Driving Drives The Driver
The Hypothesis:
The amount of stress-free driving a person does regularly is directly proportional to the speed of her decisions in life.
An awesome epiphany struck me while driving one day. I thought this is usual, I always get awesome ideas when I am driving. This led to yet another awesome epiphany “What causes my mind to come up with these great insights when I am driving?”. This got me thinking about the correlation between driving & focused critical thinking.
Our life is full of distractions from our devices, people around us, our worries and what not. We are kind of craving for distractions. Daily life is so full of stimulation, that taking time out to concentrate on that one unfinished business has become impossible. Deference has become a way of life — Defer until you are forced to attend to it. We keep numerous unfinished tasks, undecided things in our mind and we defer them for a later time. There may be a rationale for this. It can be so because we reached the point of fatigue when thinking about these or we just did not have enough data to reach a conclusion. When these loose ends lurk in our memory, our thinking becomes clouded. The mind is under a constant burden of unfinished business. What better time to bring this unfinished business back to the conscious realm of thinking than while driving.
While driving, we are forced to keep these aside and concentrate on one thing: The Road. Our entire concentration is focused on one thing. Very rarely do we get the chance to do this in an everyday busy life. When we are performing subconscious activities like driving, the mind which is not very busy now brings up thoughts that have been raking up in the brain but haven’t reached closure and the brain does not like to keep loose ends. This closure needs focused critical thinking for some time. Driving allows us this focus, that too, subconsciously. When I was at it, I realized that the same is true with running or working out or performing any chore which has formed a part of our daily repertoire.
The downside to physically strenuous activities is that the body gets tired after a while and our mind wanders towards the aching parts of the body. This distraction does not give us the mental silence required for focused thinking. Driving, on the other hand, is much less strenuous. However, you cannot think straight if you are on a new road or a busy road or if you are trying to keep up speed because you are in a hurry to reach somewhere. In these scenarios, the mind is busy looking for oncoming and overtaking vehicles, pedestrians, signs on the road. It does not allow for mindful thinking. Hence, the term I have used in my hypothesis is ‘Stress-free driving’.
While exploring to understand the root cause of this mental phenomena, I came across this definition of Procedural Memory on Wikipedia:
Procedural memory is a type of implicit memory (unconscious memory) and long-term memory which aids the performance of particular types of tasks without conscious awareness of these previous experiences.
How did you learn to drive? By reading a book? Probably not. Of course through practical training with a professional. You followed and practiced a certain set of procedures to move the car ahead, a set of actions to get the car to a halt, procedures to make a turn, etc. You would also distinctly remember your initial driving days, where you struggled to get the sequence and timing of your actions right for a smooth ride. But, after years of driving, do you remember any day from your recent times when you had to first think of the action you were required to do while driving and then take the action? No, it just doesn’t happen that way. Through repetition, all the neural networks responsible for undertaking complex activities work together to automatically produce the activity. So, driving is a subconscious task for you now. Your procedural memory is in action.
Contrary to procedural memory is the Declarative Learning:
Declarative learning is acquiring information that one can speak about.
Life’s hectic, especially in the city. We are busy at work or when we are idle, busy on our phones. Our mind constantly craves for stimulation. It wants something to react to. This is the Declarative system in action.
The declarative thinking system of the mind is at rest while driving your daily route because it is not learning any new facts or trying to bring up facts from the declarative memory. The procedural memory takes care of these motor activities required to take you from point A to point B. The declarative & procedural systems are independent of each other and do not hinder the motor activities majorly unless you reach a point where you begin visualizing your thoughts too vividly. That can be dangerous while driving.
The intention of this post was not to prove the hypothesis I have mentioned at the start. The intent is to initiate a dialogue — a dialogue that would be picked up by a brilliant researcher is some corner of the world who can run a practical analysis to prove or disprove this hypothesis. For now, I would like to leave this loose end in your brain to ponder upon while you are on the wheel.
Photo by Samuele Errico Piccarini on Unsplash
