I'd hate to insult your intelligence and I'm sure
we all know about the French hypnotherapist Emile Coue' who wrote in the
1920s about the programming of the subconscious. But just to jog your memory,
he described the differences between the
conscious and subconscious mind and laid down these rules.
- Firstly, the conscious mind passes all information to the subconscious, which naively believes it.
-
Secondly, the more the information is stressed or repeated the more the
subconscious believes it and
is likely to act on it.
- Thirdly,
the subconscious is the boss. Any attempt by the conscious to go against
the subconscious beliefs
will cause the subconscious to rise up and overwhelm the conscious, even
if it means causing its own death.
Coue' cited an example. If you place two house bricks
on the ground, put a long plank on them, and invite yourself to walk the
plank without falling off, you should pass the test. Fit the same plank
at twenty storeys across two high-rise buildings in zero wind conditions,
and try walking across again. Whether you get half-way there and fall to
your death will depend on how your subconscious is programmed. If as a
result of your experience with the plank on the ground, you have told yourself
you can walk across at any altitude, and you have no fear of falling off,
you will walk to the other side. If you have a fear of falling off but
think you can make it any way, you will probably walk partway, get wobbly,
drop to your knees, and finish the job by crawling across.
If, however, you have a strong fear of falling off
and you have told yourself, "I'll fall off that plank if I try to cross
it," but nevertheless force yourself to do it, your subconscious will cause
one of your knees to buckle, your hand to go numb as you try to grab the
plank, and your body to fall to its death.
The more you try to go against what your subconscious
believes, the stronger the subconscious makes that belief happen, even
to the extent of causing its own death. Such is the power of the subconscious,
says Coue'.
When most of us plan a flight from A to B, we program
our subconscious to get to point B. All our thoughts and expectations are
of a positive nature; we think only about getting there, and work out how
to do it. We rarely plan to get partway there and turn back.
This, therefore, is the reason so many of us push
our way through marginal or sometimes even quite lethal conditions, and
on miraculously arriving at our destination tell ourselves we were stupid
to have done it and there was no real need for us to have tried. We were
lucky this time. Yet, zingo, what happens next time? We do exactly the
same thing again!
When we reach marginal conditions, to the point
where
we should be turning back, our subconscious tells us to keep going, We
are programmed to get to B, and that is where we must try to get. We can't
help ourselves.
All right, what do we do to stop our own subconscious
minds from wiping us out one day in bad weather? The answer is:
we program ourselves to turn back. Before we submit our flight plan,
we look it over for likely turn-back points and tell ourselves, "If I run
into marginal conditions on this flight, I'm going to turn back or land."
That's all we have to do.
Any pre-flight planning that programs the pilots'
subconscious mind not to "press on" when things start to get rough may
well save their lives, the lives of their passengers, and a damn good aircraft
to boot.
Adapted from the Vortex safety letter which was adapted from the Australian Aviation Safety Digest.