Also, the brain sometimes presents useful information like this in a not useful manner.
I am among other things a Private pilot, several years back I attended a seminar on this subject. The presenter was an accomplished pilot and mechanic who owned his own airplane. One day, he had just finished engine maintenance and he went out to fly. Just as he got out to the runway, he got a strong sense of dread, of ‘my airplane is gonna kill me today’. So rather than take off he went back to the hangar to investigate.
He started walking around the airplane, running his hands over the metal, until he got to one specific spot on the engine cowling where his mind said ‘there! Something in here wants me dead’.
So he starts disassembling the airplane in that spot and eventually gets to a thing called an oil separator. It’s a simple device, just an empty box basically. A mixture of oil and air is pumped into it, the oil falls to the bottom and exits through a tube back to the engine, the air goes out the top.
Inside the oil separator he found a little loose bolt. It was right next to the hole that went back to the engine. If he took off, when the plane rotated the little bolt would have been sucked into the engine, causing massive mechanical damage. If he lost his engine on early takeoff that can be a very dangerous accident.
Obviously, he is not psychic. His airplane doesn’t want to kill him. It’s just a piece of metal. But, when he was doing maintenance the previous day, part of his brain remembered that he didn’t secure that bolt correctly. And thus, the brain presented useful information (you didn’t tighten the bolt and it’s going to destroy your engine) in a non-useful way (your airplane wants to kill you).
The moral of the story here for pilots was if something feels wrong, don’t assume it’s just nerves. Look for a reason, look for a cause, trust your instinct.
This isn’t limited to pilots though. Over a million years we have evolved it. It’s the same reason why little noises at night freak you out, because a million years ago when we lived in caves a little noise might mean the saber-tooth tiger was trying to sneak up on you and eat you.
baguettefish@discuss.tchncs.de [bot] 5 days ago
does not apply to people with paranoid schizophrenia and persecutory delusions