider heatwaves. Summer heat is built into our schema for the season. Unless you live in Wales, that is. For those not in Wales, who are based in traditionally moderate climates, it is common to equate heat with picnics and ice cream, hikes and the seaside. But global temperatures are climbing. And what once was safe is now becoming deadly. And whilst we may accept this logically, our schemas are often far slower to update. That means that, when temperatures have climbed beyond what is the norm, we may still maintain the expectation that we can do what we have always done. That we can lay out in the sun. That we can go for a hike. News reports are absolute buggers for doing this. The vast majority of heatwave features include footage of people at the beach. That means that the warning words of danger to health and life ring hollow when presented alongside images of people doing what the have always done in the sunshine - having fun. Again, if you are Welsh, feel free to disregard. I can burn by looking at the sun logo on a weather map. Schemas resist updating. They do not like it. And so our out-of-date, everything-is-fine, it’s-just-a-bit-of-sun, fuss-about-nothing schemas prevail, thus guiding our choices and behaviours without taking into account new, higher risks.
And so the moment, the one where everything changes, can be difficult to recognise.
Because most of us do not have a schema for how we will react to a crisis, that moment can leave us flailing. An event that violates our expectations means that we do not have a recipe for the steps we take next. So what do we do? We could think on our feet, be creative? But there is a problem with this option. During periods of high stress, fMRI studies have shown a decrease in blood flow to the prefrontal cortex. That matters because the prefrontal cortex is the home of creativity (we also rely on this area for logic, rationality, and emotion regulation). That means that, when the moment happens, and our stress response kicks in, activity in the PFC decreases and our capacity to be creative, rational and to regulate our emotions is seriously compromised.
Behaviour in fires is a good example. When the realisation hits that we are in danger and that escape is necessary, people have a pronounced tendency to head towards their entry point, to retrace their steps and attempt to exit the same way they entered. This hold true even if there are other exits nearby that are easier to access and safer (Almeida et al, 2008). This is a great example of creativity failing us when we need it most as stress compromises the function of our prefrontal cortex. It’s also an example of how much we prefer to have a schema to rely on in an emergency, even if it’s suboptimal.
Okay. So now what?
For most of us, when the moment comes, we likely will not have a mental model to guide our steps. We also likely will not have the capacity to generate a creative response. Instead, we will rely on our instincts. Fight, flight and freeze (sidenote, there are others, but for now we will focus on these main reactions). These reactions stem from the limbic system, a far older part of the brain that mediates emotion and instinct. When the stress reaction kicks in, fMRIs show an increased blood flow in this area. That means that our reactions when the moment comes, are dictated, not by reason, but by a sheer survival response. In terms of recognising the moment when everything has changed, the freeze reactions means that we can find ourselves unable to process the reality of the situation. Flight can become denial as we attempt to pretend that everything is just fine, nothing to see here. And fight can lead us to anger, an aggression that can be displaced onto those around us.
For Robyn, the moments come thick and fast. With murder, with fire, even with quantum physics, she is faced with disaster, again and again. And she is forced to ask herself the question, who am I going to be once the moment has passed? Once everything I know has changed?
The answers to these questions can be found in The Time Of The Fire, released January 30th, 2025.