It’s a step to the left and then a step to the right. It’s not quite the “Time Warp” that featured in the 1970s rock musical: The Rocky Horror Show.
It’s a little mini dance that people do every day in the streets of Britain. I found myself doing it over the weekend. It’s that moment when you realise that you have lost a sense of what’s around you. A tiny drift away from where you intended to go. Then a step to correct, and look-up and set-off again towards your destination. A wiggle on the pavement.
Maybe this walk didn’t exist before 2006. Well, that is all but in the most exceptional situations. Hand-held devices are not entirely new. What’s much more frequent now is the compulsion to look at the small screen.
The colours, the constant demand for attention, the tickling of our curiosity, the mobile phone has it all. In fact, its dam silly to continue to call our devices “phones.” The primary purpose of these handy devices has long since passed from being able to make telephone calls from any location.
We call them a “mobile”, but the Germans call them a “handy”. An American will call them a cell phone. Given the way we use these ubiquitous hand-held devices, I think the Germans have got it right. The whole essence of the thing is its utility.
Now, if we are fixated with heads down there’s a lot that can go wrong. This has been the source of numerous aviation accidents. Looking up and checking visual references remains a fundamental part of flying. The basics of “see and avoid” are drummed into every new flyer.
On the pavement us poor humans are evolving in a world of every more connected technology. In our heads we have a perception of the world around us as we walk the urban streets. That’s made up of sights, sounds, and even smells. Our brains gather information and then do some spatial and temporal filtering before making sense of where we are and what we need to do to get where we want to go. The eyes, and image processing in the brain are on the top of the list of our normal priorities.
Heads-down attention is drawn to the small screen and away from our surroundings. Staring at the small screen draws us into the content of an e-mail, or a text message, or a cuddly cat picture running around social media. Luckily our other senses are keeping track of the world around us.
The textbook case is where we start to drift in our three-dimensional environment. Not much. It’s a step to the left and not a step to the right. Suddenly there’s a need to correct. Our ever-active brains pick up on the misstep. That’s where our tiny dance comes in and nobody but us may notice.
I’m talking about something that’s almost trivial. Hardly noticeable. However, there are far too many cases where fatalities have resulted from missteps[1]. There’s some evidence that bumping into people and objects is most likely. Slips and falls follow those incidents.
I’ll bet not much is known about the vast number of micro-events like my tiny mobile phone dance. Now, there’s a topic of study for a student of visual perception.
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6034962/
John Vincent 