I’m an NLP master practitioner (or soon will be) so the things that our brains’ do on our behalf of us is of interest to me. So when Keith brought up what our brains do during an accident it got me thinking.
To set the stage better we were talking about panic and tunnel vision; something near and dear to many motorcycle riders’ heart. You’re riding along, things get wacky and you go in to panic mode. Your vision slams down to a nice tight focus on whatever is in front of you. Perhaps it is the nice SUV that just pulled out in front of you. Personally, I think you had tunnel vision before this otherwise you would have noticed it moving to were it could create this excitement, but I digress. Keith addresses this with the whole idea of wide angle vision. Your eyes are still receiving all the same stuff. It is your brain that is ignoring peripheral data and focusing in on what it doesn’t like. So instead of flicking the bike to the left and giving you more room you head straight in to rear bumper. Can you always save it? Nope, but I’d rather go down fighting.
But the piece that really got me wondering was what happens when things go really bad. Have you experienced time slowing down? You’re in an accident and it seems like it goes on forever. You can see everything so clearly and things just seem to drag on forever. The first piece you can learn to do. That is what wide angle is about. What sucks is that you can’t do the second part 2 or 3 seconds before the accident happens (or starts). Sucksville. Imagine if you had the ability to switch on that slow motion thing whenever you consciously thought you needed it. You’re flying down the back straight at Mid-Ohio and think to yourself “time to setup for turn 6” and blam! Time just slows down. Instead of a perceived 2 seconds to do your business you have a perceived 10.
Maybe I’m not describing this right, but I want to find out if there is a way to trigger this without having to do something dumb. I wonder if real scientists have looked in to this. Does it have a name? Maybe I’ll find out.