Brains

Many years ago, I used to ride motorcycles, I owned 3 of them in fact. In the folly of youth, I enjoyed the exhilaration of cruising down a roadway in a completely unprotected environment, obviously there are no seat belts or airbags on those 2 wheeled death wishes.

One beautiful Sunday afternoon I was rolling down the road, when the bike suddenly flipped on it’s side, most likely caused by a patch of grease or mud that I didn’t see. As luck would have it, I had installed crash-bars on that bike the day before, otherwise I’m fairly certain I may have lost, or severely damaged, my left leg. Also, had I not been wearing a helmet, which was deeply gouged by the crash, I imagine I would be even more brain-damaged than I am now. I’m most grateful for the fact that my girl friend at the time, now my wife, wasn’t along for the ride, as she often was. I believe she had gone to church. After the broken bones healed, I found that my enthusiasm for open air vehicles waned rapidly. I soon sold the bike and haven’t had any desire to ride one since.

At the time, prior to the accident, I was working on the Naval Base in Norfolk. In order to ride a bike on the base, I had to complete a motorcycle safety course. One of the lectures in that course was “How to avoid accidents”. It was an interesting lecture, covering many of the hazardous aspects of operating a motorcycle in various environments both urban and rural. One part of the lecture that has stuck with me all these years, concerns an explanation by the instructor regarding the cause of many motor vehicle accidents. The theory is, that the human brain does not always react based on the information available to it, but by interpreting information as it expects it to be.

For example, when drivers stop at an intersection, look left and right, they are looking to see if any traffic (usually defined as a car or truck) is approaching. The brain doesn’t recognize any of those vehicles in the image presented to it, and therefore assumes the way is clear to proceed. Meaning, if a motorcycle were approaching, the brain might not have been expecting that, and thus disregarded that bit of data.

An example of this is below. Close your left eye, focus on the X with your right eye, and move to within about 12-16 or so inches of the screen. You will notice the O disappears and is replaced by what the brain sees in that general area.







X ---------------------------------- o







Obviously, both symbols are still there, but your brain tells you otherwise.

I find this particularly alarming today with the much publicized use of cell phones, GPS, iPods, etc by people operating motor vehicles. These additional unnecessary distractions can only contribute to an increase in motor vehicle mishaps, injuries and deaths.

I suspect that if anyone, other than my only loyal blog reader, were to read this, they might whimsically say “if you drive with both eyes open, it’s not a problem”, hopefully they know that isn’t true.