Death on the highway...

I wish I could type in the car... the boredom induced by the same stretch of I-5 must cause my brain to generate ideas to combat the (new) sensory deprivation. Instead, I am left with the remnants of an idea, which I will now have to recreate from the central theme.

If I could type in the car, I bet I would still be a safer driver than half of the people on the road--Occasionally it strikes me that people have become rather detached from the reality that they are steering a giant metal projectile down the road... that they are literally feet away from death at any time (I am referring to being on the freeway, of course. Not city streets--that is just unsafe for pedestrians). The only thing dividing the vehicles are the lines... a tenuous barrier that relies upon the assumption that both yourself and the person next to you agree that you will not cross it when you are occupying the space adjacent.

I wonder how these people mentally represent their driving... I assume that they have placed it into the category or functional definition of "driving" and have forgotten the physical reality of it. It is similar to the idea that as something becomes proceduralized, they lose conscious awareness of the components that comprise the whole. In this case, a part of "driving" that is lost in the simplification is the reality of their situation.

A side note... although I would describe lines on the street as an abstract and artificial notion that delineates division... I have seen crows on the road not fly away when a car approaches them and they are near the line. Instead, the crow will just make a couple of hops to the safety of the space on the opposite side of the line from the vehicle. It surprises me in two ways: 1) crows have a capacity to understand that the line is a barrier that the vehicle will not travel outside, and 2) even a crow will trust that a person will follow the social contract, adhering to the vehicular laws, and not make them one with the ground.

I would postulate, following these two observations, that this behavior by crows is perpetuated by the belief that the division is tangible--that the line is a physical barrier that vehicles will not cross. I am basing this upon the limited cognitive capacity of the obsidian avians. The crows have made observations of vehicles traveling on roads within the lines with enough frequency to make a rule that the vehicles must travel in the lines (which is true most of the time). What a surprise it must be if a person were to drive off the road, through the lines, in order to flatten it.

I cannot see into other people's minds, but I would venture that people eventually believe the lines to be a barrier, in a similar manner to the birds. Without counterfactual evidence to refute this idea, people apply this heuristic (that cars drive in the lines) and feel safe.

Of course I am not saying to be scared while driving... I am just stating that people seem to be mentally divorced from the physical reality of driving. This is more than likely a fantastic thing, since it allows people to focus on staying in the lines (which, of course, is the only place that a car travels... caw).

I never did get to my idea I gained while driving... it was on citizen journalism as news. What is the division? My great idea that the division is money... but I won't say more lest I take away the impact.