The first step in dealing with narrowing attention is to be aware that you are vulnerable to it happening as your stress level rises. My associate suffered from auditory exclusion, not to mention a whole host of other stress reactions he describes in vivid detail. The forensics evidence revealed the assailant had shot his car six times. He man shot his police car multiple times, though he, himself, only remembers hearing one shot.
One night, while sitting in his police car, he was ambushed by a deranged man with a shotgun. He shares a story during my classes that drives this point home. One of my teaching associates, is a firefighter, EMT and former police officer. Police officers often report that under stress of a gun fight they are unable to recall how many shots were fired because they did not hear them. In some cases, when the stress is severe enough, the hearing receptors in the brain may shut off completely. It also led the researchers to conclude a person intently focused on something visual could have diminished hearing. This led the researchers to conclude that a person intently listening to audible cues, like a radio or cell phone, could have diminished visual performance. Tunneled hearing led to diminished vision. When the researchers performed an experiment to tunnel the hearing, the performance of the visual control center decreased. Turns out, focusing on something intently led the audio cortex to turn down the volume. Tunneled vision led to diminished hearing. While the vision was being tunneled, the performance of the audible control center decreased. But a completely unexpected event occurred. The experiment was designed to tunnel vision – and it did.
#TV SCREEN TUNNEL VISION SERIES#
Researchers at Johns Hopkins University ran a series of audible and visual tests on human subjects, measuring the loss of acuity while engaging them in activities designed to narrow attention.
The fixation on a single conversation or a single sound prevents you from hearing other things. When hearing is tunneled, you can miss hearing other things happening around you.
Many things happen in the peripheral vision that will be lost when vision is tunneled. When you are suffering from tunneled senses your situational awareness is vulnerable because you are likely to miss important clues and cues. For hearing, it means your audible attention can be focused on one source of sound, like a person talking to you face-to-face or text messages on your phone, or a siren of an approaching engine. For vision, it means your visual attention can be focused on one small geographic area of an emergency scene or one task being performed at a scene and you miss seeing things in your periphery. All your senses can become tunneled when you are stressed. Tunneled senses more accurately depicts the results of stress. It’s a little more complex than I had realized. While I have often heard the term used throughout my tenure in public safety – and having used it many times in my early years as an instructor, I never realized that the term tunnel vision does not accurately reflect what happens under stress. Let’s explore the concept of tunnel vision.Įarly on in my journey into neuroscience I learned something about tunneled vision.
#TV SCREEN TUNNEL VISION HOW TO#
But he never really told us what it was, how we get it and most importantly, how to avoid it. When I was a new recruit, I vividly remember my training officer telling us ‘ don’t get tunnel vision.’ He said it with such conviction that I knew it was important. In this segment, I’m going to discuss tunnel vision. If you try to process the meaning of all the audible and visual inputs, you may find yourself on the fast-track overload. While stress-released hormones increase arousal of the senses, the brain struggles to process all the information coming in. In the last segment I talked about the positive and negative impacts of hyper vigilance and its impact on situational awareness. Welcome to Part 5 of my discussion on stress.
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