Unthinkable_ Who Survives When Disaster Strikes - and Why - Amanda Ripley [119]
But Langford is a true believer in the brain, and it gives him enough hope to go on. “The brain is so powerful. Imagine what we can practice! Everything.” We can all become excellent drivers, Langford insists, but we have to change our brain’s programming. It’s not productive to tell drivers how to get out of a skid—just like it’s not useful to tell people to remain calm in case of an emergency. In a life-or-death situation, your brain needs subconscious programming, not just vague advisories.
So Langford takes students of all ages, some of whom have never driven before and some of whom have been traumatized by horrible car accidents, out on a course at MasterDrive and puts them into a skid, over and over again. In a safe environment, he re-creates the feeling of losing control and teaches the students to recover. MasterDrive students spend twenty-six hours behind the wheel of a car; in most states, the requirement is less than ten hours. They learn crash-avoidance techniques and how to dial up and dial down their personalities to cope with what’s happening on the road. Five thousand kids come through the Colorado locations each year. Some wet their pants or freeze up behind the wheel, which, in Langford’s mind, just means the training is sufficiently realistic.
Like Rescorla, Langford understands that realistic practice brings out our faults and then makes us stronger. As a young race-car driver, he read about the power of visualization techniques to improve performance. “So I started pretraining my brain to learn a track at the subconscious level.” He would visualize going around the track again and again. Now he helps race-car drivers do the same thing, with the car jacked up so that they can turn and lean and brake at the right moments. Like the police and military trainers in Chapter 3, he teaches drivers to breathe, too, especially when they go through high-speed turns, the most dangerous part of the track.
To experience Langford’s hands-on training, I visited the MasterDrive clinic outside of Denver, Colorado. Langford was wearing all white—white slacks and a white short-sleeved shirt with MASTERDRIVE over his heart. We sat in a small office overlooking the track, and Langford began to talk. “If you need water or anything, let me know,” he said, “because I have a tendency to not stop.” Then he stood up at a dry-erase board and sketched out a flowchart of how the human brain processes information. “Skill is my ability to do something automatically, at the subconscious level. I don’t have to think about it. It is programmed. How do I get that? I do that by repetition, by practicing the right thing. The only way you learn it—on a response level—is to program it.”
Langford has learned about how the mind works through formal and informal study of brain research. In the past decade, scientists have begun to understand just how malleable we are. “The ability for change is phenomenal,” says Jay Giedd, chief of brain imaging at the child psychiatry branch of the National Institute of Mental Health. Throughout our lives, the geography of our brains literally changes depending on what we do.
Abilities we think are strictly innate almost never are. Most men, for example, tend to have slightly better spatial reasoning skills, and women have slightly better verbal skills. The stereotypes take over from there. But as with our fear responses, the room for improvement is bigger than the gaps. In an experiment at Temple University, women showed substantial progress in spatial reasoning after spending an hour a week playing the video game Tetris, of all things. The males improved with practice too. But the improvement for both sexes was far greater than the