In this increasingly fast-paced world, there is an increasingly intense competition for a particularly limited item: your attention. Casual online window-shopping leads to ads that stalk you all over the Internet. External activities are even more disruptive, as daily life brings constant, multi-sensory efforts to divert your attention from your intended activity. 

We survive by filtering. In sheer self-defense, we have all learned to look without really seeing; to hear without really hearing. While that can be a useful, even essential, habit in some aspects of modern life, it’s positively dangerous in aviation. As noted throughout these pages, most aviation emergencies are long in the making. Noticing and promptly attending to small problems keeps them from becoming large and very loud problems that can put you and your passengers at risk. 

If you are looking for ways to strengthen your mental “pay attention” muscles, if only for aviation purposes, here are a few tips from a trio of books I’ve enjoyed. 

Learn to Look 

The key point in a 2016 book called Visual Intelligence: Sharpen Your Perception, Change Your Life by author-artist and teacher Amy Herman is that “we can train our brains to see more, and to observe more accurately.” In her The Art of Perception® course, Herman uses museum art to help sharpen visual analysis, critical thinking, and communication skills. The book provides numerous exercises to help you with a skill that every pilot needs: “Reconciling larger concepts with more specific details, articulating visual and sensory information, and conveying it in an objective and precise manner.” It doesn’t take much imagination to see (so to speak) how a high level of perceptual intelligence can help avert airborne emergencies, as well as handle incidents that truly occur without warning. 

Ask the Right Questions 

There is no shortage of ways to explain what “critical thinking” requires, but my favorite is the simplest: ask the right questions. In this connection, I especially enjoyed James E. Ryan’s Wait, What? And Life’s Other Essential Questions. As Professor Ryan observes, “many of us spend too much time worrying about having the right answers. […] The simple truth is that an answer can only be as good as the question asked. If you ask the wrong question, you are going to get the wrong answer.” 

I won’t spoil the book for you by repeating Professor Ryan’s list of essential questions. But I will say that while they all appear to be quite general, reading the chapter devoted to each one offers plenty of observations applicable to strengthening mental “pay attention” muscles. 

Listen to Your Instincts 

I have long been a fan of author Malcolm Gladwell, because I have learned so much from the piercing perceptions and keen insights in his body of work. One of my favorite Gladwell books is Blink, which explores the reasoned underpinnings of so-called snap judgments and gut feelings that a narrow definition of reason would compel us to dismiss. 

In essence, Gladwell contends that human beings take in a great deal more information than we can consciously, or “rationally,” process. Nevertheless, other parts of the brain do note, process, and catalog information that might eventually be served up in the form of eye-blink conclusions, or in the kind of diffuse but gnawing sense of unease. I encourage my fellow aviators to always remember “all available information” might well include those instant “doesn’t look right” observations, and that listening to the “doesn’t feel right” instinct might be key to safe flights and happy landings. (FAA Safety Briefing – SepOct 2019)