Ian White wrote:
geoff wrote:
When I taught our daughter to drive, I would give her a running
commentary about what was going through my mind while I was driving.

Yeah, I did that with the kids, pointing out potential hazards, how to
read the road etc

I learned an awful lot from just watching my father drive, especially
the slick, flowing way he drove without excitement or panic.

Making your movements flow and letting the subconscious take control
is important in lots of spheres of activity I've now decided.

There's a very useful term for that: "unaware intelligence". It
highlights the fact that some of our subconscious activity is actually
complex, high-level thinking - far above the level of instincts and
reactions (but with a good connection down to that lower level too). We
only discover how complex it is when we bring it all to the surface, eg
in a driving commentary.

Part of our unaware intelligence is that we can process information that
we aren't even aware of having taken in, and this probably accounts for
a lot of our "intuition" and "hunches". The Institute of Advanced
Motorists tell of a classic example:

"... I'm slowing for this blind bend. Oops, braking hard - there'll be a
horse!"

"How did you know?"

"Just before the bend, that pile of sh*t was still steaming."


Indeed. Birds flying up indicates human or predator activity,
reflections in windows helps see round blind corners..


Wasn't it Stirling Moss who said 'as I came round the corner, instead of
a sea of white faces looking at ME, it was a sea of dark heads pointing
up the track..I slowed down instinctively and managed to avoid the crash
that had already happened'.

WE are seriously good at pattern recognition. When the pattern 'doesn't
fit' ..slow down and wake up. Something is going down..