[Motofool]

Originally Posted by antiant

........It's called being intuitively aware of your surroundings..........

Excellent post, antiant !!!
I also cover the brake pedal of my wife's car each time I cross a traffic light on green.

Covering the controls (no permanently but according to the traffic situations) save us almost one second of reaction time.
A mental state of quiet awareness (in-the-zone, as Lee Parks calls it in his book Total Control) may save us from a bad crash.

If one looks close, it becomes evident that the very source of many traffic accidents, involving single or multiple vehicles is the absolutely opposite attitude: distraction.

Excluding drugs and alcohol, the reasons to be distracted and partially isolated from the surroundings, visually and mentally may be: worries, anger, cell phone talking, fears, discomfort (pain, cold, hot), day-dreams, etc.

The results are always the same: tunnel vision, impaired recognition of danger and delayed mental processing and reaction.

We ride in an ocean of distracted drivers, who are not responsible for our safety (yes, only we are); hence, we cannot afford to ride distracted.

At least, most drivers around us are anxious and constantly thinking about their financial, work and family problems with no other reason or passion for driving than moving from A to B as quickly as possible.
At worst, some drivers are not even looking forward.

Unfortunately, that mental uneasiness also affect riders, especially inexperienced and young ones, who ride partially distracted at times.
That distraction is evident in many of the motorcycle's crash videos that we watch, where reaction time and response are very poor.

This study explains the complicated processes that happen inside the distracted brain (it is targeted for cell phones, but it is applicable to any other distraction, IMHO) and why so many drivers look directly at us and still their brains don't "see" us:

http://www.nsc.org/safety_road/Distr...te%20Paper.pdf

"Multitasking is a myth. Human brains do not perform two tasks at the same time. Instead, the brain handles tasks sequentially, switching between one task and another. Brains can juggle tasks very rapidly, which leads us to erroneously believe we are doing two tasks at the same time. In reality, the brain is switching attention between tasks – performing only one task at a time.

The brain not only juggles tasks, it also juggles focus and attention. When people attempt to perform two cognitively complex tasks, the brain shifts its focus. Important information falls out of view and is not processed by the brain. For example, drivers may not see a red light. Because this is a process people are not aware of, it’s virtually impossible for people to realize they are mentally taking on too much.

Brain researchers have identified “reaction-time switching costs,” which is a measurable time when the brain is switching its attention and focus from one task to another. Longer reaction time is an outcome of the brain switching focus. This impacts driving performance.

Brains may face a “bottleneck” in which different regions of the brain must pull from a shared and limited resource for seemingly unrelated tasks, constraining the mental resources available for the tasks.

During the vast majority of road trips, nothing bad happens, as it should be. But that also can lead people to feel a false sense of security or competency when driving. Drivers may believe they can safely multitask; however, a driver always must be prepared to respond to the unexpected.

Inattention Blindness – Vision is the most important sense we use for safe driving. It’s the source of the majority of information when driving. Cognitive distraction contributes to a withdrawal of attention from the visual scene, where all the information the driver sees is not processed. This may be due to the earlier discussion of how our brains compensate for receiving too much information by not sending some visual information to the working memory. When this happens, drivers are not aware of the filtered information and cannot act on it.

Distracted drivers experience inattention blindness. They are looking out the windshield, but do not process everything in the roadway environment necessary to effectively monitor their surroundings, seek and identify potential hazards, and to respond to unexpected situations. Their field of view narrows. The danger of inattention blindness is that when a driver fails to notice events in the driving environment, either at all or too late, it’s impossible to execute a safe response such as a steering maneuver or braking to avoid a crash."