What is subconscious driving?

You get up in the morning, turn on the water tap to shower, make coffee, have breakfast, get dressed, take the car, get to your workstation and, without being aware, you have automatically carried out a lot of activities. Your brain goes on autopilot so you don’t go crazy over the little details. As Xabier Urra, neurologist at the Hospital Clínico de Barcelona explains,“If there were no subconscious perception we would not be able to live, because in daily life we have an infinity of stimuli and it is impossible for us to focus our attention on each one of them”. The problem comes when we automatically perform an action that can lead to a certain danger, such as driving a vehicle.

 

Subconscious driving is the one that happens when we are very used to a specific route or when we take the car daily in a way that allows our brain to work with a minimum number of cognitive processes. In this way, we can carry out other activities that require our attention at that time. To explain it in another way, our thinking organ has two types of attention: controlled and automatic , which work in parallel. While we cannot perform two controlled actions simultaneously, we can do one of each: one controlled and one automatic. This is exactly what happens when we drive.

Audi, through its Corporate Social Responsibility department, launched the Attitudes program in 2000, the objective of which is to analyze how our attitude behind the wheel influences driving and road safety. One of the most important aspects of these attitudes is subconscious driving.

More normal than we think

According to the study carried out by Audi, 75 percent of drivers have driven subconsciously at some point despite the fact that 77 percent of them consider it a risk to road safety. And it is that, as Maite Garolera, neuropsychologist at Terrasa Hospital explains, “the problem is not in driving automatically, but in not being able to go from automatic driving to controlled driving when necessary”.

Thanks to a special system of glasses, the Attitudes researchers have come to the conclusion that when traveling in subconscious driving, we move our eyes in a different way. As Iván del Muro, Eye Tracker Tobii technician explains, the technology used to know where we are looking, ” when drivers drive subconsciously, their gaze pattern changes ” is what technicians call “radar vision”. Basically the control mechanisms (like looking at the odometer) are reduced but the area of vision increases and the movements of the eyes occur in a less organized way. In the mouth of the director of the Attitudes research team, Jordi Fernández, “it is as if you were on automatic pilot, as if you were thinking about other things .”

And after the hard day at work, you go home, have dinner, watch TV, read for a while and go to bed. You are not aware of all the details that your brain has overlooked, but it has been precisely that which has allowed the day to develop as it has . Driving home included.