Kashish Sharma
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Written By: Kashish Sharma | Updated : December 30, 2022 5:56 PM IST
Due to unchanging settings and the absence of multiple visual elements, the person tends to experience more fatigue
We have entered into the festive phase. Many of you would be travelling back to your hometowns to celebrate the beginning of next year with your loved ones. Many of you would be driving late on Friday evening or early Saturday morning. Some of you must be up for short weekend getaways. All in all most of you would be driving at the edge of time. You must know that you might be prone to a strange sleep-related phenomenon that is more common than one imagines it to be. It is called highway hypnosis.
Imagine yourself driving on a long, empty road with monotonous settings on both sides. Your speedometer shows a constant velocity. You take a look at the signboard, it reads some distance. After some time, you see another signboard but the distance has changed and you have no idea what happened in between. This is a warning sign, it means you were on autopilot mode for a while and it was your hands and legs driving the vehicle, a sort of trance-like state. This state is identified as highway hypnosis and it can result in serious consequences like fatal accidents and even death.
As per some studies, monotony plays an important role in this phenomenon. Due to unchanging settings and the absence of multiple visual elements, the person tends to experience more fatigue. Some researchers also observed that driving on long, monotonous roads can induce fatigue only in 20 minutes of driving. Studies have also shown that driving on monotonous roads can cause brain inattention. The similar kind of visual stimuli your eyes meet can make the brain depend less on their feedback. Sometimes the driver can experience the blurring of the white lines and the trees lining the roads and the collective effect of this could be a trance-like state where you might not be driving consciously any longer.
The transition into this trance-like state is sudden and involuntary. While your limbs might be conditioned well to drive but your mind is not alert to make any sound judgement. If any vehicle or object advances towards you or is in your way or there is any change in the setting, your conditioned limbs won't be able to change the course of action without the help of an active brain. Hence, by the time you will come to your senses, it might be already late. There are however, some red flags that can alert you beforehand-
