Connecting Dots That Shouldn’t Be Connected
Connecting Dots That Shouldn’t Be Connected
An Email:
I’m at a hotel, and this morning they evacuated the building! It was about 8:00
a.m., and I was bumbling around getting ready for work, and suddenly there
was a bzzzzzzzzzzzzt alarm and a recording over the speaker in the room:
‘An emergency has been detected in this building. Leave immediately. Use
the stairs. Do NOT use the elevator.’ Huh?
OK, I figured I’d better get dressed and leave. Black shirt, gray slacks … socks
… hm. I only see cotton socks, where are my nylon socks? Oh, here they are.
Wait, these are the short nylon socks, I want the long nylon socks. All this time,
the alarm is blaring and the emergency recording is playing over and over,
telling us to get the heck out of the building. I decided OK, I guess if it’s an
emergency, I can settle for the short socks.
Got dressed, got my purse, and headed for the stairs, never feeling a bit of
fear even though I was being TOLD by a pretty authoritative source that I was
in danger. That struck me as so strange afterwards, as we were all standing
outside wondering what the emergency was. I can be in a plane and feel a
thump, and the adrenaline spurts; but I’m on the 12th floor of a building that’s
being evacuated because of an emergency, and I don’t feel much of anything
but annoyance — I suppose because none of my senses (so easily deceived!)
detected anything that looked, smelled, sounded, or felt like danger? And
even though I was being told there was an immediate danger, it just didn’t
register as danger because my senses were telling me a different story?
Realistically, shouldn’t I have been high-tailing it out of there? And from what
I saw, my reaction wasn’t unique. Nobody was tearing out of their room and
rushing down the stairs. Nobody outside was in their pajamas. It looked as if
everybody had taken the same attitude I had: ‘Yes, I’ll leave, but first I’ll make
sure I have my stuff. First I’ll get dressed.’
(As it turned out, it was a false alarm. Workmen had been digging in the park-
ing lot and hit a water main, causing a small flood, and all the water set off the
fire-detection system. So there really was no danger; but we had no way of
knowing that at the time of the warning.)
Anyway, it just struck me — how much we base our behavior on what FEELS
safe or unsafe, rather than what actually is safe or unsafe, just as you teach
in the course. On reflection, I suppose I’m glad I did what everybody else did
and didn’t go tearing out of there in a bathrobe (would have felt awfully silly
among all those dressed people) … but tearing out of there would have been
the wisest thing to do, had it been a real emergency.
===
Capt Tom’s Comments
Yes, it is amazing. If a smoke alarm goes off in the kitchen, we think: a. it could
be a fire, b. it could be a problem with the smoke alarm, c. it could be something
burning on the stove, d. it could be steam from a kettle. I like the German word
‘vorsicht’ which means foresight, look ahead and see what may be threatening;
in English, we say ‘look out’.
In any case, all the smoke alarm is is an alarm. It is saying, ‘vorsicht’, ‘look out’
and see IF there is something that needs to be avoided; maybe there is and
maybe there isn’t.
But consider a different situation. Your mom has moved in with you, and she
is getting senile. You tell her to stay out of the kitchen because you can see
she is not safe in there. She has taken the lid off the pressure cooker without
releasing the pressure and pea soup exploded to the ceiling.
You know of a situation in which a friend’s aged mother left the burner on when
she was heating cooking oil for frying, and left the kitchen and forgot about it.
The frying oil caught on fire and caused a messy fire in the kitchen. Fortunately
the fire department came quickly, but the cleanup was a problem. The smell of
smoke and the smell of burned things was still in her house when you last visited.
Now she has taken to walking around the house in the middle of the night. You
have been wondering what to do about it. You have been thinking that maybe
she should be in a home for people with Alzheimer’s, but you hate to do that.
You go to sleep with that on your mind. At 2 AM, the smoke alarm goes off.
You call for your mother, and there is no answer.
This is not a situation in which you would be choosing what to put on your feet.
You would picture disaster. You would picture the fire. You would picture your
mother unconscious on the floor. And the stress hormones would be pumping
overtime. You wonder if you smell smoke. You compare what you smell with
what you smelled in your friends house after the fire there. You are not sure;
maybe you DO smell smoke. Now the imagination of fire becomes perception
of fire.
That’s the different, the context. In the first situation, you do mental ‘vorsicht’,
mental foresight and you don’t picture (or perceive) anything all that serious.
In the second situation, you do mental ‘vorsicht’ and you do picture some
very real awful possibilities. Those images of awful possibilities bring you
instantly to action.
You run downstairs, and find noting wrong. It was a false alarm with the smoke
alarm. The perception of smoke started with imagination but became mistaken
for real.
Next question: do you feel stupid or wise to have reacted like that? In the case
you cited at the hotel, if you had gotten outside and found there was a fire or
impending exposing, you would have felt stupid for taking your time. In the
case of thinking your mother had caused a problem but it was only a false
alarm, you might also feel stupid.
But that is all based on ‘Monday Morning Quarterbacking’. You have to make
decision in the real world in real time, and if you action turns out to not have
been necessary, maybe that’s OK. Next time might be different. You don’t know.
So, you do ‘vorsicht’ to try to determine how valid this alarm is. But you really
never know until your mental ‘looking out’ becomes physical ‘looking out’ in
terms of actual examination.
On the plane, you are not in a position to do actual examination to check out
hidden problems. The pilots are. There is really nothing you can do, so why
not let those who can do it, do it. Trust? Well, that’s why you meet them.
How easily we trust must have to do with past experience, in part, very early
experience.
But let’s go back to our examples. The context in which you went to sleep
worried about a safety issue. You knew that in at least one situation, she
had done something risky. The possibility of fire was real.
When you fly, the POSSIBILITY for disaster is real. The probability is
incredibly small. When you do ‘vorsicht’ and do a mental assessment, the
incredibly small possibility should rule the subsequent imagery. But for so
many of us, there is little or no cognitive barrier between possibility and
probability. And further, there is little or no cognitive barrier between
probability and mistaken certainty.
On July 3, 1988, the USS /Vincennes /shot down an Iranian airliner, killing
290 people. George H. W. Bush said, ‘One thing is clear, and that is that the
USS /Vincennes/ acted in self-defense.’ It was soon shown that the airliner
was well within its airway and the attempted cover-up failed.
see:
http://homepage.ntlworld.com/jksonc/docs/ir655-nightline-19920701.html
Psychologists who reviewed this military blunder called it ‘false closure’.
The context led the commander of the ship to mistaken feel that he had
connected the dots indicating the Vincennes was under attack.
When closure takes place, we move from assessment and possibility - or
even probability - to certainty. Usually we have enough information to connect
the dots accurately. But under stress, and with a certain context, we connect
the dots WITH FEWER DOT OR ONLY ONE DOT: possibility. With a certain
context - and with a deficit of ’self-soothing’ - stress builds up and the dot of
possibility becomes certainty by false closure.
Without cognition to stop it, just enough stress produces enough ‘dot-of-feeling’
to produce false closure. We have to consider that this borders on psychosis:
just because you ‘FEEL’ something is true, you do not reach CERTAINTY that
it is true unless you dispose of all cognition that should stand in the way. Though
we can have this happen and not be considered insane, when it does happen,
it is a form of temporary insanity.
I’m sure that I have been on flights totally relaxed in the cockpit while some
passengers in the back believed they were about to die because they
connected dots which did not belong connected.
Being able to start off from a relatively calm state allows us to assess the dots,
and decide whether they really or supposed to connect or not. What we want
to make it possible for you to ‘chill out’ enough that the dots do not get
connected through false closure. Cognition needs to remain in play, and that
is possible only through self-soothing which prevents a rush to connect dots
(in one’s own mind) that really do not connect in the real world.
When dots get wrongly connected, possibility becomes probability and then,
when the stress hormones kick in and cause the feelings you get in real danger,
probability becomes certainty.