DON’T ALWAYS TRUST WHAT YOU DON’T SEE: In 2007, I’m going to talk a lot here about my “studies” regarding the subject of human consciousness. I’ve been reading some really interesting stuff about it lately, so I’m going to share some of what I’ve learned — along with my own reflections on the confounding question of what consciousness actually is. To be honest, I haven’t got the slightest idea on what the true nature of consciousness is or how it could be explained. But it’s still an interesting journey finding out what is and isn’t known about it.

One interesting phenomenon that I recently learned of is called “change blindness”. The Scientific American web site published a nice little article about it. To sum it up, our brains need to do a lot of unconscious processing of the internal signals that our eyes send, before we can actually “behold” a coherent image of what’s going in front of us. A lot of unconscious analysis goes on in the milliseconds between the light hitting the nerves in the back of our eyes, and our conscious response to what we see. In effect, the subconscious is trying to make a coherent picture out of a series of different identifications coming from different regions of the brain: colors, shapes, surfaces, motions, etc. In trying to put a coherent picture together, the subconscious may ignore what it doesn’t expect or has never experienced before; at the very least, it takes longer to “admit” that something unusual is happening. As such, you might not become aware of a dangerous situation as quickly as you do of a normal one.

I was a bit dubious regarding this concept, but it happened to me just this morning. I was driving over to a shopping mall, feeling fine, fully alert (having just finished a cup of tea). The weather was OK, sun behind some clouds, probably optimal visual conditions. I was tooling along on a straight road going downhill, fully aware of a truck stopped in the left lane, half way over the shoulder, about a thousand feet in front of me. Then, “as if out of nowhere”, I saw a car along side the truck; it was in my lane, coming right at me, head-on. Yikes! The guy was taking a risk, but he got past the truck and zipped back over into his lane, just a microsecond before I had to slam my brakes and veer to the right. To be honest, I never saw that idiot slide over into my lane, despite my staring right at where he was. My mind lost a couple of precious milliseconds before it accepted the fact that a car was heading at me at full speed. It was not expecting the unexpected. I was lucky in that the jerk who was coming at me was correct, after all; he did in fact have enough time to complete his maneuver and avert another highway tragedy. But if his calculations were off by just 5% or so, it could have been really messy for both of us.

How many times have you heard the phrase “it came out of nowhere” when people describe the circumstances leading up to a nasty collision? That’s change blindness at work. Because of the way our minds work, we lose a couple of split seconds that could have been used to avoid, or at least lessen, the damage and injury (and sometimes death) that followed. The only thing you can do is to drive as SLOWLY – that’s right, I said SLOWLY – as is practicable in a given situation. The slower you go, the more time you have in an unexpected emergency. I realize that you can’t drive at 30 MPH on a main thoroughfare marked for 40; you’d either get shot at or have your car rammed or sideswiped. At the very least, you’d be the subject of a variety of obscene epithets and gestures. But do realize that most people overestimate the amount of control that they really have while driving. That’s why car insurance rates are so high these days.

Back when I was learning how to drive, no one knew about “change blindness”. Today we do – but then again, how could you convince teenagers that what they see or don’t see isn’t always what’s really out there? Actually, there may be ways; there are interesting films that demonstrate change blindness. Hopefully, the drivers education institution will make good use of this . . . . before the next young idiot behind the wheels risks his life and mine.

And have a Happy New Year . . . .