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Huck and Jim’s communication with each other and others is a vital part of their survival because they act as a support system for each other and help formulate plans to survive. #communication #friendship #plan #strategy

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Th ability to lie is an important aspect of survival because it allows one to disguise themselves as someone else and travel discreetly to prevent being caught by authorities. #streetsmarts #quickthinking #discreet

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The King and the Duke use deception to survive by creating fakes shows and speeches in order to gain the support of others and make money. While this practice is immoral, it helps them in surviving due to others providing food, shelter, and profit .

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#scavenging #fishing #hungry #berries #resourceful #poison

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#fire #food #warmth #shelter #resourceful

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#raft #skiff #freedom #surivival #wood #Mississippi

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#survivingaganisttheodds #zombies #fighting #scavenging #hope #strongwilled

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#reallifesurvivors #stories #inspired

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#isolation #depression #lonliness #homesick #family #nohope

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Parellels between The Hunger Games and Huckleberry Finn

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Parellels between The Hunger Games and Huckleberry Finn

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The Hunger Games is about the odds begin in your favor in order to survive. Similar to Huckleberry Finn, their superstitions lead them to believe they are going to survive. #odds #lucky #superstitous #surviving #hungergames

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“I heard the whoop again; it was behind me yet, but in a different place; it kept coming, and kept changing its place, and I kept answering, till by and by it was in front of me of me again...if that was Jim” (Twain 82). Chapter 15

In this quote Huck and Jim are stuck in a storm and separated, but they make noises (communicate) so they can find each other and escape the storm safely.

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“Pap always said it warn't no harm to borrow things, if you was meaning to pay them back..So we talked it over all one night, drifting along down the river, trying to make up our minds whether to drop the watermelons, or the cantelopes, or the mushmelons, or what. But towards daylight we got it all settled satisfactory, and concluded to drop crabapples and p'simmons” (Twain 66). Chapter 12

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Huck using the River to throw off the dogs of them scent 

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Huck using the River to throw off the dogs of them scent 

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“I don’t hear dogs and horses yet; you’ve got time to crowd through the brush and get up the crick a little ways; then you take to the water and wade down to ,e and get in-that’ll throw the dogs off the scent” (Twain 121). Chapter 19

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“When you're in the middle of the Games and you're starving or freezing, some water, a knife, or even some matches can mean the difference between life and death” (The Hunger Games).

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#willtolive #family #freedom

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#lying #safety #protection #goodliar

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#deception #twofaced #identitytheft #lying

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#lost #nosupplies #howtosurvive #findingsupplies

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In Huckleberry Finn the characters need to conform and adapt to their surrondings in order to be descreit and not get caught. This survival tactic is important to the novel and their Hero’s Journey. #stolen #identities #conforming #costumes #changing #appearance

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#firstaid #gunshot #survival #hurt #doctor #resourceful #snakebite

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Parallels between The Hatchet and Huckleberry Finn

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Parallels between The Hatchet and Huckleberry Finn

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These two novels contain several similar themes, quotes, and imagery that pertain to the topic of survival. #survivingaganisttheodds #hatchet #similar

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How to Build a Log Raft: 10 Steps (with Pictures) - wikiHow

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How to Build a Log Raft. If you want to fulfill that Huckleberry Finn fantasy adventure of camping on a log raft, here is a good way to build a simple log raft. Collect 4 to 10 logs. Lay them gently into the shallow water near shore that...

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For one California man, what began as a day fishing trip quickly turned into a five-day fight for survival.

Mike Vilhauer, 58, went fishing Aug. 6 at Lower Sunset Lake in Alpine County when he noticed he wasn't catching any fish. Deciding he needed more bait, Vilhauer, butterfly net in hand, left on what he thought would be a short trip to find some grasshoppers.

"I was just zigzagging up and down the mountain," Vilhauer told ABC News. "I didn't see anyone for quite a while."

After a few hours, Vilhauer said it began to get late, and he decided he should probably head back to the fishing site. "That's when the fun began," he said.

Vilhauer began to make his way towards what he thought was the fishing site. But with darkness upon him at about 8 p.m., he decided to make shelter under a pine tree, covering himself with pine needles and willow branches in an attempt to stay warm. Vilhauer attempted to call 911, but a weak signal thwarted his efforts.

Vilhauer continued his search for the help on Thursday. Weak from his lack of food and water, he adapted what he called his "survivor man routine," drinking water out of puddles, regardless of what else was in the puddle.

"I thought 'I'm going to keep walking, I'm going to get back to my wife,'" said Vilhauer, who lives in West Sacramento.

After trying to find a way back the whole day, Vilhauer came across a stream and began to follow it before the sun began to set. Setting up a camp of tree bark and needles, he slept for another night in the open wilderness.

He was crushed to find on Friday morning that the stream came to a dead end. "At this point I'm thinking 'Man, this is looking bad,'" Vilhauer said.

Vilhauer continued to wander in circles on Friday, unsure of where he was or where to go next. Exhausted and hungry, he set up camp under a large rock.

KXTV

"I hadn't slept at all," said Villhauer, "It was cold and I just tried to keep moving around. It rained every night."

Saturday morning brought no relief.

"I hadn't eaten since Wednesday morning," said Villhauer, "I was so weak, I could only do so much before getting too exhausted and having to lie down."

Grounding himself underneath the rock, Villhauer tried to build up his strength. He decided he would try to climb up the side of the ridge, only to find out that every time he thought he had reached the top, there ended up just being another peak ahead.

Suddenly, Villhauer could hear helicopters in the distance. One flew overhead, but kept going, leaving Villhauer "disheartened."

"It was a rollercoaster of emotions," said Villhauer, "I thought, 'You know what? I'm done. This is it.'"

"I was thinking about my family and my wife and all of the stupid things I'd done to get myself into that position," said Villhauer.

"And then, after 10 to 15 minutes I decided 'No. Hell no. I'm not going to give up, I'm going to get down to that stream and I'm going to sit there and wait until somebody finds me,'" he added.

Villhauer made his way back down the stream, drinking out of puddles along the way, and made his way back to the rock.

He picked up a piece of driftwood and began writing his last words to his wife.

"I put all of these thoughts down, I had to continue on another piece of drift wood," Villhauer said.

KXTV

He then used cypress needles to spell out "HELP", saying "I figured if I don't make it, at least I gave it my best shot."

Sunday morning, Villhauer had just had his first meal in five days - a dandelion - when he heard the helicopters again.

"I got excited, I started waving around my blue shirt on a stick," said Villhauer as the helicopter kept repeatedly flying over and then leaving.

"It was a big rush, and then the letdown. A big rush, and the letdown," described Villhauer, who assumed that the choppers were operating on a grid system, so once they deemed the area clear they would not be returning.

"I figured, if they hadn't seen me yet, I was in here for the long haul."

The choppers returned and began circling Villhauer, when he suddenly heard a bark from behind him. It was a search dog leading one of the rescue teams that had been looking for Villhauer since Friday.

After five days in the wilderness, he had been saved.

Villhauer was given a tiny meal, then transported in a chopper to a base where he met some of rescue teams.

"I was shocked at how many people were yelling and screaming and crying and hugging," Villhauer said, who soon came to realize that his disappearance had culminated in the largest rescue search of the year.

Villhauer was reunited with his wife and family on Sunday night, staying in a hotel for the night and heading back home on Monday morning, when he was able to see a doctor. He suffered no serious injuries during his ordeal, just a few scrapes and bruises, though he did lose his wedding band somewhere along the way.

Villhauer happy to be back at home, and has nothing but gratitude for those the search teams, many volunteers, who helped him to get home.

"I appreciate all of those efforts," said Villhauer, "I couldn't say enough about those folks."

Despite getting lost for five days, Villhauer is more than ready to plan another fishing trip, though he'll likely bring a friend next time.

"I plan to go back," Villhauer said, "I'm going to go up there and buy a whole lot of rounds of beer."

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Lost in the Wilderness: One Man's 5-Day Fight for Survival

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For one California man, what began as a day fishing trip quickly turned into a five-day fight for survival. Mike Vilhauer, 58, went fishing Aug. 6 at Lower Sunset Lake in Alpine County when he noticed he wasn't catching any fish.

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“I didn’t take notice , nor let on. I knowed what it was about. He was thinking about his wife and his children, away up yonder, and he was low and homesick” (Twain 156) Chapter 23

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It's hard enough to survive being stranded at sea in a small fiberglass vessel longer than any person in recorded history. But it's even harder to prove your story is true.

That was the conundrum Jose Salvador Alvarenga faced upon his harrowing return to civilization after a record, near-14 months free-floating 9,000 miles across the Pacific.

Journalist Jonathan Franklin was one of the first on the scene after Alvarenga's rescue. His new book, " 438 Days," recounts Alvarenga's survival on rain water, sea life and even once his own hair seasoned with sea salt.

Franklin admits that even he had his doubts about Alvarenga's story. For one, a video of Alvarenga's first appearance takes place days after washing up on the uninhabited Tile Islet of the remote Marshall Islands, 2,375 miles off the coast of Hawaii. Though his hair is matted and wild, his face is round, not gaunt as one might expect.

He is smiling, even at one point waving to the cameras. Adding suspicion, that night at the hospital, Alvarenga tried to "escape" from his room. He claimed he thought he was under arrest, although no one had given him a reason to think it.

Alvarenga wasn't the most cinematic of protagonists. Thirteen years earlier, Alvarenga had abandoned a girlfriend, his parents and an infant daughter in El Salvador and snuck away to Mexico. There he began work as a fisherman, building a reputation for overindulgence. Alvarenga loved women, parties, food and drugs. Friends called him "Chancha," meaning pig.

Positive that he would not die, Alvarenga figured out how to fish the sea only using his hands, one knife and a machete. He drank turtle blood to stay hydrated when it didn't rain.

But the more Franklin dug, the more Alvarenga's story tracked. "He was a well-known and beloved coastal fisherman with a history of surviving against the odds," Franklin says.

Alvarenga, then 36, was last seen setting sail with another fisherman, Ezequiel Córdoba, for an overnight trip on Nov. 18, 2012.

They had only been out 20 miles when a storm hit and raged on for five days. They radioed back for help, their final contact with civilization. During the storm, their motor broke and, in an effort to remain upright, the men had tossed most of their equipment overboard.

Córdoba and Alvarenga spent significant amounts of time shielding themselves from the sun, wind and rain in an overturned ice box, huddled together.

But Córdoba fared far worse on their diet of raw sea turtles and birds and the occasional fish. The young fisherman had finally succumbed to starvation, two months into their ordeal.

After Córdoba died, Alvarenga spoke to his corpse, then five days later lowered him to a watery grave.

After that, Alvarenga claims he started to go crazy. "He was alone," writes Franklin, "a tiny speck in the vast Pacific."

But that's when Alvarenga's survival instincts took hold. Positive that he would not die, Alvarenga figured out how to fish the sea only using his hands, one knife and a machete. He drank turtle blood to stay hydrated when it didn't rain. He ate birds he kept prisoners aboard his 24-foot boat, even befriending one he thought particularly beautiful (although he later ate him as well out of necessity).

For his limited entertainment, Alvarenga played soccer against the birds with the carcass of a blowfish, using the center-line of the boat as the goal. He sometimes carefully swam alongside the vessel, always vigilant in his watch for sharks.

By the time he washed up in the Marshall Islands, he could barely walk. He was much thinner than he appeared in that video largely due to puffiness from his raw diet and year at sea.

A couple living on a remote island discovered him alone, starving and practically naked. He was near the same boat in which he'd last been seen.

Alvarenga ravenously consumed several meals in short order. He was dirty, confused and wholly uninterested in talking to the press.

"This was hardly the attitude of a publicity-seeking scammer," Franklin points out.
View video
In the book, Franklin begins each chapter with dates and coordinates. Alvarenga's journey was painstakingly recreated using the very currents that likely twirled him toward Australia. The dates were estimated based on a combination of Alvarenga's memory of the moon cycles and a study of those currents by the University of Hawaii and the US Coast Guard.

Alvarenga, Franklin claims, "was always clear as to how many months he had been adrift."

Based on that voyage and those dates, Franklin and the specialists he consulted, figured out that it is possible that Alvarenga might have happened upon the sea life that he claims sustained him, as well as the storms that always eventually replenished his water stores. That, along with his instinctual understanding of the sea, his faith and his tremendous luck, made Alvarenga's survival possible.

By all accounts, Alvarenga overcame impressive odds. He never tried to scratch out dates or messages to memorialize his nightmarish journey on the side of his boat, because, Franklin explains, "Alvarenga planned on telling his survival story in person."

Back in Mexico, his old boss and fellow fishermen wanted Alvarenga to return to ​his fleet. But Alvarenga wasn't ready. ​Instead, h​e ​went back to his parents and daughter in ​El Salvador, where he ​moved back into his childhood home. ​He fulfilled a promise he had made to himself while he was out on the boat: He was slowly becoming a good father, even helping to teach his daughter how to drive - on land.

"Now," writes Franklin, rather than days-long deep-sea fishing adventures, "he enjoys short boat trips."

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Man's incredible survival story: One year free-floating across the Pacific

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It's hard enough to survive being stranded at sea in a small fiberglass vessel longer than any person in recorded history. But it's even harder to prove your story is true. That was the conundrum Jose Salvador Alvarenga faced upon his harrowing return to civilization after a record, near-14 months free-floating 9,000 miles across the Pacific.

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“And he thought, rolling thoughts, with the smoke curling up over his head and the smile still half on his face he thought: I wonder what they're doing now.  I wonder what my father is doing now. I wonder what my mother is doing now” Chapter 9 The Hatchet

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“What we be the laughing-stock of this whole town, I reckon, and never want, is to go out here quiet, and talk this show up, and sell the rest of the town! Then we'll all be in the same boat. Ain't that sensible?" (Twain 153). Chapter 23

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“Patience, he thought. So much of this was patience - waiting, and thinking and doing things right. So much of all this, so much of all living was patience and thinking” (Paulsen Hatchet).

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“All life is precious”(The Walking Dead, TV Show).

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“Life is always a test”(The Walking Dead, TV Show).

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“He was saying how the first thing he would do when he got to a free State he would go to saving up money...he would buy his wife...then they would both work to buy the two children” (Twain 89). Chapter 16

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“Jim said it made him all over trembly and feverish to be so close to freedom” (Twain 88). Chapter 16.

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“ I have a friend, he (Bryan) thought—I have a friend now. A hungry friend, but a good one. I have a friend named fire” Chapter 9 of the Hatchet

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Superstitions in Huckleberry Finn keep Huck and Jim hopeful and give them motivation to survive. # superstitions #hope #willtolive

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“I tole you I got a hairy breas’...signs is signs, mine I tell you; en I knowed jis’ ‘s well ‘at I ‘uz gwineter be rich agin” (Twain 293). Chapter 43

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Huck Finn lying about having a runaway slave on his raft

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Huck Finn lying about having a runaway slave on his raft

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"Boy, that's a lie. What is the matter with your pap? Answer up square, now, and it'll be the better for you” (Twain 91). Chapter 16.

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Illustration by Robert Neubecker

Over the winter I moved from New York City to Portland, Ore. The reasons for my move were purely logical. New York was expensive and stressful. Portland, I reasoned, would offer me the space and time to do my work.

Upon arriving, I rented a house and happily went out in search of "my people." I went to parks, bookstores, bars, on dates. I even tried golfing. It wasn't that I didn't meet people. I did. I just felt no connection to any of them.

Once social and upbeat, I became morose and mildly paranoid. I knew I needed to connect to people to feel better, but I felt as though I physically could not handle any more empty interactions. I woke up in the night panicked. In the afternoon, loneliness came in waves like a fever. I had no idea how to fix it.

Feeling uncertain, I began to research loneliness and came across several alarming recent studies. Loneliness is not just making us sick, it is killing us. Loneliness is a serious health risk. Studies of elderly people and social isolation concluded that those without adequate social interaction were twice as likely to die prematurely.

The increased mortality risk is comparable to that from smoking. And loneliness is about twice as dangerous as obesity.

Social isolation impairs immune function and boosts inflammation, which can lead to arthritis, type II diabetes, and heart disease. Loneliness is breaking our hearts, but as a culture we rarely talk about it.

Loneliness has doubled: 40 percent of adults in two recent surveys said they were lonely, up from 20 percent in the 1980s.

All of our Internet interactions aren't helping and may be making loneliness worse. A recent study of Facebook users found that the amount of time you spend on the social network is inversely related to how happy you feel throughout the day.

In a society that judges you based on how expansive your social networks appear, loneliness is difficult to fess up to. It feels shameful.

About a decade ago, my mom was going through a divorce from my step-father. Lonely and desperate for connection, she called a cousin she hadn't talked to in several years. On the phone, her cousin was derisive: "Don't you have any friends?"

While dealing with my own loneliness in Portland I often found myself thinking, "If I were a better person I wouldn't be lonely."

"Admitting you are lonely is like holding a big L up on your forehead," says John T. Cacioppo of the University of Chicago, who studies how loneliness and social isolation affect people's health.

He admitted that on an airplane he once became acutely embarrassed while holding a copy of his own book, which had the word Loneliness emblazoned on the front cover. He had the impulse to turn the cover inside-out so that people couldn't see it. "For the first time I actually experienced the feeling of being lonely and everyone knowing it," he says.

After the public learned of Stephen Fry's suicide attempt last year, the beloved British actor wrote a blog post about his fight with depression. He cited loneliness as the worst part of his affliction.

"Lonely? I get invitation cards through the post almost every day. I shall be in the Royal Box at Wimbledon and I have serious and generous offers from friends asking me to join them in the South of France, Italy, Sicily, South Africa, British Columbia, and America this summer. I have two months to start a book before I go off to Broadway for a run of Twelfth Night there.

I can read back that last sentence and see that, bipolar or not, if I'm under treatment and not actually depressed, what the fuck right do I have to be lonely, unhappy, or forlorn? I don't have the right. But there again I don't have the right not to have those feelings. Feelings are not something to which one does or does not have rights.

In the end loneliness is the most terrible and contradictory of my problems."

Most of us know what it is like to be lonely in a room full of people, which is the same reason even a celebrity can be deeply lonely. You could be surrounded by hundreds of adoring fans, but if there is no one you can rely on, no one who knows you, you will feel isolated.

In terms of human interactions, the number of people we know is not the best measure. In order to be socially satisfied, we don't need all that many people. According to Cacioppo the key is in the quality, not the quantity of those people. We just need several on whom we can depend and who depend on us in return.

As a culture we obsess over strategies to prevent obesity. We provide resources to help people quit smoking. But I have never had a doctor ask me how much meaningful social interaction I am getting. Even if a doctor did ask, it is not as though there is a prescription for meaningful social interaction.

Both Denmark and Great Britain are devoting more time and energy to finding solutions and staging interventions for lonely people, particularly the elderly.

When we are lonely, we lose impulse control and engage in what scientists call "social evasion." We become less concerned with interactions and more concerned with self-preservation, as I was when I couldn't even imagine trying to talk to another human. Evolutionary psychologists speculate that loneliness triggers our basic, fight vs. flight survival mechanisms, and we stick to the periphery, away from people we do not know if we can trust.

In one study, Cacioppo measured brain activity during the sleep of lonely and nonlonely people. Those who were lonely were far more prone to micro awakenings, which suggest the brain is on alert for threats throughout the night, perhaps just as earlier humans would have needed to be when separated from their tribe.

One of the reasons we avoid discussing loneliness is that fixing it obviously isn't a simple endeavor.

Even though the Internet has possibly contributed to our isolation, it might hold a key to fixing it. Cacioppo is excited by online dating statistics showing that couples who found each other online and stayed together shared more of a connection and were less likely to divorce than couples who met offline. If these statistics hold up, it would stand to reason friendships could also be found in this way, easing those whose instincts tell them to stay on the periphery back into the world with common bonds forged over the Internet.

Me? I moved back to New York.

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Over the winter I moved from New York City to Portland, Ore. The reasons for my move were purely logical. New York was expensive and stressful. Portland, I reasoned, would offer me the space and time to do my work. Upon arriving, I rented a house and happily went out in search of "my people."

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“He was uncommon bright, the duke was, and he soon struck it. He dressed Jim up in King Lear's outfit- it was a long curtain-calico gown, and a white horse-hair wig and whiskers; and then he took his theatre-paint and painted Jim's face and hands and ears and neck all over a dead dull solid blue, like a man that's been drownded nine days” (Twain 158). Chapter 24

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Survivor: Ghost Island - Watch on CBS All Access

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Watch Survivor: Ghost Island Wednesday nights on CBS. Watch full episodes of Survivor: Ghost Island, view video clips and browse photos on CBS All Access

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The innovations of "Survivor" are evident in almost every reality show on the market, from "America's Next Top Model" on the CW to "Paris Hilton's My New BFF" on MTV. It's a copy-and-paste format: collect a diverse cast of strangers, pit them against one another and expel a contestant at the end of each episode. Last year, CBS applied it to a sea expedition on "Pirate Master" and with children on "Kid Nation," but the concepts were canceled after one season.

"After eight years, you've got to wonder what's left to come up with," said David C. Joyce, a media equity analyst at Miller Tabak & Company who follows CBS.

That doesn't mean networks will stop trying to dream up new reality shows. They are a proven way to keep costs down, and are especially valuable in a precarious economy.

Already, analysts say, the downturn is pressuring advertisers. Most TV ad time is sold in advance during presentations each spring, but "there are concerns that advertisers may not make good on their commitments," Mr. Joyce said.

Furthermore, analysts say sales of spot advertising have slowed recently. If the economy goes into a long recession, companies short of cash will be tempted to trim their ad budgets even further. Earlier this month, CBS cut its forecast for the fiscal year, projecting that operating income would fall by midteen percentages, versus the previous year. Three months ago, it had forecast growth of 3 to 5 percent.

Given that bleak picture, CBS will continue to milk every nickel out of "Survivor" as long as it can. And despite a 50 percent drop in viewership in the last eight years, "Survivor" is still a hit by many measures. It remains No. 1 in its 8 p.m. Thursday time slot - a remarkable feat for any show - and continues to earn many tens of millions for the network.

In the second week of October, "Survivor: Gabon" was No. 9 on the list of most popular programs among the 18- to 49-year-old viewers that advertisers pay a premium to reach. "The length and strength of this run - and I obviously believe it will continue - is pretty astounding," Mr. Moonves said.

For people like Mr. Probst, "it's not an understatement to say that the show changed my life," he says. But Mr. Probst was clear-eyed in a conversation at the offices of Mark Burnett Productions as he discussed the ratings in terms of the inevitable life cycle of television. "They will continue to dissipate until we're off the air. Just like every other show," he said.

A glance at this year's prime-time schedule confirms that formats like that of "Survivor" are no longer the sole staple of reality TV. The revival of "American Gladiators" grabbed attention for NBC last winter, and "The Moment of Truth," the lie-detector game show, made headlines for Fox in the spring. And the humiliating obstacle course "Wipeout" was an ABC hit over the summer.

The task for Mr. Burnett's staff, then, isn't to expand the "Survivor" brand. It's to manage the decline.

IT'S easy now, long after "Survivor" was born, to forget how audacious the concept was.

Real people, 16 ordinary Americans, would be stranded on a desert island and forced to compete for basic necessities. Every three days, a contestant would be sent home. The winner, after 39 days in the wilderness, would receive $1 million. "No food, no water, no fire. Imagine how shocking that was" for viewers, said Ghen Maynard, who pushed for "Survivor" to earn a spot on the CBS schedule and subsequently headed alternative programming for the network until last August.

The show's distinct nature made it a phenomenon almost overnight. When the first season ended in the summer of 2000, more than 50 million people were watching, making it the No. 2 program of the year, behind the Super Bowl.

Given the first season's success, CBS made the daring decision to schedule the second season on Thursdays at 8, the first hour of network television's most lucrative night. "Survivor" was facing the NBC sitcom "Friends," then TV's most popular program.

Mr. Probst asked Kelly Kahl, head of scheduling for CBS, why the network seemed to be setting up "Survivor" to fail. Mr. Kahl's reply: "When you have a sledgehammer, you have to use it."

Shari Anne Brill, the senior vice president and director for programming at Carat, the media services agency, said "Survivor" gave CBS a signature show and "a completely different reputation," drawing younger viewers.

The candle burned brightly, and at CBS, executives wondered how long it would last. "If you can find anyone who says they thought it would run for 16 seasons, I would probably call them a liar," Mr. Kahl said. A Newsweek cover titled "Secrets of Survivor" still adorns his office wall.

After the show's success, CBS introduced "Big Brother," about a group of unrelated people living in the same house, and "The Amazing Race," which has won 11 Emmys. (This year, Mr. Probst was the first to win an Emmy in the new category of reality show host.)

The second season of "Survivor," in early 2001, was its most successful and its only season ranking No. 1 in prime time. The show continued to flirt with 20 million weekly viewers through Season 10, in 2005. But its audience has steadily dwindled, from 18.3 million for the 11th season, in Guatemala, to 13.6 million for the season in Micronesia this year.

Over time, new formats of reality shows started to supplement "Survivor." " American Idol," the singing competition on Fox, has been prime time's most popular show for five seasons. "The Osbournes," "The Hills" and other semi-real soap operas on cable popularized the celebrity-reality format. And gimmicky shows like "Joe Millionaire" and "Temptation Island" twisted the competition format in ways that made some viewers cringe.

But the decade's hit reality shows - "Survivor," "American Idol" and "Dancing With the Stars" - share traits. They're easy to explain, have high production values and generally stay true to an original idea. "Survivor," in particular, never strays far from the template the producers have painstakingly created. The host never changes. The time slot never changes. The tribal council never changes.

WITHIN this template, the scenery and the contestants change every season. The locations dot the globe: Thailand, Micronesia, Panama, Fiji, China. But at its heart, "Survivor" is a show about characters, about heroes and villains, about loyalty and duplicity.

The contestant eliminations add an element of surprise that scripted shows can rarely match. "In scripted TV, clearly the lead character is not going to die," Mr. Burnett said. "In unscripted TV, oftentimes the favorite character gets voted out."

The most important aspect of "Survivor's" survival may be its mythology. Sitting in an office decorated by Emmy statues and a map of Pulau Tiga, where the first season was filmed, Mr. Burnett discussed the series' lasting appeal. Citing "The Hero With a Thousand Faces," the mythological study by Joseph Campbell, he said "Survivor" adopted classic storytelling styles and devices that "just work."

Mr. Burnett carefully constructed the tribal council sessions at the climax of each episode. They are always held after dark, alluding to sacrificial ceremonies. The contestants are illuminated by torchlight, instilling fear. By voting a member out, "the tribes are executing one of their own," Mr. Burnett said.

When the votes are counted, the torch of the excommunicated tribe member is snuffed out. Mr. Probst does not let the person say goodbye, continuing the allusion to death. But then he makes a reference to the day ahead, symbolizing rebirth and hope.

"I don't often think about this," Mr. Burnett said self-consciously. "You may think this is completely nutty."

It's not. It is evidence that the show's storytelling style is layered and novelistic, complete with historical analogies, perhaps demonstrating why it has prospered. No one can say with a straight face that reality TV stunts like this season's "Hole in the Wall" (plot: try to contort your body into Tetris-like pieces or risk falling into a vat of yellow water) has mythological roots.

The most recent reality shows "feel a little less sustainable and a little more quick-buck," Mr. Probst said.

Consider "Secret Talents of the Stars," a competition that CBS canceled the day after its premiere in April. Or "America's Toughest Jobs," a summer series that turned into an occupational hazard for NBC when fewer than four million viewers were watching last month.

The dearth of new hits puts more pressure on producers like Mr. Burnett, whose TV empire now extends far beyond "Survivor," including "Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader?" and "The Apprentice." The morning he met with Mr. Probst and Mr. Kirhoffer, a binder labeled "StarMaker," a planned MTV reality show about grooming musical talent, was on the table.

He has no doubt that reality will remain a TV staple, saying that a generation of teenagers has grown up with reality as a dominant format: "They may not remember pre-reality TV."

REALITY shows are, stereotypically speaking, easy and inexpensive to produce. The budget for each hourlong episode of "Survivor" is about $2 million, about $1 million less than many scripted dramas. But unlike scripted shows, reality shows have limited rerun and syndication value. And "Survivor" is produced overseas, so it's susceptible to currency fluctuations. "The value of the dollar is making our budgets shrink because it's worth less than it used to be," Mr. Probst said.

When the series started in 2000, it posed little risk for CBS, because the company had signed up eight advertisers to sponsor it before it entered production. "We needed a certain amount of advertising backing it up, so if the thing was a disaster we'd be covered," Mr. Moonves said.

"Survivor" integrated products like Dr. Scholl's foot-care items into the first season. While that type of product placement was novel then, it is widespread now, with cups of Coca-Cola on "American Idol" and Saturn cars on "Project Runway."

CBS charges $213,000 for a 30-second commercial on "Survivor" this season, Advertising Age estimated this month, up slightly compared with last year. Only two other CBS shows earn more, the trade publication said, "Two and a Half Men" and "CSI."

Mr. Burnett and Mr. Probst have committed to the 19th and 20th seasons, but CBS has ordered the series through only the 18th. Mr. Moonves said, however, that he expected to order more. "It's not going away anytime soon," he said.

CBS would be foolish to let "Survivor" retire, at least until it comes up with something that will deliver higher ratings in the time slot. That something could well be a new reality program.

Forecasters have learned to be wary of betting against reality shows. By 2005, "everyone had started saying 'reality's had it,' and then 'Dancing With the Stars' showed up," said Ms. Brill, from Carat. "Dancing," on ABC, also has two seasons a year; it averages 18 million viewers a night.

"Somebody, sooner or later" will have another good idea, she said, "and will launch a series that everybody will get excited about."

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On Reality TV, Even 'Survivor' Looks Mortal

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The innovations of "Survivor" are evident in almost every reality show on the market, from "America's Next Top Model" on the CW to "Paris Hilton's My New BFF" on MTV. It's a copy-and-paste format: collect a diverse cast of strangers, pit them against one another and expel a contestant at the end of each episode.

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How to Survive If You’re Lost in the Woods

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Watch more Disaster Survival & Worst-Case Scenarios videos: http://www.howcast.com/videos/23667-How-to-Survive-If-Youre-Lost-in-the-Woods Getting out of the wilderness alive is a matter of knowing what to do--and what not to do. Step 1: Stay where you are As soon as you realize you are lost, stay where you are.

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how to survive in the woods without supplies

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How to Survive in the Woods Without Supplies

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How to Survive in the Woods Without Supplies

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(Photo: canada wilderness image by Michael Shake from Fotolia.com )

In the expanding global community, thrill-seeking travelers are exploring the far reaches of the earth to find new, untouched vacation locations. The increased adventure comes with increased risk: a wilderness adventure is inherently dangerous, and the hazards become more significant as participants move farther from civilized areas and deeper into the backcountry. To improve your chances of escaping a wilderness emergency, it is helpful to have a basic understanding of outdoor survival skills.

Know Before You Go

One of the most crucial steps for wilderness survival can be completed before you leave home. Research the area you will be visiting, and plot your planned route on a map. Review the surrounding areas, making note of major landforms that can be used as landmarks in case of an emergency. Find the nearest highways, and check for rivers that can be followed out in case you lose your way. If possible, take copies of the maps on the trip; a simple photocopy could be the difference between life and death.

Stabilize Injuries

When you find yourself in a wilderness survival situation, treat injuries first to prevent further complications: this is particularly important with copious bleeding or broken limbs. To stop bleeding, apply pressure directly to the wound with the cleanest bit of cloth available and elevate the wound above heart level. Use a tourniquet only if the bleeding is life-threatening. For broken bones, create a makeshift splint by using a stiff tree branch and strips of fabric to immobilize the limb.

Build a Fire and Shelter

If you expect to be lost in the wilderness overnight, build a fire and shelter long before darkness falls. Select a spot that is naturally sheltered, such as a large tree or rock overhang, and stack tree branches to make a lean-to shelter with a small opening. Not far from the opening, build a fire: this will keep animals away and add warmth to your shelter. Gather enough firewood to last through the night, and cover it with more tree branches if rain is likely.

Find Water

One of the most important factors in wilderness survival is hydration. Once you have set up a place to sleep and keep warm, find a water source. Look for streams, lakes, snow or puddles. If no water is immediately available, dig a deep hole and allow water to collect in it.

Plan Rationally

A key factor in wilderness survival is a positive, rational mind-set. To avoid panic, set achievable goals and tasks that will keep your mind calm and organized. If family or friends are likely to be searching for you, stay in one place and build a smoky fire or lay out bright clothing to alert air rescuers. If you are far from your planned itinerary or if no one is likely to come searching, carefully consider the best route out. Most importantly, avoid making hasty decisions in the heat of the moment, which can make your situation worse.

About the Author

Elizabeth Smith has been a scientific and engineering writer since 2004. Her work has appeared in numerous journals, newspapers and corporate publications. A frequent traveler, she also has penned articles as a travel writer. Smith has a Bachelor of Arts in communications and writing from Michigan State University.

Photo Credits

canada wilderness image by Michael Shake from Fotolia.com

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(Photo: canada wilderness image by Michael Shake from Fotolia.com ) In the expanding global community, thrill-seeking travelers are exploring the far reaches of the earth to find new, untouched vacation locations. The increased adventure comes with increased risk: a wilderness adventure is inherently dangerous, and the hazards become more significant as participants move farther from civilized areas and deeper into the backcountry.

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This story appears in the June 2017 issue ofNational Geographic magazine.

In the fall of 1989 Princeton University welcomed into its freshman class a young man named Alexi Santana, whose life story the admissions committee had found extraordinarily compelling.

He had barely received any formal schooling. He had spent his adolescence almost entirely on his own, living outdoors in Utah, where he'd herded cattle, raised sheep, and read philosophy. Running in the Mojave Desert, he had trained himself to be a distance runner.

Santana quickly became something of a star on campus. Academically too he did well, earning A's in nearly every course. His reserved manner and unusual background suffused him with an enigmatic appeal. When a suite mate asked Santana how his bed always seemed to be perfectly made, he answered that he slept on the floor. It seemed perfectly logical that someone who had spent much of his life sleeping outdoors would have no fondness for a bed.

Except that Santana's story was a lie. About 18 months after he enrolled, a woman recognized him as somebody she'd known as Jay Huntsman at Palo Alto High School in California six years earlier. But even that wasn't his real name. Princeton officials eventually learned that he was actually James Hogue, a 31-year-old who had served a prison sentence in Utah for possession of stolen tools and bike parts. He was taken away from Princeton in handcuffs.

In the years since, Hogue has been arrested several times on theft charges. In November, when he was arrested for stealing in Aspen, Colorado, he tried to pass himself off as someone else.

The history of humankind is strewn with crafty and seasoned liars like Hogue. Many are criminals who spin lies and weave deceptions to gain unjust rewards-as the financier Bernie Madoff did for years, duping investors out of billions of dollars until his Ponzi scheme collapsed. Some are politicians who lie to come to power or cling to it, as Richard Nixon famously did when he denied any role in the Watergate scandal.

Sometimes people lie to inflate their image-a motivation that might best explain President Donald Trump's demonstrably false assertion that his Inauguration crowd was bigger than President Barack Obama's first one. People lie to cover up bad behavior, as American swimmer Ryan Lochte did during the 2016 Summer Olympics by claiming to have been robbed at gunpoint at a gas station when, in fact, he and his teammates, drunk after a party, had been confronted by armed security guards after damaging property. Even academic science-a world largely inhabited by people devoted to the pursuit of truth-has been shown to contain a rogues' gallery of deceivers, such as physicist Jan Hendrik Schön, whose purported breakthroughs in molecular semiconductor research proved to be fraudulent.

These liars earned notoriety because of how egregious, brazen, or damaging their falsehoods were. But their deceit doesn't make them as much of an aberration as we might think. The lies that impostors, swindlers, and boasting politicians tell merely sit at the apex of a pyramid of untruths that have characterized human behavior for eons.

Lying, it turns out, is something that most of us are very adept at. We lie with ease, in ways big and small, to strangers, co-workers, friends, and loved ones. Our capacity for dishonesty is as fundamental to us as our need to trust others, which ironically makes us terrible at detecting lies. Being deceitful is woven into our very fabric, so much so that it would be truthful to say that to lie is human.

The ubiquity of lying was first documented systematically by Bella DePaulo, a social psychologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Two decades ago DePaulo and her colleagues asked 147 adults to jot down for a week every instance they tried to mislead someone. The researchers found that the subjects lied on average one or two times a day. Most of these untruths were innocuous, intended to hide one's inadequacies or to protect the feelings of others. Some lies were excuses-one subject blamed the failure to take out the garbage on not knowing where it needed to go. Yet other lies-such as a claim of being a diplomat's son-were aimed at presenting a false image. While these were minor transgressions, a later study by DePaulo and other colleagues involving a similar sample indicated that most people have, at some point, told one or more "serious lies"-hiding an affair from a spouse, for example, or making false claims on a college application.

That human beings should universally possess a talent for deceiving one another shouldn't surprise us. Researchers speculate that lying as a behavior arose not long after the emergence of language. The ability to manipulate others without using physical force likely conferred an advantage in the competition for resources and mates, akin to the evolution of deceptive strategies in the animal kingdom, such as camouflage. "Lying is so easy compared to other ways of gaining power," notes Sissela Bok, an ethicist at Harvard University who's one of the most prominent thinkers on the subject. "It's much easier to lie in order to get somebody's money or wealth than to hit them over the head or rob a bank."

As lying has come to be recognized as a deeply ingrained human trait, social science researchers and neuroscientists have sought to illuminate the nature and roots of the behavior. How and when do we learn to lie? What are the psychological and neurobiological underpinnings of dishonesty? Where do most of us draw the line? Researchers are learning that we're prone to believe some lies even when they're unambiguously contradicted by clear evidence. These insights suggest that our proclivity for deceiving others, and our vulnerability to being deceived, are especially consequential in the age of social media. Our ability as a society to separate truth from lies is under unprecedented threat.

When I was in third grade, one of my classmates brought a sheet of racing car stickers to school to show off. The stickers were dazzling. I wanted them so badly that I stayed back during gym class and transferred the sheet out of the classmate's backpack into mine. When the students returned, my heart was racing. Panicking that I would be found out, I thought up a preemptive lie. I told the teacher that two teenagers had shown up on a motorbike, entered the classroom, rifled through backpacks, and left with the stickers. As you might expect, this fib collapsed at the gentlest probing, and I reluctantly returned what I had pilfered.

My naive lying-I got better, trust me-was matched by my gullibility in sixth grade, when a friend told me that his family owned a flying capsule that could transport us anywhere in the world. Preparing to travel on this craft, I asked my parents if they could pack me a few meals for the journey. Even when my older brother snickered, I refused to disbelieve my friend's claim, and it was left to my friend's father to finally convince me that I'd been duped.

These lies that my friend and I told were nothing out of the ordinary for kids our age. Like learning to walk and talk, lying is something of a developmental milestone. While parents often find their children's lies troubling-for they signal the beginning of a loss of innocence-Kang Lee, a psychologist at the University of Toronto, sees the emergence of the behavior in toddlers as a reassuring sign that their cognitive growth is on track.

To study lying in children, Lee and his colleagues use a simple experiment. They ask kids to guess the identity of toys hidden from their view, based on an audio clue. For the first few toys, the clue is obvious-a bark for a dog, a meow for a cat-and the children answer easily. Then the sound played has nothing to do with the toy. "So you play Beethoven, but the toy's a car," Lee explains. The experimenter leaves the room on the pretext of taking a phone call-a lie for the sake of science-and asks the child not to peek at the toy. Returning, the experimenter asks the child for the answer, following up with the question: "Did you peek or not?"

Most children can't resist peeking, Lee and his researchers have found by monitoring hidden cameras. The percentage of the children who peek and then lie about it depends on their age. Among two-year-old transgressors, only 30 percent are untruthful. Among three-year-olds, 50 percent lie. And by eight, about 80 percent claim they didn't peek.

Kids also get better at lying as they get older. In guessing the toy that they secretly looked at, three- and four-year-olds typically blurt out the right answer, without realizing that this reveals their transgression and lying. At seven or eight, kids learn to mask their lying by deliberately giving a wrong answer or trying to make their answer seem like a reasoned guess.

Five- and six-year-old kids fall in between. In one study Lee used Barney the dinosaur as the toy. A five-year-old girl who denied having looked at the toy, which was hidden under a cloth, told Lee she wanted to feel it before guessing. "So she puts her hand underneath the cloth, closes her eyes, and says, 'Ah, I know it's Barney,' " Lee recounts. "I ask, 'Why?' She says, 'Because it feels purple.' "

What drives this increase in lying sophistication is the development of a child's ability to put himself or herself in someone else's shoes. Known as theory of mind, this is the facility we acquire for understanding the beliefs, intentions, and knowledge of others. Also fundamental to lying is the brain's executive function: the abilities required for planning, attention, and self-control. The two-year-olds who lied in Lee's experiments performed better on tests of theory of mind and executive function than those who didn't. Even at 16, kids who were proficient liars outperformed poor liars. On the other hand, kids on the autism spectrum-known to be delayed in developing a robust theory of mind-are not very good at lying.

On a recent morning, I took an Uber to visit Dan Ariely, a psychologist at Duke University and one of the world's foremost experts on lying. The inside of the car, though neat, had a strong odor of sweaty socks, and the driver, though courteous, had trouble finding her way. When we finally got there, she asked me smilingly if I would give her a five-star rating. "Sure," I replied. Later, I gave her three stars. I assuaged my guilt by telling myself that it was better not to mislead thousands of Uber riders.

Ariely became fascinated with dishonesty about 15 years ago. Looking through a magazine on a long-distance flight, he came across a mental aptitude test. He answered the first question and flipped to the key in the back to see if he got it right. He found himself taking a quick glance at the answer to the next question. Continuing in this vein through the entire test, Ariely, not surprisingly, scored very well. "When I finished, I thought-I cheated myself," he says. "Presumably, I wanted to know how smart I am, but I also wanted to prove I'm this smart to myself." The experience led Ariely to develop a lifelong interest in the study of lying and other forms of dishonesty.

In experiments he and his colleagues have run on college campuses and elsewhere, volunteers are given a test with 20 simple math problems. They must solve as many as they can in five minutes and are paid based on how many they get right. They are told to drop the sheet into a shredder before reporting the number they solved correctly. But the sheets don't actually get shredded. A lot of volunteers lie, as it turns out. On average, volunteers report having solved six matrices, when it was really more like four. The results are similar across different cultures. Most of us lie, but only a little.

The question Ariely finds interesting is not why so many lie, but rather why they don't lie a lot more. Even when the amount of money offered for correct answers is raised significantly, the volunteers don't increase their level of cheating. "Here we give people a chance to steal lots of money, and people cheat only a little bit. So something stops us-most of us-from not lying all the way," Ariely says. The reason, according to him, is that we want to see ourselves as honest, because we have, to some degree, internalized honesty as a value taught to us by society. Which is why, unless one is a sociopath, most of us place limits on how much we are willing to lie. How far most of us are willing to go-Ariely and others have shown-is determined by social norms arrived at through unspoken consensus, like the tacit acceptability of taking a few pencils home from the office supply cabinet.

Patrick Couwenberg's staff and fellow judges in the Los Angeles County Superior Court believed he was an American hero. By his account, he had been awarded a Purple Heart in Vietnam. He'd participated in covert operations for the Central Intelligence Agency. The judge boasted of an impressive educational background as well-an undergraduate degree in physics and a master's degree in psychology. None of it was true. When confronted, Couwenberg's defense was to blame a condition called pseudologia fantastica, a tendency to tell stories containing facts interwoven with fantasy. The argument didn't save him from being removed from the bench in 2001.

There appears to be no agreement among psychiatrists about the relationship between mental health and lying, even though people with certain psychiatric disorders seem to exhibit specific lying behaviors. Sociopathic individuals-those diagnosed with antisocial personality disorder-tend to tell manipulative lies, while narcissists may tell falsehoods to boost their image.

But is there anything unique about the brains of individuals who lie more than others? In 2005 psychologist Yaling Yang and her colleagues compared the brain scans of three groups: 12 adults with a history of repeated lying, 16 who met the criteria for antisocial personality disorder but were not frequent liars, and 21 who were neither antisocial nor had a lying habit. The researchers found that the liars had at least 20 percent more neural fibers by volume in their prefrontal cortices, suggesting that habitual liars have greater connectivity within their brains. It's possible this predisposes them to lying because they can think up lies more readily than others, or it might be the result of repeated lying.

Psychologists Nobuhito Abe at Kyoto University and Joshua Greene at Harvard University scanned the brains of subjects using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and found that those who acted dishonestly showed greater activation in the nucleus accumbens-a structure in the basal forebrain that plays a key role in reward processing. "The more excited your reward system gets at the possibility of getting money-even in a perfectly honest context-the more likely you are to cheat," explains Greene. In other words, greed may increase one's predisposition to lying.

One lie can lead to another and another, as evidenced by the smooth, remorseless lying of serial con men such as Hogue. An experiment by Tali Sharot, a neuroscientist at University College London, and colleagues showed how the brain becomes inured to the stress or emotional discomfort that happens when we lie, making it easier to tell the next fib. In the fMRI scans of the participants, the team focused on the amygdala, a region that is involved in processing emotions. The researchers found that the amygdala's response to lies got progressively weaker with each lie, even as the lies got bigger. "Perhaps engaging in small acts of deception can lead to bigger acts of deception," she says.

Much of the knowledge we use to navigate the world comes from what others have told us. Without the implicit trust that we place in human communication, we would be paralyzed as individuals and cease to have social relationships. "We get so much from believing, and there's relatively little harm when we occasionally get duped," says Tim Levine, a psychologist at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, who calls this idea the truth default theory.

Being hardwired to be trusting makes us intrinsically gullible. "If you say to someone, 'I am a pilot,' they are not sitting there thinking: 'Maybe he's not a pilot. Why would he say he's a pilot?' They don't think that way," says Frank Abagnale, Jr., a security consultant whose cons as a young man, including forging checks and impersonating an airline pilot, inspired the 2002 movie Catch Me if You Can. "This is why scams work, because when the phone rings and the caller ID says it's the Internal Revenue Service, people automatically believe it is the IRS. They don't realize that someone could manipulate the caller ID."

Robert Feldman, a psychologist at the University of Massachusetts, calls that the liar's advantage. "People are not expecting lies, people are not searching for lies," he says, "and a lot of the time, people want to hear what they are hearing." We put up little resistance to the deceptions that please us and comfort us-be it false praise or the promise of impossibly high investment returns. When we are fed falsehoods by people who have wealth, power, and status, they appear to be even easier to swallow, as evidenced by the media's credulous reporting of Lochte's robbery claim, which unraveled shortly thereafter.

Researchers have shown that we are especially prone to accepting lies that affirm our worldview. Memes that claim Obama was not born in the United States, deny climate change, accuse the U.S. government of masterminding the terrorist strikes of September 11, 2001, and spread other "alternative facts," as a Trump adviser called his Inauguration crowd claims, have thrived on the Internet and social media because of this vulnerability. Debunking them does not demolish their power, because people assess the evidence presented to them through a framework of preexisting beliefs and prejudices, says George Lakoff, a cognitive linguist at the University of California, Berkeley. "If a fact comes in that doesn't fit into your frame, you'll either not notice it, or ignore it, or ridicule it, or be puzzled by it-or attack it if it's threatening."

A recent study led by Briony Swire-Thompson, a doctoral candidate in cognitive psychology at the University of Western Australia, documents the ineffectiveness of evidence-based information in refuting incorrect beliefs. In 2015 Swire-Thompson and her colleagues presented about 2,000 adult Americans with one of two statements: "Vaccines cause autism" or "Donald Trump said that vaccines cause autism." (Trump has repeatedly suggested there's a link, despite the lack of scientific evidence for it.)

Not surprisingly, participants who were Trump supporters showed a decidedly stronger belief in the misinformation when it had Trump's name attached to it. Afterward the participants were given a short explanation-citing a large-scale study-for why the vaccine-autism link was false, and they were asked to reevaluate their belief in it. The participants-across the political spectrum-now accepted that the statements claiming the link were untrue, but testing them again a week later showed that their belief in the misinformation had bounced back to nearly the same level.

Other studies have shown that evidence undermining lies may in fact strengthen belief in them. "People are likely to think that familiar information is true. So any time you retract it, you run the risk of making it more familiar, which makes that retraction actually less effective, ironically, over the long term," says Swire-Thompson.

I experienced this phenomenon firsthand not long after I spoke to Swire-Thompson. When a friend sent me a link to an article ranking the 10 most corrupt political parties in the world, I promptly posted it to a WhatsApp group of about a hundred high school friends from India. The reason for my enthusiasm was that the fourth spot in the ranking was held by India's Congress Party, which in recent decades has been implicated in numerous corruption scandals. I chortled with glee because I'm not a fan of the party.

But shortly after sharing the article, I discovered that the ranking, which included parties from Russia, Pakistan, China, and Uganda, wasn't based on any metrics. It had been done by a site called BBC Newspoint, which sounded like a credible source. But I found out that it had no connection to the British Broadcasting Corporation. I posted an apology to the group, noting that the article was in all likelihood fake news.

That didn't stop others from reposting the article to the group several times over the next day. I realized that the correction I'd posted had not had any effect. Many of my friends-because they shared my antipathy toward the Congress Party-were convinced the ranking was true, and every time they shared it, they were unwittingly, or perhaps knowingly, nudging it toward legitimacy. Countering it with fact would be in vain.

What then might be the best way to impede the fleet-footed advance of untruths into our collective lives? The answer isn't clear. Technology has opened up a new frontier for deceit, adding a 21st-century twist to the age-old conflict between our lying and trusting selves.

Yudhijit Bhattacharjee, a contributing writer, has also written about deception in his new book,The Spy Who Couldn't Spell. He wrote about baby brains in January 2015.Dan Winters is an award-winning photographer based in Austin, Texas. This is his first feature assignment for the magazine.

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Why We Lie: The Science Behind Our Deceptive Ways

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This story appears in the June 2017 issue ofNational Geographic magazine. In the fall of 1989 Princeton University welcomed into its freshman class a young man named Alexi Santana, whose life story the admissions committee had found extraordinarily compelling. He had barely received any formal schooling.

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Earlier this week, fishermen near the Marshall Islands in the western Pacific found 37-year-old Jose Salvador Alvarenga adrift in a 23-foot fiberglass boat. Alvarenga had a fantastic story: He'd been lost at sea for 13 months, after setting off for a day of shark fishing near the Mexican coast where he lives, 5,500 miles away. Some have expressed skepticism about his story, but he would have been far from the first to endure such seemingly unendurable odds.

Here are nine of the world's most famous stories of survival against inhospitable conditions and days, weeks or months without help.

1972: Scottish dairy farmer Dougal Robertson and his family were sailing around the world in a schooner they purchased with their life savings, which sunk 200 miles off the Galapagos when a pod of killer whales punched a hole in the hull. They survived at sea for 38 days, first in an inflatable raft with a jury-rigged sail and then in a 10-foot dinghy.

1972: A small chartered flight carrying 45 people, mostly a Uruguayan rugby team and its associates, crashed in a remote part of the Andes Mountains in Argentina. Two of the survivors, having heard a radio report saying that the search for them had been abandoned, set out to find help. Their journey across the mountains took 10 days. By the time they found help, the other 14 survivors had been waiting for rescue for 72 days. The survivors subsisted on the remains of those who died in the crash and a subsequent avalanche.

1982: American inventor and shipbuilder Steven Callahan sailed his homemade sloop successfully from Rhode Island to the United Kingdom. On his trip back, something punched a hole in his ship during a storm - he suspects it might have been a whale - and he escaped into a small inflatable life raft. He drifted for 76 days before being picked up by fishermen near Guadeloupe.

1989: Bill and Simone Butler were 1,200 miles from land in the Pacific Ocean when pilot whales attacked and sank their sloop. The Butlers spent 66 days in a leaky six-foot-raft before they were rescued.

1994: Italian policeman Mauro Prosperi got lost during a six-day marathon through the Moroccan Sahara when a sandstorm spun him off track. He ended up 186 miles off route in Algeria, where he found an abandoned mosque. He spent nine days subsisting on bats and his own urine before being rescued by a nomadic family. He entered the race again in 1998.

2003: Aron Ralston was climbing in a Utah canyon when his arm was trapped by a loose boulder. On his fourth day suspended on the canyon wall, he decided that his only chance for survival was to amputate his own arm with a cheap multi-tool. He severed his arm the next day, descended to the valley floor and hiked for several miles before encountering a family who helped him. His story became a book and then the movie "127 Hours," starring James Franco.

2006: Three Mexican fishermen spent nine months drifting across the Pacific after the engine of their 25-foot boat died. They were finally rescued by a Taiwanese tuna trawler near the Marshall Islands, 5,000 miles away.

2006: It's still not entirely clear how Australian Ricky Megee ended up lost in the Australian outback - he first said that his car had broken down, later that he'd been drugged by hitchhikers and left for dead - but he managed to survive for 71 days before being rescued. He survived mostly on leeches and insects.

2013: Harrison Okene was rescued by divers May 28, 2013, nearly three days after the boat he was on capsized off the coast of Nigeria. He managed to breathe in a bubble of air about four feet high. The video of his rescue went viral in December.

A few more images from well-known survival stories can be found here:

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Stranded: 9 amazing stories of survival against the odds

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Earlier this week, fishermen near the Marshall Islands in the western Pacific found 37-year-old Jose Salvador Alvarenga adrift in a 23-foot fiberglass boat. Alvarenga had a fantastic story: He'd been lost at sea for 13 months, after setting off for a day of shark fishing near the Mexican coast where he lives, 5,500 miles away.

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First aid information from Mayo Clinic for use during a medical emergency.

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If you've just been shot but can't be bothered with a trip to the hospital you may want to know how to remove a bullet yourself. Learn how to remove the bullet as well as clean and cauterize, and bandage the wound.

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If you've just been shot but can't be bothered with a trip to the hospital you may want to know how to remove a bullet yourself. Learn how to remove the bullet as well as clean and cauterize, and bandage the wound.

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Everyone should have a first aid kit somewhere in their house and/or car if possible. However, if you find yourself in extenuating circumstances, there are certain things you should still be prepared to do.

It's worth pointing out that nothing stated here is an acceptable substitute or a replacement for having proper first aid gear and training. Treating burns, broken bones, or bleeding without proper equipment should be the backup of your backup of your backup plan. That being said, planning for every contingency is just good practice. So if you find yourself in the middle of the woods without your first aid kit, and obvious exits are North, South, and Dennis, here's what to do.

Stop Bleeding Without Bandages

If you're dealing with smaller cuts and scrapes where blood is flowing, the first order of business is to clean the wound. Wash it off with any clean water source you have available. Next, you'll want something to soft and absorbent to place on the wound. Paper towels and napkins can do, as well as strips of clothing if they're clean. It's important to make sure you don't infect the wound you just cleaned. For tiny cuts, you can also use super glue to quickly seal the fleshy fissure.

Also, if you're in a pinch, you can use tampons in place of cotton balls. In what may be one of the most obvious-once-you-think-about-it hacks, tampons happen to be very good at soaking up blood. They're also useful for nosebleeds if you don't have any other options laying around.

Once you've found a good absorption pad, you can use any form of tape to adhere the pad to the wound. If you don't have any tape, tie a piece of cloth tightly around the wound. Be careful not to cut off circulation, or make the knot too tight.

For larger wounds, you'll want to skip cleaning the wound, as it's more important to stem the loss of blood, rather than preventing infection (though both are important). With heavy blood loss, keep the wound elevated above the heart to slow down the flow, apply an absorption pad or your hands if nothing is available directly to the wound, and use pressure points to slow the flow of blood.

It's extremely important to know when to use a tourniquet. Using one should be a last resort option as it's designed to prevent death from loss of blood. Improper or inappropriate use of a tourniquet can result in damage to the cut off portion of a body and, depending on how long it's on, may even result in the need for an amputation. Keep this in mind before applying one.

Stabilize a Broken Bone

Broken bones can be extremely tricky, because you can cause more damage than you fix if you treat it improperly. For closed broken bones-that is, injuries where a bone is broken, but does not break through skin-the first thing to do is stabilize the wound. Do not try to straighten the bone if you can avoid it. While this needs to be done to heal, the bones inside the body are very sharp and can cut blood vessels, muscles, and cause all manner of nasty damage if you try to set the bone wrong.

Instead, keep the bone steady. Don't let it move if you can help it. Try to find something to stabilize the bone. If you're able to keep the person still and wait for help to come to you, try to keep the wound elevated above the heart to help prevent swelling. When you're far from civilization, you may need to create a splint using straight and sturdy sticks, fastened with rope or fabric to keep bigger breaks steady.

As much as possible, try to ice the break. This will help keep swelling down and prevent further internal damage. Place ice in a bag-never directly on the skin-and keep it on for twenty minutes, then off for twenty. Rinse and repeat. Rinsing optional.

Soothe Burns

For minor burns, the first thing you want to do is cool the affected area. Burns retain a lot of heat (for very obvious reasons) so the first thing to do is reduce the heat before more damage is done. Run the burned region under cool (but not freezing) water.

Once the burn has cooled down, you'll want to wrap it in something protective that won't stick. You want to give the burn enough air to breathe and keep any loose fibers or foreign objects from getting in it. Gauze is ideal, but you don't have any on you, right? In place of that, again paper towels or a clean cloth will work.

For second-degree or higher burns, try to get professional medical help as quickly as possible. Very small second-degree can be managed without help, but anything larger than a couple inches should be treated professionally as soon as it can. If you're dealing with a chemical burn, also be sure to clean off the burning chemicals. Use like methods to do the cleaning, too. If it's a dry powder, use a dry brush to clean it off. If it's a wet chemical, run it under water to rinse it off.

Relieve Pain Without Medication

Pain relief is going to be a very subjective case. Without medication or sedatives, treating pain for things like broken bones won't be very feasible. For minor pain like headaches or soreness, there are ways to minimize pain, or just generally keep your body healthy enough that it stays out of pain in the first place.

For starters, stay hydrated. It should go without saying, but we need plenty of water to live well. When you don't get enough fluids, muscles dry out, joints get creaky and your whole body gets tense. Water isn't a pain reliever in the same way aspirin is, and you can't just chug a gallon to make your sore back go away, but by getting into the habit, you can reduce long-lasting pain.

Another alternative is copious amounts of vitamin C. Several studies examining cancer treatments found that high concentrations of vitamin C can help reduce pain. Consuming extra vitamin C can sometimes help. A lack of vitamin D can also cause some pain, so look into eating some food rich in vitamin D as well.

Keep in mind, you're not popping pills to immediately reduce pain, you're treating underlying causes to make your body more healthy. If you're in pain, you might be able to get some small relief immediately, but more than anything you'll be helping your body be in a better condition to feel better overall.

Of course, if you're reading this now and no one around you is bleeding, in pain, or has broken bones, chances are you have time to prepare properly. There are plenty of guides out there for putting together first aid kits, so take a look at those. Also, the Red Cross offers an app with plenty of emergency first aid instructions and contact information, so download it and keep it handy.

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How to Treat Minor Injuries Without a First Aid Kit

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Everyone should have a first aid kit somewhere in their house and/or car if possible. However, if you find yourself in extenuating circumstances, there are certain things you should still be prepared to do. It's worth pointing out that nothing stated here is an acceptable substitute or a replacement for having proper first aid gear and training.

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There is any chance that the snake is venomous

The person has difficulty breathing

There is loss of consciousness

If you know the snake is not venomous, treat as a puncture wound.

1. Note the Snake's Appearance

Be ready to describe the snake to emergency staff.

2. Protect the Person

While waiting for medical help:

Move the person beyond striking distance of the snake.

Have the person lie down with wound below the heart.

Keep the person calm and at rest, remaining as still as possible to keep venom from spreading.

Cover the wound with loose, sterile bandage.

Remove any jewelry from the area that was bitten.

Remove shoes if the leg or foot was bitten.

Do not:

Cut a bite wound

Attempt to suck out venom

Apply tourniquet, ice, or water

Give the person alcohol or caffeinated drinks or any other medications

3. Follow Up

If you treat the bite at home:

At the hospital, treatment will depend on the type of snake.

If the snake was venomous, the person will be given anti-venom treatment.

A tetanus shot may be given, depending on date of last injection.

Sources

SOURCES:

CDC: "How to Avoid or Respond to a Snakebite."

FamilyDoctor.org: "Avoiding snakebites."

University of Maryland: "Snakebites."

Merck Manuals: "Snakebite."

Merck Manuals: "Wounds."

California Poison Control System: "Rattlesnake Encounters on the Rise, State Poison Officials Warn."

Snakebite Information from eMedicineHealth.

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There is any chance that the snake is venomous The person has difficulty breathing There is loss of consciousness If you know the snake is not venomous, treat as a puncture wound. Be ready to describe the snake to emergency staff. While waiting for medical help: Move the person beyond striking distance of the snake.