My Kingdom for a horse

So driver behaviour featured in a recent post on being inconsiderate and I am begining to feel that I might have it in for vehicles or more specifically the way some people drive (not me of course like everyone I know "we" are good drivers)

To move on from the idea that people are just generally incondsiderate in cars and assume for a moment that most people are decent human beings then the question arises why do people behave the way they do in cars.

Brain power strikes me as a key determinant, no I am not insinuating that people are thick it is just a couple of things we have inherited presumably make driving more difficult.

Firstly speed of decision making which manifests in hesitant driving potentiall especially around intersections and the like.
So people have evolved to travel around at say a maximum speed of about 35km (which is Olympic sprinter speed) and mostly at about 5km (lesiurly walking speed) Therefore dealing with things coming at you at 50 - 100km must present a challange.
On the other hand we see tennis players and cricketers etc facing balls traveling at over 100km and they are able to deal with it? But they do it by reaction rather than analysis. The part of our brain that deals with reaction is the amigdala and is buried deep in our brains and the "oldest" part of the brain. This is also our watchdog the bit of the brain that makes you flinch at an unexpected noise or close your eyelid in time to protect your eye from an incoming partical. It is the "act first ask questions second" part of our brain. You know from your own experiance that the thinking part is much much slower.
For example if you have ever been to a scary movie and flinched at a sudden sight or sound that is our friend amigdala in action the fact that you relax again and don't run out of the theatre is our slower but smarter thinking brain taking over.

So the point is we all make decisions relatively slowly, admittedly some people are faster than others but what a car does travelling at higher than walking speeds is make this slower process visable. While some of the time we rely on learned responses such as changing gear a lot of what happens on the road is constantly changing so we have to think it through not merely react.

Next time we see someone being indecisive on the roads lets assume that they are getting to it as fast as they can its just that sometimes good decisions take time.

Next post, why some people drive in a very sequential manner, but this one is long enough for one day.

Health or Lack of it

So my grandmother is 92 (or maybe 93 I forget to be honest) and I have been fortunate to have her as part of my life.
Unfortunately she has gall stones something I know about as I have had them too.

For those who do not know about them the salient points are that it is very very painful when they "attack" you and the treatment is relatively straight forward in that it is day surgery to have your gall blader removed, something that you can live happily without.

And there is the problem for my gran, "day surgery" which no matter how routine etc is still surgery and involves a general anestethic. It is unlikely that this would go well for my gran and so unlike me she is having to live with this issue.

Your gall bladder comes into play when you eat, specifically fats and so if you don't eat you don't get the very painful attacks, or more usefully if you don't eat fat you don't get it. This was the way I managed the condition until my surgery I would only eat things that had 2% or less fat content which by trial and error I had discovered was a level my system could tolerate with out anoying my gall bladder.

A variation on this has likewise become my grans solution unfortunately this means she isn't eating very much and losing weight which in the end could potentiall kill her.

The reason for this discussion is a thought I had about the short term benefits of being healthy as we routinely ignore this on the basis that any health issues associated with our current bad behaviour will manifest in the future.

The thought is this, what if you are not healthy enough to stand the treatment and therefore you die of a cureable condition, wouldn't you feel at the minimum a bit dumb. So are you healthy enough to survive getting healthy?