The World Beyond Your Head: On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction

by Matthew B. Crawford

You learn things from others by reading books, having conversations with other practitioners, or watching tutorials on YouTube. Gary Klein has famously studied the decision making of firefighters, and discusses their ability to discern when a building is about to collapse, allowing them to get out in the nick of time. Klein emphasizes their ability to integrate subtle sensual data and recognize patterns. But as far as I know he does not address the role of affect, nor the role that language plays (on my account) in priming the integration of affect with perception and action. Presumably, the more experienced firefighters try, at least, to describe to a beginner the peculiar sequence and combination of sights, sounds, and feelings that precede a building collapse, so that the beginner knows what to be alert to in the chaos of a burning building. If my hypothesis is correct, such explicit instruction would be an important preparation for the establishment of those perception-action-affect circuits which, once integrated, become the basis for high-level performance.