How good we are depends on us

How good we are depends on us

• MUKUL SHARMA

WHAT makes a person throw himself in front of a fast moving train? Most of us would think, to end it all. Obviously, for whatever reason, the person may have concluded his life was not worth living and decided to finish with it. But 19-year-old Cameron Hollopeter didn’t tumble onto the tracks in a New York subway station earlier this year because he wanted to commit suicide. Instead, he was having some sort of a seizure which made him first collapse on the platform in convulsions before uncontrollably tripping into the tracks as a train was approaching.
This brings us to our next question. What makes a person throw himself in front of a moving train to help a complete stranger who’s inadvertently fallen in? A person moreover who, when he couldn’t get the teenager out of harm’s way, proceeded to drag him into a 12-inch-deep drainage trough between the rails and lay on top of him pleading with him not to move. That he didn’t get pulverised into pulp is borne out by the fact that the hat he was wearing got clipped by the train’s undercarriage as it passed over them, leaving grease marks on it.
Not only that, Wesley Autrey — for such is our hero’s name who’s recently made it to Time magazine’s list of 100 most influential people in the world — was not by himself on the platform. With him were his two daughters aged four and six who watched horrified as their father dived in to rescue the man. Also, Autrey is a black American while Hollopeter is white. So what made him do what he did? Gregory L Friccione, a professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School gives a neurological explanation.
When Autrey saw the stranger plunge onto the tracks his thalamus which absorbs sensory information registered the fall and sent the information to other parts of the brain for processing. This included parts that mediate fear responses, help in emotional processing and, ultimately, trigger decisions on how to act. However, there was nothing rational about the decision because that would have been too slow in this case. It was a spontaneous decision, either because of genetic disposition or cultural training. But, maintains another professor of bioethics, there’s nothing in Mr Autrey that the rest of us lack. We all have “mirror neurons” which make us feel what someone else is experiencing because social support is always important to survival. In other words, Autrey’s true heroism lies in the fact that he reminded us of how much good we’re all capable of.