What is striking in retrospect is how much organized, purposeful activity the survivors maintained in conditions that would have degraded the cognitive function required for such activity. The construction of the sleeping bag required sustained attention to a complex task over many hours. The reconnaissance expeditions required assessment of terrain, management of risk, and decision-making under physical stress. The radio repair attempt required sustained technical effort at a problem that did not have an obvious solution.
These cognitive achievements — accomplished by people who were malnourished, cold, sleep-deprived, and psychologically traumatized — are part of what makes the survival story remarkable beyond the simple fact of physical endurance.
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## The Role of Youth
The survivors of the 1972 Andes crash were, with the exception of Javier Methol, young. Most of the rugby players were in their late teens or early twenties. Roberto Canessa was 19. Nando Parrado was 20. Several were 18.
The role of youth in the survival is ambiguous. Youth brought physical resilience — young bodies can sustain physical stress more effectively than older ones, and recover from some forms of damage more quickly. The rugby players had the athletic fitness that comes from sustained training, which gave them a physical reserve that sustained them through the initial weeks of deterioration.
Youth also brought the specific cognitive quality of not fully understanding what was happening. This sounds counterintuitive, but several survivors have described it in their accounts as genuinely relevant. They did not have the life experience to know, with certainty, that they were going to die. They had not seen enough of the world to have a fully realistic assessment of their probability of survival. Some degree of unrealistic optimism — the belief that things would work out that did not have a solid empirical basis — may have been psychologically useful in a situation where realistic optimism would have been difficult to maintain.