Scientific American web site<\/a> 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 \u201cbehold\u201d a coherent image of what\u2019s 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\u2019t expect or has never experienced before; at the very least, it takes longer to \u201cadmit\u201d 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.<\/p>\nI 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, \u201cas if out of nowhere\u201d, 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. <\/p>\n
How many times have you heard the phrase \u201cit came out of nowhere\u201d when people describe the circumstances leading up to a nasty collision? That\u2019s 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 \u2013 that\u2019s right, I said SLOWLY \u2013 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\u2019t drive at 30 MPH on a main thoroughfare marked for 40; you\u2019d either get shot at or have your car rammed or sideswiped. At the very least, you\u2019d be the subject of a variety of obscene epithets and gestures. But do realize<\/span> that most people overestimate the amount of control that they really have while driving. That\u2019s why car insurance rates are so high these days.<\/p>\nBack when I was learning how to drive, no one knew about \u201cchange blindness\u201d. Today we do \u2013 but then again, how could you convince teenagers that what they see or don\u2019t see isn\u2019t always what\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
And have a Happy New Year . . . .<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
DON\u2019T ALWAYS TRUST WHAT YOU DON\u2019T SEE: In 2007, I\u2019m going to talk a lot here about my \u201cstudies\u201d regarding the subject of human consciousness. I\u2019ve been reading some really interesting stuff about it lately, so I\u2019m going to share some of what I\u2019ve learned — along with my own reflections on the confounding question […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/408"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=408"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/408\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=408"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=408"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=408"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}