Saturday, September 3, 2011

You make about four hundred observations for every two miles you travel

Laurence Gonzales in Deep Survival. Page 131.
When you cross a busy street, you make calculations involving speed, distance, time, and so on, but you can't explain how you do it. When driving a car, you make about four hundred observations for every two miles you travel. You have to make about forty decisions. And you also make one mistake. You aren't born knowing how to drive, and you aren't naturally able to cross a busy street. Children can't. They have to be taught. But our culture places such great importance on that type of learning that, by the time you grow up, you don't even have to think about crossing the street. People from other cultures, say Polynesia, might not be able to do that; but they, unlike us, would be able to navigate the open ocean in a raft and hit a tiny island spot on. That kind of learning is important in their culture.

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