What makes a survivor? Jamie Neale is a survivor, despite being stupid enough to strike out into the bush provisioned with only two bread rolls and a bottle of water. Yet according to his aunt Caroline, Jamie is also “a very tough lad, very resourceful, very bright”. Not to mention bloody lucky: yesterday’s rescue of the 19-year-old from Muswell Hill, North London, after 12 days lost in the dense eucalypt forests of the Blue Mountains near Katoomba, New South Wales, came only after he stumbled across two startled bushwalkers, who raised the alarm.

Extremely foolishly, Neale didn’t have his mobile phone, unlike the Sydney teenager David Iredale, who got himself lost on the same trail to Mount Solitary three years ago. Not that the phone was enough to save Iredale, 17: despite contacting the emergency services they were unable to find him alive. His body was found eight days later.

“That was a tragic event,” says Lincoln Hall, who lives in Wentworth Falls, just four miles down the Great Western Highway from Katoomba. “It’s particularly remarkable that Jamie has survived all that time. If you’re not familiar with the Australian bush it can be quite disorientating. Once he’d gone off the trail he would have been in a very confusing situation.”

In a life-threatening situation, Hall says, a certain attitude makes survival more likely. He should know. In May 2006, Hall suffered a cerebral odema just after successfully scaling Everest. For eight hours his fellow climbers attempted to guide the hallucinating Hall down from the summit, but after 150 yards they left him, taking his pack and his oxygen. They thought Hall was dead. He wasn’t. When he came around, it was in total darkness and he was alone, and stripped of much of his equipment.

“Everything was stacked against me; dehydration, potential hypothermia, exhaustion, malnutrition and hypoxia — lack of oxygen. The only thing I could do was to get through the night. That became a matter of just forcing myself to be focused. When your life depends on it — and it wasn’t just my life it was that of our family — that was a big motivator for me. So I just tackled the impossible.”

At dawn the next day a team of four climbers stumbled across Hall — 12 hours after he had been left for dead. He was two feet from a 10,000ft drop, Myles Osborne, one of his discoverers, later said. “This was a moment of disbelief to us all. Here was a gentleman, apparently lucid, who had spent the night without oxygen at 8,600m, without proper equipment and barely clothed. And alive!”

“Fear is a great motivator,” Hall says. “But it’s when fear turns into panic that people die.” He says that however hopeless the situation appears, your chances for survival are increased by maintaining a state of pragmatic optimism. “You have to hope, but only in the context of hope supported by a plan to achieve something. Keep your mind ticking over, putting it all together.” The American writer Ben Sherwood, author of The Survivor’s Club, a fascinating study of the science of survival, met Hall soon after his escape from Everest. He says: “People such as Lincoln Hall were the motivation that led me to go on the two-year exploration of why some people survive and others don’t.”

So do certain people possess attributes that make survival in adversity more likely? In the past few weeks, for instance, 13-year-old Bahia Bakari was rescued after 12 hours clinging to a piece of wreckage from the plane crash that had killed all her 152 fellow passengers. Three Chinese coalminers, Wang Quanjie, Zhao Weixing, and Wang Kuangwei , have been rescued after 25 days trapped underground, during which they licked moisture from the walls to survive.

Sherwood says: “My thesis is that survival is a mindset, it’s a lens, it’s an outlook. Most of all it’s a muscle that you can exercise and build with awareness and constant learning and a ‘deliberate calm’, which is how pilots describe what you are supposed to do in a crisis.” The author has created a quiz that measures 12 different attributes that, he says, “are the common or shared toolkit of the world’s most adept survivors”. They include resilience, adaptability, tenacity and general intelligence. The most important of all, Sherwood believes, is adaptability.

When lost in the wilds, as Jamie Neale was, Sherwood says that the best thing you can do is to stop. “The most important survival rule in the wilderness is to control the impulse to keep moving . Searchers always say that they find the clues before they find the body. That means they would have found you earlier if you’d stopped moving.”

Certain situations are simply unsurvivable, but in those that are not, some of us are more likely to escape with our lives than others. Dr John Leach, a retired psychologist who narrowly escaped the 1987 King’s Cross fire, spent his career observing patterns of human behaviour at moments of intense peril. He concludes that there are three categories of behaviour when faced with disaster. Some of us are stupefied and paralysed. Others fall victim to “cognitive dysfunction”, behaving counter-productively — displaying the “victim” characteristics that are more likely to ensure that they become a victim. The final group retain a sense of calm in the face of adversity and start to think. “The brain is a signal processor of limited capacity,” Dr Leach says, “so everything that is not crucial to immediate survival is blocked out.”

This chimes with something once said by Aron Ralston, whose story of survival is one of the most incredible of recent times: “Psychologically, it comes down to eating the elephant one bite at at time, taking care of the next thing you can do.” While hiking in the Blue John Canyon in Utah six years ago, he became trapped after a loose boulder pinned his arm against a rock wall. After five days he was able to free himself, by breaking his arm and then cutting through the flesh with his pocket-knife.

According to Ralston: “If it’s an act of survival, we’ve all got a reason to keep living. It may not be pretty, but surviving is grit and determination in its highest form. I learnt that I’ve got the capacity to do a hell of a lot more than I thought I could — if I have the proper motivation.”

To take Ben Sherwood’s survival test go to: www.thesurvivorsclub.org

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