In the book Deep Survival, author Lawrence Gonzales tells us about a group of snowmobilers who were warned not to "Hammerhead", or go charging at full throttle up any slopes for fun because of the extreme avalanche danger. They did it anyway and two of them died in an avalanche. Why did they do it knowing they would probably die? Because they had hammerheaded hundreds of times before and had a great time and never once died. So their minds bookmarked that good feeling, their autopilot took over, ignored the warning as unimportant, and they charged up the slope to their death.
But leaving an autopilot on can be only irritating and self defeating instead of deadly. I was once forced to take a job in a military family practice clinic to make ends meet. Patients would be checked in at the desk, given their medical records and told to go three yards down the hall, put the record in a rack on the wall for the screeners and have a seat. Simple directions, right? Yet anywhere from 10 to 15 times a week, the staff would find patients wandering all over the building completely lost. And they would always say the same thing. "The girl at the desk told me to find my doctors office and put my records in a rack on his door". Which the girls denied saying. So I devised a foolproof solution. I laid down colored tape on the floor leading to the rack on the wall. The patient would be told to follow the tape. When the patient got to the end of the tape and looked up they would see a sign in front of them telling them to put the record in the rack above the sign. How could it fail?
It didn't make the slightest difference. The same number of people were still getting lost. Then, one day, I came in off-duty to get a payroll problem fixed. While I sat in the waiting room, a Signal Corps major came in, got his records, and I listened as the desk clerk told him to follow the line on the floor to the records rack and there place the records. He glanced down at the line, then up the hall, and turned from the desk. I took off my badge, got up and followed him. Never again did he look down. He sailed right past the rack to the end of the hall, looked around, and headed down the peds hall to the back of the building where he stood there looking around in confusion. Putting my badge back on, I asked him if I could help him. He looked at me and said "The girl at the desk told me to follow the colored line on the floor to my doctor's office." (She didn't say any such thing) I looked down and asked him "You followed a line on the floor back here? What line would that be?" He looked down and for the first time realized there was no line. This field grade military officer, a college graduate serving in the most technically complex branch of the Army, had been unable to follow such a simple direction as "Follow the line on the floor". I have never seen such a look of utter bewilderment on any officer's face. He had no idea what to do or say. I took him the long way back to the desk, pointed out the line, told him to follow me , we took three or four steps to the rack where the line ended and showed him the sign. As I expected, he gave a forced laugh and said "Oh,I must have walked right past it. Ha Ha."
It would be easy to dismiss this man as just an idiot who couldn't follow simple directions. It would also be wrong. He was a very intelligent man, accustomed to following directions. So, why didn't he? Because his autopilot was set to seeing his doctor. That's why he was at the clinic. His autopilot disregarded everything else he was told because it was set to take him to his doctors office. Nothing else mattered. Not even the fact that the autopilot didn't know where the doctors office was. Every other lost patient made exactly the same mistake.
It is not my purpose to denigrate autopilots. When we have simple, repliticious tasks to perform, they're excellent and useful tools. The lesson to be learned from others here is, Be Aware Of Your Autopilot! Don't unconsciously allow it to take over when you have decisions to make that are life or death in nature, and that includes when we're driving, operating dangerous machinery, hunting, swimming, or any other activity familiar to you where you or someone else could suffer from your autopilot not knowing that the situation isn't what it thinks it is while your conscious mind is thinking of something else.
