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Building situational awareness isn’t just for super-spies

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Mon, Feb 20, 2017 (2 a.m.)

From James Bond to Sherlock Holmes, the silver screen’s masters of deduction show that simply paying attention can make you seem psychic. If you see threats coming, you can neutralize them. If you anticipate disasters brewing, you can avoid them. Think extreme survival instincts.

Real-life agents of law enforcement and covert ops are trained to have heightened senses and quick reaction time, but it’s useful for anyone to know how to hone situational awareness. It might help you avoid everyday chaos or keep you safe from real danger.

What is situational awareness? It’s knowing what’s going on around you. If you’re driving, it’s scanning the road for hazards and anticipating the actions of other cars. If you’re at a party full of unfamiliar faces, it’s making sure you don’t get isolated with someone who makes the hairs stand up on the back of your neck.

Why is it important? Research shows that drivers who are distracted by complex tasks other than driving are at three times greater risk of being in a crash. A leading cause of accidents in aviation is not equipment malfunction nor terrorism but Controlled Flight Into Terrain, a phenomenon wherein pilots don’t even realize they are flying directly into an obstacle until it’s too late. And the U.S. Department of Defense’s Sexual Assault Prevention and Response Program emphasizes situational awareness as a prevention tactic for both potential victims and bystanders who might intervene. These are just a few examples of the utility of situational awareness.

What exactly is a ‘gut feeling’? That tingle in your stomach that you’re in danger is worth listening to. People subconsciously notice signs of danger — seeing something out of place or feeling a sensation of being followed. Combining the visual of a stranger who appears menacing and the resulting rush of fear, your brain pushes you to flee.

What dampens your awareness?

• Fatigue

• Drugs and alcohol

• False sense of security

• Distractions inside your head or in the environment

Humanity’s situational awareness has arguably decreased. Back in the frontier days, people worried about attacks by wild animals or outlaws, so they were attuned to sensory cues. Now, a lot of eyes are glued to smartphones, said Fred Burton, a former counterterrorism agent for the U.S. State Department and chief security officer for strategic intelligence company Stratfor. He said many people have a false notion of safety, walking around with their heads buried in their devices. “Look at people at bus stops or airports. You can see for yourself how totally unaware of their surroundings they are.”

What controls sensory awareness? The reticular activating system (RAS) is a network of neurons and neural fibers running through the brainstem. While one portion plays a role in sleep and waking, breathing, the beating of the heart and other essential functions, another connects to the cerebellum and the nerves that drive our senses. The RAS is what allows us to consciously focus our attention, which is key to situational awareness.

How is RAS used to scan a scene?

Once the conscious choice is made to pay attention, the RAS switches off filters that keep your senses from being overwhelmed. Heightened senses allow you to hear and see better and clearly feel instincts that can steer you from danger.

Imminent Threat Solutions (ITS), an online platform for survival training, says the key is knowing an environment’s baseline: “what things look like, sound like and feel like when nothing much is going on.”

Think of Las Vegas in terms of neighborhoods. Downtown moves, sounds and feels a certain way on a typical day, as does the Strip and outlying communities. The combination of activity and sensory information determines an area’s baseline, and it’s what your brain uses to pick up on disturbances.

It’s important to establish a baseline of activity when in a new place. “It’s not being paranoid or obsessively concerned. It’s simply increasing your focused awareness for periods of time when you could be — from the law of probability — more vulnerable,” Burton said.

Also, keep the following in mind:

• Concentric rings of disturbance: Imagine a field where animals are grazing. When a predator appears, the prey reacts, alarm radiating out from the first set of eyes to spot the threat. It happens in urban settings, too. If you’re in a nightclub and a fight starts, there’s a ring of disturbance from the incident that might prompt you to leave — or approach for a better look.

• Practice makes perfect: The more you get in the habit of noticing disturbances, the faster and better you’ll be at interpreting them. It’s a process of constant monitoring and assessing potential threats.

• Take note of exits when you’re in public places such as shopping malls or movie theaters.

• Take mental snapshots of what’s happening around you so you’ll notice objects that seem out of place.

• If you sense you’re being followed, jot down descriptions of the person’s appearance, car model and plate number.

Avoid making these mistakes

• Not paying attention: If you’re too distracted to monitor the baseline, you’ll miss cues that something isn’t right. So, train your brain to pay attention. Conscious effort will eventually transition to constant subconscious monitoring. You’ll condition yourself to notice more and react faster.

• Normalcy bias: Our desire for things to be OK can sometimes override our survival instincts. We might sense danger but ignore it by rejecting the stimulus that suggests a threat. It might feel like paranoia at first, but if you spend time looking at every baseline disturbance as a potential threat, you’ll learn to sort out real risk.

• Focus lock: Distractions can be so compelling that they draw all of your focus, blinding you to other stimuli. “The smartphone is the single most effective focus lock ever invented,” according to ITS, so leave it in your pocket if you’re transitioning from your office to your car.

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