When pilots’ senses glitch midflight, the results can be fatal.
, PopSci explores the relationship between our brains, our senses, and the strange things that happen in between.pilots can navigate through cloudy and foggy conditions. They’re trained to do this. Substantially lowered visibility leaves them needing clarification and direction, and for that their instruments are essential. But in very rare cases, disagreement between their sensory experiences and reality can spell disaster.
It is the way our brains are wired that can cause such a chaotic scenario. To traverse our world, we rely on several different senses. The strongest cues are visual. There is also the somatosensory system that senses temperature, pain, and, in this case, pressure, as in the “seat of the pants” feeling of being pushed down into your plane seat when the aircraft gains altitude. And then there’s the neurovestibular system.
“Oftentimes, one given sense that has the most precise information will dominate perception,” says Fischer. “This kind of thing happens all the time with vision and audition, like when you try to judge the location of something based on hearing it. The signals coming from the front of you can be perfectly identical to those coming from behind you if you make those spatial judgments based on sound.
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