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Even experts default to habit
The jump
In a documentary about the free solo climber Dean Potter, a very seasoned base jumper borrowed someone else's gear for a demonstration jump in Yosemite, where the sport is illegal and gear was being confiscated at the bottom. She was used to pulling from the leg, and the borrowed pack had a different pull location.
The footage shows her doing that routine movement the whole way down. She had a parachute on, and she died.
The pattern
If you don't know what to do under high arousal, you default to not knowing what to do. If you know what to do, you default to what you think you need to do in one situation. An air failure while scuba diving shows the same pull toward routine.
People tend to assume that when an alarm goes off they will sort things out in a regimented way, or that being keyed up will make them figure it out. The brain seems to not work that way.
Why do experts fall back on habit under stress?
Stress hormones weaken the prefrontal cortex, which handles deliberate planning, and strengthen habit systems in deeper brain regions such as the striatum. In 2009, Lars Schwabe and Oliver Wolf found that stressed people relied more on habit-like learning in tasks where flexible choices would have worked better. Well-practiced routines are stored in a form that runs with little thought. Under pressure, those routines fire first, whether or not they suit the moment.
How does high arousal narrow attention?
The Yerkes-Dodson law, first described in 1908, holds that performance rises with arousal up to a point and then drops. In 1959, psychologist J. A. Easterbrook proposed that arousal shrinks the range of cues a person uses, so peripheral details drop out. A narrower focus helps with simple tasks and hurts when a situation has changed. Easterbrook's cue-utilization hypothesis is still widely cited in stress research.
Why do pilots drill emergency procedures so often?
Repeated practice makes the correct response automatic, so it is available when the thinking part of the brain is overloaded. Aviation calls this overlearning, and it is why emergency checklists and memory items are rehearsed until they run on their own. Simulators let crews practice failures that would be too dangerous to stage in flight. US airline pilots must complete recurrent simulator training at regular intervals.
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