Gotta Sleep Sometime

In case I came across wrong...

It is impossible to maintain 100% situational awareness 100% of the time.

As the post title says, you gotta sleep sometime.

There's a myriad of things that can distract you from your greater surroundings long enough to get you killed, and that's just accidents.

Most people when performing a task are involved with it enough to not really be too aware of their surroundings, and what awareness there is gets heavily filtered.

It was once called sense memory.

Sense memory is the shortest term, your senses perceive it, but a filter runs here.  If the filter deems it noteworthy it can bump it up to short term memory, and into your conscious awareness.  You're literally not aware of everything your senses are reporting.

Ever been someplace where something that has been making noise the entire time you're there suddenly shuts down and you suddenly notice the silence rather than the absence of the noise?  That's sense memory talking.

When I was learning this, we dubbed it "the denial circuit".  Because your sense filters aren't very good at discriminating when they've been programmed to ignore things that fit a certain mold.  Your whole brain is not involved in the filtering process.  What this leads to is your senses reporting what they expect to see and not what they're actually seeing.

A person moving around in a public place where you expect people to be moving around can get filtered almost out of existence.  You nearly have to make a conscious effort to notice the background and then you're compromising your ability to perform the tasks you were sent to do.

Catch 22.

This same phenomenon is at work with several eye-witness studies.

You do the best you can.  All we can really hope is these tragedies will make you reprogram your filters to be more aware and perhaps that will save your life.

Me?  Because of the misophonia I spend a lot of time trying to shut my surroundings out.  I'm going to be killed never knowing how if someone decides to off me.