Monday, July 31, 2006

Situational Awareness

Situational awareness is a term often used in aeronautical and military training, to instruct combatants and pilots to be aware of everything around them. It is a skill that is all too infrequently employed by much of the population in everyday life. Many people go about their daily lives without being aware of their surroundings or realizing what is happening around them. Situational awareness is like a mother’s claim of having “eyes in the back of my head”, but multiplied to include all of the senses. When walking down the street, many people unconsciously watch where they put their feet (and some don’t) and subliminally assess anyone coming their way – usually taking the measure of the person they are about to meet, and adjusting their reaction to the meeting on a sliding friend or foe scale. This instinct comes from the animal kingdom. We humans can fine-tune this simple scale into many tones on our way to making the decision about how to react to the approach of another. Do we ignore them, make eye contact, cross the street, or stop and speak to them?
Our awareness and reaction is also influenced by the general surroundings. Is it day or night, am I on familiar or strange territory, are there other people present, what are the cultural habits of the place I am? We use this skill of situational awareness to pass safely, to communicate whatever it is that we need and want. We need this skill in order to learn.
When one is begins driving lessons for example, an instructor my raise the point of situational awareness, because it is critical to safe driving. Bad driving is a perfect example of how many people aren’t observant, which results in an inability to judge situations and act appropriately. The worst case of a driver with lack of situational awareness is a driver with tunnel vision – he drives straight ahead, looking only in front of him - but not too far, he doesn’t look side to side, or use his mirrors, but drives his car like he has no control except stop and go. The tunnel vision driver may suffer from compromised motor and observational skills, so that staying inside one lane of traffic puts him at the maximum of his capabilities. He fears that if he looks sideways or back, he may lose control of his forward motion, which in his state of reduced capability, may happen. Some people find it difficult to multi task, but driving is a multi-tasking skill. Apart from some differences in speed and capacity to retain information levels, humans can be trained to multi-task. A new mother must learn this out of necessity. To multi task while driving is the ability to control the speed & direction of a vehicle, while being fully aware of what is happening on the rest of the road, and trying to anticipate what might happen. Some drivers believe that the skill of multi tasking while driving is eating, drinking coffee, applying makeup, window shopping, talking on a cell phone, while changing lanes, gears and radio stations. These dangerous habits would be better substituted by thinking about where they want to go on the road, what is the best way to arrive, driving responsibly with awareness that there are other vehicles on the road whose drivers have their own agenda.

One important point about situational awareness is that those who lack it may be not only a danger to themselves, but also a danger to others. What will happen to a child whose mother isn’t aware of the child’s needs? What would happen in traffic if all drivers thought in only forward mode? What would happen if we perceived all who approached us as an enemy and reacted violently toward them with no reason?

Situational awareness also can be used to maintain our own physical and mental health. A doctor will often tell a patient to pay attention to his own body, repeating this obvious reminder because it is too often ignored. When an obese or thin person looks in the mirror, do they see the truth, and do they act on what the objective truth of their condition? If a person experiences constant headaches, do they examine their life and try to discover if the cause is mental, physical, environmental, or do they just take a pill to cover up the pain?

There are three stages of situational awareness – the perception of situation, the placing of the perceived factors on our own personal scale, and the decisions we make about our actions in this situation which usually involve projecting any situation into the future – how will this situation play out.

Several factors figure into our ability to react appropriately to any given situation. The first is experience, the second is knowledge, the third is processing velocity, and the fourth is the degree of transparency of any situation.

In the absence of professional counseling, many people are unable to apply the concepts of situational awareness to their own life choices, and many people subvert the obvious. We know by information received from the outside world, from our own experience that smoking is bad for us, yet we may carry on with an addiction like this in spite of all information that it is harmful. Overeaters continue to overeat and either admit that they do this, or they delude themselves about what and how much they eat, yet continue to make unhealthy choices. Even in illogical situations like this, situational awareness plays a part. We may consider our life to be valueless so we eat, drink, & smoke to comfort ourselves while we pass the time. We all die sooner or later, and if the future doesn’t look particularly bright, we chose to indulge ourselves along the way. This bleak perception of the future is particularly prevalent in the young. Negation of the future is a common state in adolescents and young people – they don’t often see themselves as capable of great things or their world to be heading for great things – so why try, better just enjoy the ride – even if it leads to their own destruction. It is particularly damaging when this nihilistic approach is carried into full adulthood. These people may or may not be aware of the state that their negative beliefs have brought them to, but willful self-destruction is not a tenet of life – it is anti life.

Our society doesn’t encourage people to think for themselves, nor to examine the causes of things that happen around them. Governments know that people are more easily controlled if they are accustomed to being told what to do. This creates a situation in which people often don’t know how to react unless someone else tells them. People feel comforted when they can easily categorize an event into a belief box that allows them to assimilate the event, and righteous when that particular box is a widely held belief in their own culture. They feel unified and validated even if they are mistaken, having lost the personal skill of judging information for themselves. They are not encouraged to be aware, to think for themselves, to act of their own volition, to trust their own reading of a situation and act appropriately on what they know. When people have lost situational awareness their own survival is at risk. Many people live their lives so entangled in petty dramas that they lose sight of who they are, where they are going, and how to get there. Like the Tarot fool with one foot off a cliff, they don’t realize that their lack of attention to necessary things has severely compromised their survival.

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