Glenn E. Meyer said:
Vanya - there's a large training literature on how to give people these abilities. You are correct - they clearly point out that realistic training gives people automatic schema for emergencies. They find it in fire training, piloting, military, etc.
Yes, of course there is... but what I'm also trying to point out is that having "automatic schema for emergencies," which is largely a matter of training
responses -- as you put it, "thorough learning and reps" -- is just one part of a picture which ought, for civilians, to include training in everyday
perceptual skills, in much the same way that drivers can be trained in "attention-paying" behaviors like keeping their eyes moving, scanning well ahead on the road, etc. Many (most?) people don't choose to train as if they lived in a war zone, nor want to meet the world with that mindset; but there are specific "attention-paying" abilities and skills which can be cultivated in order to build an effective everyday level of situational awareness...
It's not mystical or ESP or the Force - just cog. sci. !!
No sixth sense based on the unknown - just trained use of what we have. For example, it was figured out how outfielders catch baseballs hit to them. Is that mystical?
Good grief! Of course it isn't. I'm a bit bewildered that you'd read anything of the sort into my posts. I'd never insult you -- or other experts in this stuff -- by suggesting you're not perfectly well aware of the literature in this field... other people may not be, however, and that Times piece seemed like a good starting point.
It's common -- for example, in "what did I do wrong?" threads in this forum -- for people to point out that if the person had been paying attention, he/she could have avoided the situation entirely. So what goes into "paying attention?" How do you get better at it? My reason for starting this thread was to get some discussion going that might be useful to others who are less well versed in this stuff, and get people thinking about the
non-mystical (cognitive, emotional, physiological, what-have-you) factors that go into what we loosely call situational awareness.