Please take a minute and a half to watch the video below, if you haven’t already. (1)
So …for real? Half the people don’t notice a woman in a gorilla suit walking through with a dramatic chest-beat mid-screen? Yep. I’ve watched a lot of people take this test (it’s a lot of fun, to be honest), and it’s true. Cute, but what’s the prepping relevance?
Why does situational awareness fail?
Situational awareness is a term tossed around a lot in prepper circles, and everyone agrees it’s a great thing. Be cognizant of what’s going on in your vicinity. Pay attention to your surroundings. The problem is … that’s great advice, but hearing it won’t make it happen. Wanting to be aware won’t make it happen either. Why does situational awareness fail and what can improve it?
The truth is, there are far more things available for notice in our environments most of the time than we can ever pay attention to. We only have so much processing ability in our brains – let’s call that processing ability ‘bandwidth’ since that gives the right feel to anyone who knows how network quality degrades if we have a low bandwidth connection. Our brains deal with the bandwidth problem by letting the subconscious interpretation areas decide what factors are important and promote only those factors up to our conscious selves where it will use up a lot of our limited mental resources.
When factors that turn out to be important never reached our conscious attention, situational awareness failed.
Situational awareness often fails for the truly unexpected events
Betcha weren’t expecting a girl in a gorilla suit in a basketball game! Our brains are wired to insist that things make sense. Data that doesn’t fit a sensible pattern can be warped or outright disregarded in service of ‘understanding.’ Pilots in working in training simulators to master a specific piece of new equipment didn’t notice *another jet* on their runway. Why? Because it was *their* runway, duh; this wasn’t supposed to be a crash aversion training! They weren’t expecting the misplaced jet. (2)
You’d think a pilot would notice this on his runway, no? But he doesn’t if he thinks he’s supposed to be just training on his new visual display.*
Improving situational awareness by making the unexpected less unexpected
You might think experts would be less likely to fall for this Ignore the Unexpected quirk. They are… to a point. The key point seems to be ‘What’s unexpected?’
For example, when those pilots were actually flying planes, or were doing general simulation training, they were better than novice pilots at noticing the first signs of problems. Their subconscious selves had learned what things were important when flying and were paying attention to the right things. It’s just when the pilots thought they’d just be training on some new displays that they overlooked the giant jet right in their runway.
I know this one personally. Especially when I’m driving, I am amazingly oblivious to details that I didn’t know would be important. Salty driving past me on a two-lane road, waving wildly? Nope, don’t notice. Tiny glint of animal eyes in the darkness by the roadside? I’m all over that. Road hazards I’m watching out for. People in cars that are behaving and staying in their lane are not worth my bandwidth.
What’s the lesson here? If you think about what sorts of ‘unexpected’ you might be encountering, your subconscious is more likely to promote those things to your conscious awareness.
Stress degrades situational awareness
It’s not how we’d like it to be. In a perfect world, we think, being in a stressful situation would make us more aware. We’d be harder to sneak up on, better able to notice opportunities, etc. Nevertheless, it’s a biological fact that when we’re stressed we tend to be generally less aware.
Why? Focus or general awareness. Pick one. It’s the bandwith problem again. When we are hyperaware of what we intend to pay attention to, we apparently haven’t the bandwidth left to notice other things.
Most of us have experienced this at some level. The crowd going silent as we stretched to our utmost in the final moment of the game. Hearing awful news from a doctor or policeman and later having zero recollection of the face of the person who gave us the news. The price for the heightened attention on the play of the game or the news itself is the loss of situational awareness of what our subconscious deemed less important.
Improve situational awareness by stress reduction
Intentionally self-calming can help overcome the narrowing of focus caused by stress. That old platitude about ‘Just take a couple of deep breaths’? That one works. There’s a fun feedback system where our brain notices us breathing like we’re calm. In response, it dials back the activity of the sympathetic nervous system that is responsible for stress effects.
Stimulants, such as caffeine and anything with ‘ephedra’ or ‘ephedrine’ in the name work in part by dialing the stress response up. If you need situational awareness, it helps to go as easy on the stimulants as possible.
There are some more tips on stress reduction here.
1) Simons and Chabris, 1999. Selective attention test. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJG698U2Mvo
2) Chabris and Simons. 2010. The Invisible Gorilla: and other ways our intuitions deceive us. Random House Audio. http://www.theinvisiblegorilla.com/overview.html
*Thanks Downtowngal [CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0) or GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html)], from Wikimedia Commons