The late-model Ford Escape and I arrived at the intersection in my neighborhood at about the same time. I recognized the driver, a nice guy whose kids play with mine. I brought my Honda CB1100 to a stop and waited. So did he. Which was unusual, because he didn't have a stop sign. No, wait—he's stopped to talk to another one of our neighbors. I gave him about 30 seconds to change his mind and go forward. When he gave no sign of ending his conversation, I let the clutch out and started crossing the intersection.

Naturally, about half a second later, my neighbor started driving forward, still looking back at the person to whom he'd been speaking. I beeped the horn and twisted the throttle at the same time. He came to a sheepish halt about where my right leg would have been had I not accelerated out of the way and waved apologetically.

Think about that for a minute. Although my neighbor hadn't looked ahead for more than half a minute, he naturally assumed that the road ahead of him was clear. Sounds crazy, right? In fact, his behavior was less crazy than it might sound, and chances are that we've all done the same thing ourselves, for reasons that are both inherently biological and completely normal.

If you could see a raw feed of the image sent to your brain by your eye at any given time, you'd be horrified.

The first thing to understand is that our eyes don't see very much. We tend to think of eyes as cameras, but in reality they are biological devices with considerable limitations. If you could see a raw feed of the image sent to your brain by your eye at any given time, you'd be horrified. It's mostly blurry, it has a blind spot near the middle, and it's upside down.

Luckily for us, our eyes are constantly in motion, even when we think we are looking straight ahead. They send several pictures every second to the brain, which then assembles the best and sharpest parts from each picture into a mental image. That's what we see. When you read the print on this page or screen, your eyes are flicking all over that page or screen, assembling a complete picture that you can then read.

Think of an old-school radar screen. There's a bright green line that tells you what the radar is seeing at that very moment, and it sweeps in a circle, continually refreshing the screen. Compared with the human eye, the line is the small area it can focus and see at any given time, and the whole screen is the image we have in our minds.

The human eye isn't really that great when compared to other outstanding eyes in the animal kingdom, such as the ones attached to eagles, some grazing animals, and (wait for it) sharks. But when it's combined with the human brain as an evolved system for hunting deer and the like, it's not bad. The problems start when things happen faster than the eye-brain system can "see." Since the eye is only looking at a very small area at any given time, it's possible that an alien or hugely advanced predator of some type, could actually hide in plain sight by moving quickly enough to avoid the eyeball's motion. (This is part of the plot of Blindsight by Peter Watts, a great book that I can't recommend enough to all of you.)

Luckily for us, the eyeball-tracking aliens haven't arrived—or they have arrived, and they are simply content to sit around and harmlessly make fun of us for being so blind. I can't say for sure, because I wouldn't be able to see them. But there are things that move quickly enough, and are small enough, that we don't necessarily "see" them even when they are right in front of us.

As you might guess, motorcycles fall into that category of things that we don't always perceive even if they are right in our field of vision. A motorcycle approaching head-on from a distance occupies a very small part of a driver's vision. If it's going quickly, it's possible that the eye simply won't get around to looking at it enough to make it "stick" in the brain before it arrives in the driver's immediate vicinity. That part is important because the brain can really only see things that it understands.

Your brain has a sort of visual shorthand for objects. For instance, chances are that you aren't really seeing everything around you right now, especially if you are in a familiar environment. You're just seeing the shortcuts that your brain is placing there to conserve processing power and attention. That's why people become fatigued more easily in foreign countries or really unfamiliar terrain; their brain is working overtime trying to account for all the things that it doesn't normally see. For this same reason, if you don't expect to see a motorcycle or pedestrian during a certain part of your morning commute, your brain will often ignore a motorcycle or pedestrian right in front of you, particularly if they aren't moving sideways across your field of vision.

Alright. Let's take a typical case. A driver is preparing to turn left from a side road onto a main road. There's a GSXR-1000 flying down that main road because what's the point of having something that fast if you don't wind it out, right? So our driver looks left and doesn't see the Gixxer because it's pretty far away. He looks right. Now he looks left again. The bike is much closer, almost on him, but because he didn't see it last time—and this is important—his brain simply discards the Gixxer as a result of his brain not expecting to see it. His brain is already busy doing this discarding for everything from his blind spot to various floaters in his vision to his own eyelashes. What's the harm in adding just one more object?

So the driver pulls out and BAM it's a GSXR-1000 in the door and at least one person who will wind up either dead or crippled. And the driver will tell the cop, "I didn't see him." And the cop will chalk it up to the Suzuki simply moving too quickly or to the driver being inattentive. But there truly is that third possibility: The driver looked right at the Suzuki but failed to truly "see" him.

This sort of thing happens with bicycles and pedestrians as well, of course, but it doesn't happen nearly as often because bikes and people tend to move slowly compared to a motorcycle. It happens even more often when people are stressed or frightened, because these emotions tend to freeze up the muscles, including the muscles of the eyes. When that happens, you get tunnel vision, which is simply the eye refusing to do its normal tracking deal and the brain helpfully filling in all the areas away from the eye's fixed center focus with plain black.

Tunnel vision is why I work very hard to keep my novice trackday students from being next to another car on track. They literally won't see the car next to them because their eyes won't move enough to pick up that visual information and add it to their visual map. The same is true, of course, for people who are learning how to drive on the street for the first time. The field of vision for those drivers is very small.

So, let's go back to my neighbor. He hadn't looked forward in more than 30 seconds, but his brain was telling him that nothing was likely to change. Sure, it had been a while since he looked forward, but he probably wasn't consciously aware of just how long it had been. He might have even thought that he had looked forward prior to driving forward, because his mental map of the intersection was so strong. Of course, the information was outdated, and there was 800 pounds of motorcycle and rider directly in front of him. But it's okay. I expect stuff like that to happen, and as a result I still have both of my legs. Woo-hoo!

Make an effort to look around, even at things that don't seem important.

Can we improve the way we see on the road (and track) just by understanding our vision better? Yes, we can. Make an effort to look around, even at things that don't seem important like the side of the road or, if you're an SUV driver, your rear-view mirror. The more you consciously look around while driving, the better and more varied the visual information your brain receives will be, which will lead to a much higher-quality mental picture.

In short, you'll learn how to see things that are invisible to you right now. That's like a super power, right? So use it for good, and not evil. Unless you're a club racer. In which case you should absolutely use it for evil. I certainly do. But no matter how you use your new super power, do me a favor and look out for the old guy on the big black Honda bike, okay? Especially if you're my neighbor.

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