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227 - Nerding Out on Vision
About this episode
Scott and Seth dive into Seth's New Year's resolution to become a library regular, sharing insights on their reading habits and the fascinating world of scientific literature. They discuss the evolution of reading research, including eye-tracking studies from the late 1800s that revealed how we process text. The conversation touches on how literacy connects to democracy, the impact of different media on reading, and the nuances of reading fluency versus speed. Their light-hearted banter and deep dives into academic topics make for an engaging listen.
Cars:
Mazda 2
Seth goes to his local library... and Scott loves citations...
We get into the research we've been doing... and loving every minute of it.
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Technical
Too Afraid to Ask
Part
brake pressure
"...I could actually check. The one thing I could check was brake pressure and wheel speed..."
Brake pressure is how hard you press on the brakes to slow down or stop the car. It's important for making sure the car stops safely.
Brake pressure refers to the force applied to the brake system in a vehicle, which is crucial for effective stopping power and overall safety.
Car
Mazda 2
"...OLO way back in the day. First thing I did on my Mazda 2 is I could actually check. The one thing I could ..."
The Mazda 2 is a small car that is easy to drive and park, making it great for city life. It's known for being good on gas, which means you won't spend too much money on fuel. People like it because it's affordable and fun to drive.
The Mazda 2 is a subcompact car known for its nimble handling, fuel efficiency, and stylish design. It has been popular in various markets for its affordability and practicality, making it a great choice for urban driving. The Mazda 2 is often discussed for its fun driving experience and reliability.
Term
ABS
"...I could see if I was causing any lockup into ABS. That car didn't have a, didn't have any way for me to track..."
ABS is a system in cars that helps prevent the wheels from stopping completely when you brake hard, which helps you steer while stopping.
ABS stands for Anti-lock Braking System, a safety feature that prevents the wheels from locking up during braking, allowing the driver to maintain steering control.
Term
autocross
"...I loved the shit out of that for, for autocross. And I don't know how much I well, okay, I did learn about myself that I'm actually kind of bad at braking..."
Autocross is a type of car racing where you drive alone on a course marked by cones. It's all about how well you can control your car and make sharp turns, rather than racing against other cars directly.
Autocross is a timed competition in which drivers navigate one at a time through a defined course on either a sealed or unsealed surface. It emphasizes precision and skill rather than speed, making it an excellent way for drivers to improve their handling and braking techniques.
Term
driver inputs
"...the signs of trackable driver inputs since then. And I realized at any professional level of motorsport..."
Driver inputs are the ways a driver controls a car, like turning the steering wheel or pressing the brake pedal. Knowing how to manage these inputs helps drivers become better at handling their vehicles.
Driver inputs refer to the actions taken by a driver to control a vehicle, including steering, braking, and accelerating. Understanding these inputs is crucial for improving driving performance and vehicle dynamics.
Term
eye tracking
"...when I saw what you showed with, with eye tracking, I was like, that's something that I don't know about..."
Eye tracking is a way to see where someone is looking. In driving, it helps understand how drivers pay attention to the road and their surroundings, which can make them better drivers.
Eye tracking is a technology that measures where a person is looking, often used in driver training and research to understand how drivers focus on different aspects of their environment while driving. This data can help improve driving techniques and vehicle design.
Select text to request an explanation
Oh
Hi, I'm Scott and I'm Seth and we are track walking
Yeah, tonight we're gonna talk about one of Seth's
New Year's Eve resolutions that he's
Really leaning into it's going oddly so far
You one of your resolutions was to
Get a library card and to become so frequent a
Guest and visitor there that how did you put it? I
Don't even remember but but basically I want to become part of the library community like I walk in
I wanted to be like cheers and the librarians be like hey, how's it going? How'd you like that book?
I don't know if I'll get to that point, but that's where that's what I'm going for. Yes and
Judging by the number of
page of
pictures of book pages
with
Like I
edited like I like underlined on the picture
Yeah, you know the outlining tool. It's pretty red. You've you're doing pretty well
Yeah, so I've been going to the library twice a week for the last two weeks. Is that it? Which is it enough?
Yeah, yeah, two Tuesdays and Thursdays because I walk my wife to work in the morning Monday Wednesday and Friday and I go pick her up on
Tuesday and Thursday, but I go early on Tuesday and Thursday
And I stop at the library and she meets me there because the library is only two blocks from her office
Nice. Um
So I go and I browse the stacks and I sign up books and then I sit down and I read
Science periodicals mostly scientific America a scientific American
I just pick through the back issues that are in a stack and find cool stuff
What and I've always been curious because I'm like we're gonna get into it
But what general topics is scientific America covering these days?
Like it really depends like everything anything that could be it's sort of the the popular version of what's being in science periodicals
So so like it's not popular science
It's not popular science. No, it's it's they're they're summarizing important research
Okay, if that makes sense in and important research that
People will be more likely to be interested in like there's esoteric stuff, which they certainly don't get but
They're still trying to make money. So they're doing articles that are interesting
Do they do it well or not?
Yeah, I need to read more geology articles to to see if they do it well because it's the only thing
I have any expertise in that I can be critical about unless they start writing about race cars
um
I have a feeling the peer reviewed research
Uh backlog of motor sport is probably then
Yeah, it probably all gets published in race car engineering and that's it
Yeah, but peer reviewed stuff too like that's that's all proprietary business stuff. I would think
Race car engineering publishes like have you ever looked at that magazine? Yeah
It's where it's the british publication race car engineering
And so I used to be able to find it at Barnes and Noble and they have a bunch of articles that come
This is totally sidetracking the shit out of us, but that's what we do
Um when I used to read it 15 years ago, which is when I would go buy them and and read them
They had a lot of articles that came out of universities in england that were
That were published there. They were probably published elsewhere, but they were like proper academic stuff
Not just not just business stuff. So that was fun and disheartening to read because I I got lost
I uh, I think the publication may have changed in the last 15 years
I've did it. That's that's one of the things that's one of the
Uh, I go on their website fairly frequently and I think that magazine is still at my Barnes and Noble
Because I recall like taking a look at it, but in terms of like
peer reviewed research stuff
I don't recall seeing a whole lot other than like deep dive engineering
Analysis and stuff like that's more of what I see these days
Oh, yeah, they used to have a lot of stuff that had been submitted and written up by, um,
university
Students and university programs as they did research
Um, I enjoyed that back then. I'm she was just enough of a nerd and it just been done publishing my own work
In semi peer review journals that I was like, yeah, this is my world, man
And it's not my world anymore. So well, sorry for the uh,
Sorry for the sidetrack. You're talking about the library
The library so I go to the library. Um, I
I walk up the stairs because up the stairs is uh
Is all the non-fiction stuff
Downstairs fiction lovely great big huge fiction section
upstairs
I want if I want to read about trees if I want to read about psychology if I want to read about
Religion what if you want to read about reading?
If I want to read about reading
I can find a book up there. So I
In the the first time I was there
I was just like looking at the stacks and picking stuff and picking stuff and I saw a book that was
There was about how we read
I didn't take that the first time because I was like this looks too heavy. I want to get fun stuff
So I grabbed a book on algae
And a book on um
Burding I burned through those in in like two and a half days. You're really leaning into your uh retired
retired life here
Yeah, that was that I was
But the the how we read book was sort of you know in my head
And so the third book I took out was was that book
And I thought it would be
because it was supposed to be like a comprehensive history of sort of
Written language and how our brain works with that and then the second half of the book
Which I haven't read yet. It sort of gets into the modern thing where we're bombarded with
Um content different sorts of of print and in computer media and what that does to our brains and
I didn't think it was going to be as technically scholarly as it was
Um, I thought it was going to be like a little bit lighter popular science stuff
Which is more what you find in libraries. Sure
um
But this
How it started it's just like deep dive
It was a deep dive into the history of how we've learned about reading and it turns out the history of how we learned about reading
Initially was the history of what our eyeballs are doing
Um because we didn't have a really good framework for what the brain's doing and we were like it's all about perception reading well
Is about perception and the only way we can track perception is to watch those little eyeballs go back and forth
Yes
um
Because they thought initially they thought good readers
Would have like a smooth eye track across the page
You'd smoothly go across and then you'd reset and you'd smoothly go across
And they confidently wrote like that's what good reading is and this and we're talking
1870s. Yeah
Uh
Yeah, I guess yeah early 1900s late 1800s. Yeah late 1800s early 1900s
most of this stuff the the
The real learning about it started in the 1870s and 1880s
um
And then somebody actually looked at someone reading
Like they watched them reading and they went that's not what's happening at all
Like if you ever watched
I looked at everyone's like no, no, this is how it happens and someone just came along one day
It's like wait. Have we actually like looked at somebody when they're reading
this novel because
because
What we and this this is the common thing on the show like what we think we're doing versus what we're actually doing
Is not the same thing. Yes data, right? We talk about data a lot
And and that was it was all about data the first like 40 years of them learning to read was like
How do we measure this? How do we figure it out?
And
It was terrifying the things that they did to sort of try to figure out how how the eye moved across the page
Yeah, because they didn't have
You know, they didn't have tracking cameras. Obviously nothing digital existed
This was all like clockwork and machines and film and things like that clockwork orange machines
Yeah
And the most the scary the scariest thing that I read about
Is they found a way to physically attach a metal rod to one of the reader's eyes
By creating a little cup sort of like a like a big horrifying contact lens with a metal rod that came out of it
Yeah, so let's let's be good because the first time you told me you said that they did it mechanically
So my brain immediately goes into
Okay, they stabbed somebody in the eye with the needle
That had like a bar that went over here and then like
Made notes on a piece of paper or something like that's what I pictured but like nothing was inserted
Like into the eyeball. However
What was it plaster of paris or something plaster of paris? Yeah, they made this little plaster of paris cup and they polished it
So they report that the readers didn't experience much discomfort
Dude, they were built differently back then I don't know
Sounds terrifying and that was the first time they could really track eye movements
And they done some other experiments before them to to confirm that we don't
Like we don't read letter by letter and we don't actually read word by word. We read chunk by chunk
We look at between like two and five words at a time
And we sort of absorb it and absorb it and absorb it and the amount of time
What they what they ended up measuring was the amount of time we look at a chunk
And where we pause between those chunks and then how we go down and so the smoother reader you are
The the more you go peace peace next line peace peace next line in
And slower readers go little piece little piece little piece little piece little piece next time little piece little piece little piece
back up and look at something else and do that sort of thing. And so they could
actually track what the eyes were looking at and by by tracking what the eyes
were looking at you could see what they thought was the fluency of reading
because they were they were largely measuring the speed of reading and
speed conflated perfectly to fluency in their minds. And so if you could teach
someone to look at something better then you could teach them to read better, the
end. And it was genuinely fascinating because like I was like, oh my God, this
is what Scott has been talking about with eye tracking goggles and things. And
they use the same you'll have to remind me of the terminologies, but they use the
exact same terms that they were using in the late 1800s that they use now doing
eye tracking. Yeah, like 140 years later, they're still using the same
terminology. And so like when they're when you're sending me these clips, I'm
like, like, they're still using this. So there's yeah, largely it's classified
into two categories, gazes and saccades. gazes are the places where your eyes
rest. The duration of that can vary and that can mean a whole lot of different
things. And then the saccades are simply the eye movement between gazes. And
that can be fast, that can be slow. You know, the the distance traveled is a
thing too. But yeah, those are the basics to fundamentals of eye tracking that
we're being used in the late 1800s. That was the first thing they figured out.
And they were like, dude, we nailed it. We don't need to learn anymore. And so it
was really neat because the the whole science of eye movement and the science
of like really measuring eye movement and perception was invented to learn about
how we read because there was a huge push for for literacy and in literacy sort
of was connected to democracy and human rights and all those things. And if you
had a literate public, then you could have a public that worked better voting
and how's that working for us now, Seth? Yeah, it's well, so that was the other
really interesting thing is they talked about the the introduction and we talked
about media before we had that whole show that I did sort of half asked about
a mediated experience. And they talked about the fact that between about about
1890 and the First World War was what we would call the what they were calling
the written period. And so basically all mass media that you could possibly
consume during that time was written. Okay. And post World War One radio started
become popular. So you started to get a whole bunch of media that was also you
could listen to and not have to read. But during that that 25 30 year period,
they said for the first time in human history, people were just assaulted by
words everywhere you went, there was words on buildings on signs, there's
newspapers everywhere, people handing out little cards, like it was just
everywhere and you couldn't get away from it. And that was that was part of
this whole we also need to figure out how and why people are reading so they
can read better. So let's stick some stuff to their eyeballs and measure it.
And yeah, it was it was the whole history of it. And they talked a lot about
how they made the machines, probably in an inappropriate amount about how they
made machines was utterly fascinating.
That's crazy. And, you know, that's it's something that I've been, you know,
learning about over the last year and kind of at the same time, decided to do
start doing some research of my own, fill in the gaps of my knowledge, and to
get a little bit more specific in terms of vision and sports and things like
that. And Seth, I haven't done a research project in a hot minute, let's
call it. And I'm reading articles from research papers that have citations.
And I'm looking at the citations.
You've done a deep dive. You have sent me some stuff where I'm like, how do you
even find these things? This is wild.
My Google foo is pretty strong. Yeah. And I've like I've grazed the surface
because I'm getting, you know, I'm finding some articles I think might be
interesting because, of course, like they'll, on some of these articles,
they'll show you the abstract. And that's, that's what kind of stuff I'm
reading if they have an abstract. And it's like, hey, for access to this, you
need to pay. And it's like, oh, crap. They're going to need a subscription or
something. Do we have to find somebody who's smarter and more connected than
us and like steal their credentials to look at research papers?
Something or, hey, drop us a line at a track walking podcast and see if you
want to sponsor my research. But we're, we're both aware that there's been,
like there's been studies into vision in sports. Yes. Like that's something you
and I both know about because we went on a little bit of a rabbit hole with
those, those shutter glasses about a year ago. Yep. And that topic's come back up
recently. Right. But we've been aware of that. But there's a, there's a huge
difference between like, dude, wear shutter glasses and you'll shoot better free
throws, which is about the depth that you find stuff online generally. And the
actual academic papers that try to quantify if you wear shutter glasses,
what does that do to your perception and whatever other terminology they're
using to actually figure out how to make a better player in sport, because
there's a huge amount of money in sport. Yes. If you can be 1% better.
So the interesting thing, and this was the last article I read, it was actually a
research on the literature that's out there in terms of vision and sport.
And it was able to quantify different training methods into three different
categories. And the one thing it did note that the studies that have been done
really don't have effective blind, let alone double blind studies. The results are
very difficult because some of its skills base, which is fine, but skills and
performance don't all don't totally line up all the time. And so it's hard to quantify
performance in a game or in an individual sports scientifically.
And again, we're talking about vision, not just like strength or tactics or stuff like that.
Yeah. So if you could make a person just use their eyes better,
how do you quantify that? Yeah, how do you quantify like, oh, they actually did better at
this because they can see better. Right. Really hard. A lot of the research I was reading that
does have good numbers is like, is all advertising type research? Like, how do we get people to look
at web pages more? And that stuff has got some really good numbers to it. And it's terrifying.
Yep. I mean, but that stuff's a whole lot easier to quantify. I mean, again, you're looking at
dwell time, which is the duration of a gaze. You've got the number of cicades and the flow
of vision is another thing that they talk about. And of course, I giggle because of course,
marketing has the money to back it up into doing all this research and the motivation to do it,
even if it's a devious, devious one. Yeah. If you don't think you're being manipulated by what you
see research papers, and I guarantee you'll be like, you'll get pissed off at the, at the lengths
people have gone to put your eyes in a particular place and keep them there.
It was interesting. One of the first articles I read was about eye tracking and looking at art
specifically. Oh, that was the first two dimensional eye tracker they made.
They went over that in the book. So the first time, because it had been, it had been,
I'll say one dimension, you could read along a line. Yes, sure. And then they made some guy,
one of the guys who was doing this, the, there was the art critics were like,
this is how human beings look at art. And this dude reading was like, yeah, they're like,
the reason a vase is beautiful is because your eyes slowly go up the curves and track it perfectly.
And this is why architecture is good because it draws your eyes in a line along. So much bullshit.
It's not that. No, and this guy was like, yeah, I think you're all full of shit. I'm going to
invent an eye tracker that can, that can look at your eyes in both dimensions. And he did and
immediately he was like, yeah, we basically just randomly look at shit. Like that was his, his
takeaway was everything you think about looking at art is wrong. Congratulations.
Yeah. The, what the art critics and everyone thought is that you could intentionally create
an image to direct the flow of vision, which is scientifically inaccurate. I think there's,
I think it's the biggest slam a science research paper could, could say.
Yes. Now the one thing that it can do is that it can draw the eyes to certain places.
Yes. But the flow of which and the kind of start and end points vary from person to person.
The other thing that this paper pointed out, which as a driving coach, I immediately like
wrote down and starred is that where the gaze is located. So like the attention to detail
and a certain part of any picture can be heavily influenced by instructions.
You can coach people on art.
You can coach people on, on where to look.
Yep.
So one, one study was done with this, I think an old New York City photograph where I had a big
building in the middle, kind of brighter in the sun and then a bunch, a little bit more shadowy,
but still like on the sides and stuff. And you could see the, you know, the gaze map
all over the place and in terms of like these two different people who, who they shared in
this particular image. And then right after they shared the gaze path of the two people
after they had been giving instructions to seeing if they can see the person in the window.
And all of a sudden those saccades were very short right over that main central building
with very much more brief gazes at each place. And it went side to side, up and down, but it was
all focused on that central building. And so yeah, thought that was interesting.
It was fascinating. Yeah, I did a, did a deep dive and sort of melted my brain on
some of the teachability of art, of art gazing and like what are you try, like if you're teaching
people to appreciate art, what are you actually telling them to look at? That's interesting.
Okay. And I'm not sure they came to a conclusion because if an experienced art critic looked at
pictures differently, but not in a way that you could tell was better.
So it was pretty scientific slam right there. Yeah, it was, it was pretty fascinating. There was,
so that is, it was, if you looked at people who weren't experienced looking at art and you looked
at people who were like a noticeable art critics and you separated those into two groups, you'd
be like, Oh, they look at art differently. But if you mix them all up, there wasn't really a
statistical difference. Like you couldn't clearly pick the art critic out of them necessarily.
The gazes weren't longer in any particular, like in any place. Just no, no, it was, it was,
it was sort of how they worked through an image was different. If you really got down to like how
they looked at different, if they knew something was important, they tended to look at it.
But if you gave them new arts that they didn't know, they were basically statistically the same
as someone who like you had a construction job and didn't look at art at all. So this,
I kind of want to do a whole episode on this because that tells me then that there's the
difference between perception and cognition. Because, yeah, which is, which is what they
were trying to figure out, right? Because perception is what your eyes are doing,
what you are looking at, what you're taking and cognition is the sense your brain makes out of
those images. And that cannot be studied with an eye tracker. Right. And so we, we come down to the
thing that we've, we've done in cars forever. It's like, what can you measure and how useful is that
data to your performance on track? Yes. And no, and good data, I think knows its limitations.
Yeah. So this is what it will show you. This is what it will suggest, but it is not definitive.
No. And if it's, you had some of the, the eye tracking data of Pete
up and I saw some of that and you could see times where he was looking at the back of a car or he
was looking around a car. Right. And you can tell, you can say, okay, he was either looking at the car,
he was looking around the car, but you can't say definitively why he was doing either of those things
or whether or not those things made it, made what he was doing better in that moment.
Yeah. The, not all of us, but many of us have the ability to see pictures in our minds.
Right. And what a lot of really talented drivers, no, not talented, hardworking drivers
that I know, that I know is that they are able to look through a corner that you can't see the exit
or maybe the apex of, but look in that direction and in your mind's eye, see what's, see what your
eyes cannot see to fill in those gaps, which turns out is also trainable. So yeah, it's,
it's wild that you can do that. And we've, I think we've all done that as we learn tracks to some extent.
Any track that has anything, it doesn't even have to have blind thing, just sort of like,
like a track opening up in front of you. You can be completely flat track like Knolla
and there's stuff that opens up in front of you. And when we say we know where the track goes,
some of that is like, I think some of that is cognition. Like I understand if I'm flat here,
there will be track when I'm done. Sure. And some of it is, is visual. Like we visually remember,
if I'm flat through here, I know what the track will look like when I do that. And that's why
it's okay because I understand visually the track will be there the way it is. And one thing that
I personally haven't been able to observe yet is that you can be looking at a thing and the eye
tracker will show that you're looking, say at the trunk of this car, but are you looking at it
in a focused look like as in that is all you are seeing, or are you looking at it with your
peripheral vision, which means that while your eyes are pointed at it, your mind is actually
perceiving what's on the periphery more than what the center is looking at. And I think that there's
a way that that can actually be measured. Yeah, that was one of the other articles that I sent
you that I had read in Scientific American, and they were talking about data speed in the brain.
And they've been measuring. Yeah, this was fascinating.
Measuring data in and out of your head. And they've been doing it for a really long time,
well over 100 years. Like how fast can you take data in? How fast can you take data out?
And you can do that at about, what was it, 10 megabits a second or something like that?
I figure what the measurement was. 10 bits, I think. 10 bits, 10 bits a second.
But that is what you can see now. Now our language is going to break down here because
that is what you perceive, but not what you take in. Like I don't know, there's something in front
of perception. It's what you, it's the information that can be useful to you. Whether it's through
your eyes, through your ears, a combination of those two, like if you start to, if you start
to do different things, you can only take in information so fast, and you can only output
information so fast. Whether you output it through your mouth, whether you output it through
interpretive dance, through your fingers typing, whatever that is. There's an in and out speed,
and we've been measuring this for over 100 years. And everybody sort of exists in a range between
like five and 20 bits per second. What's fascinating to me, and I don't recall the number I'd have to
look in our messages, was the amount of information that is available to us at any given time
is enormous.
It was more than that. If you go, okay, in your range of perception, say that again, you
it was a billion times more than the actual, like the available information to you is a billion
times more than what you're taking in. And they calculated that by going, okay, how many nerve
endings do you have? Because each one of those is capable of bringing in stuff in your range of
vision, like where, what can you see? Like what can your eye perceive? And they can do that looking
at the nerves in the eye, and sort of, you know, if you hold your hand way out to your side, which
I'm doing and Scott can see it, like you can see your hand way out to the side. And you can see
amount of data that is available to you is staggering compared to the amount of data that
you can take in at any given time. And so that's, that kind of speaks to like, you know that there's
that old misnomer that humans only use what like five or 10% of their brains at any given point?
Right. But I think this one kind of disproves that. But two, I think what it also does is that the
primary work of our brains, the primary work that we don't even think about the thing that the brain
uses so much energy on is filtering sensory input. Yes. It is for anyone who wild.
Anyone who goes, Oh, that's bullshit. Imagine a sim racing, a three monitor sim racing setup
covered in text. The matrix screens, right? Right, right. You can only read what you're
focusing on. You can read pretty much anywhere within those three monitors, but you have to focus
on a section in order to read it. You're seeing all of it at the same time, but you're not like,
like you can't read all of it at the same time. And as much as it sucks to say it, that's exactly
what you're doing when you're driving. And there's, I think I've shared that I'm pretty sure I've
shared this before, but they did a study on caloric consumption in a quiet room with a one on one
conversation versus being in a hugely crowded and loud room, having a one on one conversation.
And the caloric, like the number of calories that you use standing like same, same thing
is increased because your brain is simply trying to filter out audio to focus on the one thing.
And so, so think about like you go to Buffalo Wild Wings or like your local sports bar,
right? And you've got all these TVs and you've got these people at the bar. You've got these
things behind you and you're trying to have a conversation. Maybe I don't, I'm not sure that's
why you go to those places, but you're trying to like look at somebody and have a conversation.
And the primary work before you even get to decide what to do about it is filtering out,
all right, I'm only going to, I'm going to focus on this image that's right here. I'm going to try
to filter out everything else so I can hear what this person is saying is effort. Like it is,
that's why it is electrical nerve effort.
That's why I get exhausted in big groups. That's, that's my, that's my new excuse for it is it's
simply too tiring to be in big groups because my brain has to work too hard. I mean, it does.
Or like I said before, like I was, what I sent you a message about the whole thing where you
have to turn the radio down to look for street signs. I know, I always 100% true.
That is not bullshit. That is real and it works.
I always wanted to give my parents shit about that once I grew up, you know,
because my dad, you know, during bad weather or something, we'd have a like one of the little
reading lights in the back is, you know, on road trips and stuff. And he's like, turn that off.
I got to concentrate like as an adult, I'm like, that's bullshit. Like I can see how my windshield
fine, but like it's also processing power. Yep.
Yep. Yeah. It's the more I learn, the more I realize the world's been trying to tell me this
for years. Yeah. And I just suck at listening as you.
Well, I think what's interesting, well, and this is maybe getting into pop culture and stuff,
but like with the sheer amount of information and images and reels and videos and media and,
and, and, you know, music, like all these things that we can take in,
like it's, it's kind of no wonder that some people are just tired of it.
Like it's, it's, it's hard to turn away from it because of how intentionally addicting and enticing
it is again from all the market research, but it's like, it's a thing like mental focus fatigue,
attentional fatigue, like is a thing. But on the flip side of that, there's, there's some,
I read like one and a half research papers showing that it's, there's some really
significant data showing that certain people with ADD, not everybody, but basically everybody who
deals with this has ADD needs a certain level of stimulation to focus. Yes. And so in environments
that regular people would find distracting, their brain actually uses, like uses that extra
processing power to, to sort the rest of that stuff out and that enables them to focus clear.
And so you'll find, and nobody needs to self diagnose themselves with this, but you'll find
people with ADD want to, to have some sort of background noise on when they're trying to read
or trying to study because it actually creates the right environment for them to focus properly.
Yeah. And I've been in enough higher education to, you know, see how people work best and
and I've tried enough things myself that's like, I'm, I'm proud. I've got some level of ADD,
um, but like I work best and the past few weekends I've gone to Barnes and Noble
because and like sitting their coffee section because it's not loud, but there's definitely
activity and there's people talking and I put my headphones on and I listened to very loud music.
But the, and, and here's the caveat for me is because especially when I'm reading,
the lyrics can't be well-defined because if I start listening to lyrics,
the words that I'm hearing interact or interfere with the words that I'm reading.
Right. So the noise and the activity around me is helpful, but the it's, it's, it just can't have
sing song lyrics. Weird, isn't it? Indeed. But I'm, I'm pretty excited about following this,
continuing to follow this rabbit hole down. Um, I've got, and this is again, how my brain works.
I've got sections on my, my note list. I've got my reading materials at the top and it's got my
unread versus my red section and my red has just like a couple lines of like summary. Like this is
kind of what it was about because I know I'm going to kind of forget which article was which pretty
soon. Right. Underneath that, I've got like topics just like range of topics, um, envision and stuff
like that, um, to help me think of the themes and the different aspects of it. And then at the bottom
I've got training and exercises to do. And this is the part I'm super excited about because it's
taking all that information, getting a big picture, synthesis, and then like, what can we do? What can
I do as a driving coach to like talking about gazes and saccades and like processing power
is super nerdy and I'm super into it. But like, how is that going to make somebody a better driver?
And some of it we've already been onto. Um, I've also discovered through some of the research that
there's quite a few, uh,
training things that you can buy, like physical training things for vision that you can purchase
that maybe aren't very applicable to results based science. And maybe that's all I'll say about that.
Cause I don't want to shit on anyone, but at the same time, like,
maybe it'll, you know, it'll make you better at that thing, but it doesn't necessarily translate
into better performance. Right. See, the difference between you and I is that I basically skip step
one and two and think, ooh, what experiments can we do? Sure. I mean, I don't, yeah. And that
should be pretty clear. If anybody remembers the time where I was like, Hey, I think I'm going to
put a three by five card in my goggle and block one eye and drive around and see what happens.
That did happen very quickly. It was just like, I, from like a little thought clawing at the back
of my head immediately to, I should try this. Yep. Let's do it. And so these are different
approaches as to how science gets done. Immediately I was asking in the, in the chat on discord,
how low you can turn the frame rate down on eye racing because it was like, oh, if you could turn
the frame rate down to like, I don't know, like 10 frames a second, the kind of thing that would
make you ill while you were driving. Good. Yeah. You could really do, I would, I would love guinea
pigs. Anybody listens to this one. Let's be my guinea pig. I got so many ideas about things you
should try that may make you barf when you're, you're doing it, but it also may make you a better
driver. So I don't actually know, but I want you to try it. So yeah, I'm, I'm super excited.
I don't need also Scott has better ideas for like real experiments that you can do and like
actually see if they make you better rather than me just torturing you. Yeah. I, I mean,
it's fun to have fun with people sometimes. As long as they're willing participants, you know,
yeah. But yeah, I'm excited. I don't, I was about to say like to have this rabbit hole, but like
this is the whole like this, this is driving. It's like a particular aspect of driving in vision,
but as we've kind of always known, like vision is a huge part of, of the thing. And so
it's, you know, again, part of the perception, not necessarily the cognition aspect of it,
but it's, it's interesting. And like, again, if we can, you know, better learn and understand
how to train it, which got some pretty solid, pretty solid stuff going right now. So I'm excited.
Yeah. And I mean, honestly, this is, this is just an extension for me. This is an extension of
everything I've learned about tracking driver inputs. I've been a like super excited about
looking at driver inputs since I bumped my first AIMSOLO way back in the day. First thing I did
on my Mazda 2 is I could actually check. The one thing I could check was brake pressure and
wheel speed. And so I could see where I was braking. I could see how hard I was braking. I could see
if I was causing any lockup into ABS. That car didn't have a, didn't have any way for me to track
the steering wheel. So like the only thing I could track was the brake pedal and how it was
affecting the car. And I loved the shit out of that for, for autocross. And I don't know how much I
well, okay, I did learn about myself that I'm actually kind of bad at braking and I need a lot
more repetition to learn how to do it better. But I've just been fascinated with the signs of
trackable driver inputs since then. And I realized at any professional level of motorsport, whether it
be motorcycles or cars or airplanes or anything, the tracking driver, driver inputs, rider inputs
is a really, really important, important part of what they're doing and understanding how the
person is interacting with the vehicle. And so when I saw what you showed with, with eye tracking,
I was like, that's something that I don't know about. And if I don't know about it, I definitely
want to know about it. So it's super exciting to me. Yeah. And I sent Tim an article about
pupil dilation as well. And so like, I'm kind of turned out on that right now too.
Yeah. Which, which again, is something that can be tracked. So
Yeah, you could correlate, you know, how, how the eye is moving with, you know, heart rate
and some other stress indicators, because we know some of the stuff that I was reading dealt
with stress indicators and eye tracking. And you can, if you can core can just use how the eyes
are moving to determine stress. And when, when people are not in a good spot, just by how they're
looking at things. So again, that correlates to me with perception, because that was the thing
when I did the break things, like how do I think I'm breaking versus how I'm really breaking. So
and I'm fascinated with where I think I'm looking and how I think I'm perceiving the racetrack
and how, like, what am I actually doing? I don't, I don't know if I can't tell how I'm
breaking, how the hell am I going to be able to tell what I'm actually looking at? That's an
in order of magnitude more complex. And it's, I want to be my own guinea pig, really.
Well, you'll be back in Texas soon. Yeah. So that's going to be a whole, whole thing too.
Yeah. I have four race weekends to really think about, really get in my own head about where
I'm actually looking so that'd be fun. Well, I think that's probably going to do it for us.
We're just being nerds and researching a bunch of. Yeah. If anybody listened to this whole show,
congratulations. That was totally unnecessary.
It's exciting to us, I guess. So, but I mean, that's basically this entire podcast. So it's
yeah, it really is. Yeah, we're at track walking podcast,
discords where we're hanging out, click the link, come say hi. And yeah, I guess come be nerds with
us and nerds or guinea pigs, nerds for motorsport or guinea pigs for motorsport. Like we've
got place for those two. But yeah, thanks for listening. It's going to do it for us this week.
Like, subscribe, share all that good stuff. Sure. I'm Scott and I'm Seth. Have a good one.
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