TIM BOUCHER RAW!

I recently finished Scott McRedie’s “Balance: In Search of the Lost Sense,” a smart analysis of something most people take for granted in their bodies, the vestibular system. (Also just saw the movie Vertigo, coincidentally, though I didn’t make it all the way to the end…) Among many highly relevant and interesting themes in the book, the one which caught my attention and imagination most fervently relates to sensory illusions in aviation:

Because human senses are adapted for use on the ground, navigating by sensory input alone during flight can be dangerous: sensory input does not always accurately reflect the movement of the aircraft, causing sensory illusions. These illusions can be extremely dangerous for pilots.

In other words, you can end up piloting a plane in less-than-ideal conditions: darkness, fog, cloud – and think everything’s cool, but suddenly discover that your orientation relative to the horizon has inverted. You’ve flipped upside-down completely, or you’re angling off in a direction which will take you into a perilous downward spiral – all the while your internal mechanisms have been telling you everything is A-OK, peachy-keen, hunky-dory.

In Air Force training, evidently, they use something called the Bárány chair to actively teach prospective pilots that they simply can’t always trust their senses while in the air, because their senses were not designed to function in such an environment. For example, you might be spun about rapidly in the magic chair with your eyes closed, and then halted and asked what direction you’re spinning in: at which point your brain is likely to register, based on the functionality inherent within the vestibular apparatus, that you’re rotating now in the opposite direction when in fact you’re entirely still.

In this way, a pilot is trained to rely on sensory data inputs from his or her flight instruments (for which pilots need to attain a separate instrument rating in addition to their license) – but it is allegedly very hard to get pilots to trust something which runs counter to what their organic sensory organs are telling them to do. This is where things like the Sperry Gyro-compass and the autopilot function which such instruments allows come into play.

It occurs to me that the situation described vis-a-vis the vestibular system of an individual versus the information coming in from an “objective” instrument is somehow akin to a lot of what happens in regular life – nevermind just when you’re up in the air fooling around in an aeroplane. You spend so much time getting good at trusting your instincts and your intuition only to be lead into situations where your internal instruments may not be adequately built to handle the load. How do you know you’re in one of these situations, experiencing the mundane equivalent of an aviation sensory illusion, about to spin to your doom? If the analogy hold, you simply don’t. You need the outside objective information from some other source to tell you that you’re about to crash. And then it’s a matter of being able to trust those instruments – in whatever form they come – to give you accurate readings when you need them the most.

Experimenting a little here and there lately with meditation. Nothing strenuous, nothing very disciplined. But it occurs to me, that maybe there is some extra-ordinary sense one might be able to develop internally, something which bridges the gaps and failures we butt up against in our instincts, intuitions and prior experiences, something which can be created as an internal or supra-personal mechanism to offer accurate readings in those situations when we need it the most. But it’s a matter of, first of all, building or tuning into that mechanism, and then secondly learning to actively trust it when its signal conflicts utterly with what our “gut” or whatever else we’ve been relying on to navigate tells us.

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