I am looking for the most amazing, almost miracle-like examples, and
sources to, real events and examples where the mind has overcome
extreme physical situations - real life examples and stories that if
they hadn't happened people would have said were impossible

Dear dtnl42-ga;

Thank you for allowing me an opportunity to answer your interesting
question. It?s kind of frightening to take on a question where a
customer says ?the most? (as in, ?MOST amazing?) because we have to
read literally, rather than figuratively. Since there is no such list
in literal terms I must assume (carefully) that you are looking for a
?compiled list? of a few representative examples that I find ?most
amazing? as compared to other, less amazing instances. Having
blabbered all that let me tell you about a number of instances that I
shook MY head at in wonder:


The first one that immediately came to mind was the incident involving
outdoorsman, Aron Ralston, who, upon being trapped when a half-ton
boulder fell on his arm while rock climbing alone in a Utah canyon,
managed to muster the mental grit and determination to survive in this
condition for 5 days, but eventually broke the bones in his own arm
and than amputated it with a dull pocketknife. Even more amazing (as
if there IS anything MORE amazing than that) Ralston THEN repelled 60
feet down a sheer canyon face and walked a great distance before he
was rescued. He lived because he WILLED himself to live.

Ralston has written a book about his ordeal called ?BETWEEN A ROCK AND
A HARD PLACE?. You can read an excellent series of excerpts from the
book here:

ARON RALSTON
http://outside.away.com/outside/features/200409/aron_ralston_1.html


?????..

This isn?t the only time this kind of fantastic ?mind over matter?
type incident has occurred. Two years ago a similar situation happened
to William ?Bill? Jeracki while hiking back to his car after a fishing
trip near St. Marys Glacier (Near Denver, Colorado). Only Bill was
forced to cut off his own LEG with a pocketknife and other improvised
tools from his tackle box before CRAWLING on to his STICK SHIFT truck
and DRIVING HIMSELF to safety. Today Bill his own prosthetics company
in Fort Collins, Applied Biomechanics.

ASPEN DAILY NEWS
http://www.aspendailynews.com/Search_Articles/view_article.cfm?OrderNumber=5751

A LEG TO STAND ON
http://outside.away.com/outside/features/200409/top_survival_stories_9.html


???

You can read a number of miraculous survival stores like this at
OUTDOOR ONLINE; like the story of Douglas Mawson, who was stranded,
starved, poisoned and nearly frozen yet he willed himself to survive ?
and he did.

I WILL SURVIVE: THE ICE ZONE
http://outside.away.com/outside/features/200409/top_survival_stories_2.html

?Like German teenager Juliane Koepcke, who was the sole survivor of an
Amazon plane crash that left her alone in the harsh Peruvian jungle.
With a fractured collarbone, a badly gashed right arm, and blinded in
one eye she trekked through dense forest, at one point stopping only
to surgically remove enormous parasitic worms that had infested her
skin.

PLANE CRASH: THE ONLY ONE WHO LIVED
http://outside.away.com/outside/features/200409/top_survival_stories_4.html

?Like Hugh Glass, who in 1823 was left for dead by his companions
after being terribly mauled by a grizzly bear. When Glass came to his
was alone in the wilderness and his broken ribs were exposed through a
huge laceration in his side. Glass overcame his fear, pain, infection,
and fever and re-set his own broken leg before CRAWLING much of the
100 miles to Ft. Kiowa ON HIS ELBOWS ? a miraculous journey that took
SIX MONTHS to complete, surviving in those first weeks on only wild
berries, bugs and dead animals he found along the way.

LEFT FOR DEAD
http://outside.away.com/outside/features/200409/top_survival_stories_7.html

PRAIRIE ODYSSEY OF HUGH GLASS
http://www.dakota-web.com/lemmon/about/history/hughglass.htm


?as well as many others.

?????


Historically, of course, there?s Helen Keller, who, though blind, deaf
and even unable to speak in the early years of her life, not only
graduated cum laude from Radcliffe in 1904 but went on to earn three
honorary university degrees one from Gallaudet College, one from
Western Michigan University and one from John Hopkins University), the
Lions Humanitarian Award, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and
election to the Women's Hall of Fame. She trained her mind to believe
that all these things were possible ? and indeed they were.

LIFE OF HELEN KELLER
http://www.rnib.org.uk/xpedio/groups/public/documents/publicwebsite/public_keller.hcsp

????.

Then there?s the multitude of stories from the Vietnam War, and many
other conflicts, where men and women were taken prisoner and brutally
tortured, sometimes for years, and who survived only because they
disassociated themselves from their pain, loneliness, starvation,
seclusion and utter horror of captivity.

POW STORIES
http://www.zestive.com/bookspow.htm

????

The same of course is true with those holocaust survivors who forced
their minds to accept what was happening to them in order to maintain
sanity and endure their suffering. On some occasions prisoners fooled
their minds to forget about their starvation by eating bones or sand
to relieve the pain in their stomachs.

HOLOCAUST FORGOTTEN
http://www.holocaustforgotten.com/Responses2.htm

MIDDLE EAST NEW ONLINE
http://www.menewsline.com/oneonone.html

???.

In a number of other well documented instances people resorted to
cannibalism in order to survive. Overcoming their revulsion by forcing
their minds to accept the need to survive at al costs.

THE DONNER PARTY
http://members.aol.com/DanMRosen/donner/

TWO TALES OF DISASTER: THE DONNER PARTY AND THE ANDES PLANE CRASH
http://www.infoplease.com/spot/donner1.html

THE WRECK OF THE WHALESHIP "ESSEX": A FIRST-HAND ACCOUNT OF ONE OF
HISTORY'S MOST EXTRAORDINARY MARITIME DISASTERS
http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0747274045/202-6092880-1501436


Below you will find that I have carefully defined my search strategy
for you in the event that you need to search for more information. By
following the same type of searches that I did you may be able to
enhance the research I have provided even further. I hope you find
that my research exceeds your expectations. If you have any questions
about my research please post a clarification request prior to rating
the answer. Otherwise, I welcome your rating and your final comments
and I look forward to working with you again in the near future. Thank
you for bringing your question to us.

Best regards;
Tutuzdad ? Google Answers Researcher


INFORMATION SOURCES

Defined above


SEARCH STRATEGY


SEARCH ENGINES USED:

Google ://www.google.com




SEARCH TERMS USED:

OVERCAME

MIND

SURVIVE

SURVIVAL

MIND OVER MATTER

BLOCKED OUT

DISASSOCIATED

IN SPITE OF

EXTREME 

PHYSICAL 

SITUATIONS

ENDURANCE

Hi,
You can find find the extraordinary feats of ordinary people... in
their own words at the following link : -
http://www.saywhynot.com/stories.htm

Some short anecdotes about world fame personalities :-
http://www.seas.upenn.edu/~srihari/anecdotes.htm

Here are *two* more Gems :-

*******************************************************************************

A mathematics graduate student at a university in California,arrived
late in the class and quickly copied the two math problems  that were
written on the blackboard assuming  them to be the homework
assignment. He went to work on them that evening and found out this
was the most difficult assignment the professor had ever assigned.
Night after night he tried to solve first one problem and then the
other. Even though he wasn?t successful, he kept at it in dogged
determination.

Several days later, he came upon the breakthrough he had been seeking
for and solved both problems. He took the homework to class the next
day and left it on the professor?s desk along with a mountain of
clutter which was already there. He remembers worrying about whether
it would get lost in the shuffle or not, but he left it anyway.

Six weeks later, he was awakened by a pounding on the door. It was his
professor ? on a Sunday morning! "George! George!" the professor
shouted, "You solved them! You solved them."

"Yes, of course!" George said. And then asked, "Wasn?t I supposed to?"
That?s when the professor explained that the two problems he had
copied down were not homework; they were two famous outstanding
problems that the even leading mathematicians had not been able to
solve. The professor was astounded that in a few days George had
solved them both!

This student later became a pioneer mathematician and the world knows
him as George Dantzig,the inventor of linear programming,network
optimization, mathematical programming and development of the simplex
method.

George now reflects on that event and says: "If someone had told me
that they were two famous unsolved problems, I probably wouldn?t have
even tried to solve them. It goes to show the power of positive
thinking."
[Source: http://www-gap.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~history/Mathematicians/Dantzig_George.html
http://dailyhelp.com/az23.htm ]
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Some time ago I received a call from a colleague. He was about to give
a student a zero for his answer to a physics question, while the
student claimed a perfect score. The instructor and the student agreed
to an impartial arbiter, and I was selected.

I read the examination question: "Show how it is possible to determine
the height of a tall building with the aid of a barometer." The
student had answered: "Take the barometer to the top of the building,
attach a long rope to it, lower it to the street, and then bring it
up, measuring the length of the rope. The length of the rope is the
height of the building."

The student really had a strong case for full credit since he had
really answered the question completely and correctly! On the other
hand, if full credit were given, it could well contribute to a high
grade in his physics course and certify competence in physics, but the
answer did not confirm this.

I suggested that the student have another try. I gave the student six
minutes to answer the question with the warning that the answer should
show some knowledge of physics. At the end of five minutes, he hadn't
written anything. I asked if he wished to give up, but he said he had
many answers to this problem; he was just thinking of the best one. I
excused myself for interrupting him and asked him to please go on.

In the next minute, he dashed off his answer, which read: "Take the
barometer to the top of the building and lean over the edge of the
roof. Drop the barometer, timing its fall with a stopwatch. Then,
using the formula x=0.5*a*t^2, calculate the height of the building."
At this point, I asked my colleague if he would give up. He conceded,
and gave the student almost full credit.

While leaving my colleague's office, I recalled that the student had
said that he had other answers to the problem, so I asked him what
they were.

"Well," said the student, "there are many ways of getting the height
of a tall building with the aid of a barometer.

For example, you could take the barometer out on a sunny day and
measure the height of the barometer, the length of its shadow, and the
length of the shadow of the building, and by the use of simple
proportion, determine the height of the building."

"Fine," I said, "and others?" 

"Yes," said the student, "there is a very basic measurement method you
will like. In this method, you take the barometer and begin to walk up
the stairs. As you climb the stairs, you mark off the length of the
barometer along the wall. You then count the number of marks, and this
will give you the height of the building in barometer units." "A very
direct method."

"Of course. If you want a more sophisticated method, you can tie the
barometer to the end of a string, swing it as a pendulum, and
determine the value of g [gravity] at the street level and at the top
of the building. From the difference between the two values of g, the
height of the building, in principle, can be calculated."

"On this same tack, you could take the barometer to the top of the
building, attach a long rope to it, lower it to just above the street,
and then swing it as a pendulum. You could then calculate the height
of the building by the period of the precession".

"Finally," he concluded, "there are many other ways of solving the
problem. Probably the best," he said, "is to take the barometer to the
basement and knock on the superintendent's door. When the
superintendent answers, you speak to him as follows: 'Mr.
Superintendent, here is a fine barometer. If you will tell me the
height of the building, I will give you this barometer."

At this point, I asked the student if he really did not know the
conventional answer to this question. He admitted that he did, but
said that he was fed up with high school and college instructors
trying to teach him how to think.

The narrator is nobody else but Sir Ernest Rutherford,recipient of the
Nobel Prize in Physics. The name of the student was Niels Bohr."
(1885-1962) Danish Physicist; Nobel Prize 1922; best known for
proposing the first 'model' of the atom with protons & neutrons and an
innovator in Quantum Theory.
[Source: http://www.cooperativeindividualism.org/bohr_storyontests.html ]
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I hope this  helps !!

Have a wonderful day,

regards,