The idea is that when someone does something in an interrogation that causes your defences to fail, you have a panic button: a trained response that puts you back on secure footing and allows you a few moments to think. In the worst case, it’s a cloud of squid ink for the mind, it gives you a moment to gather yourself. In the best, you get clean away into the hills and you can fight your insurgency another day. The difference between those two is measured by how deeply you believe in your image, and how many complex operations you can assign to its structure. That’s why you take the first thing in your head, something that’s deeply rooted in you: if it feels intuitively right for the situation it’s easier to believe in. With an animal, you can generally assign five or six functions to its body—head, four legs, tail. If you’re particularly disciplined you can throw in extras for the eyes and teeth, maybe the pattern of the coat. You can dump your cognition into your five senses, scatter yourself, vanish through the woods. It’s a solid trick.