In the spring of 2017, I was diagnosed with a concussion. I was at a lacrosse practice running through a drill when something hit my head and blacked out. I woke up on the gym floor and a pool of people were crowded around me. My coach walked over to me and escorted me to the sideline. I was confused and scared. I had been informed about concussions in the past and I was nervous about what would happen to the rest of my season. My teammate came up and explained what happened to me. I was hit in the head with a lacrosse ball while guarding a teammate. How did I not see the ball coming? The thrower was only 20 feet from me. I should have seen it.
In a lot of cases, when people are in car accidents they claim that they “didn’t see the other car,” which is a similar thought as to when I got hit in the head. How can you not see something that is in your field of vision? Well, as humans our
brains can only truly process a small part of our range of sight. When you are focused on something else, you can be blind to very significant things, which is considered inattentional blindness. Inattentional blindness is the failure to notice a visible object entering your line of sight. It was a lacrosse ball in my case. I was so focused on the drill and who I was guarding that I did not notice the ball flying at my head. Additionally, my brain only has the capacity to process, in detail, a small part of my field of vision. Selective attention means that you can only process a certain amount of stimuli when several occur. In my case, I was processing my task in the drill and I did not have the capacity to also process the ball flying at me. Selective attention typically leads to inattentional blindness.
Sadly, due to inattentional blindness and selective attention I was benched for a month. However, I am no longer beating myself up for not being more careful. My perception, being aware through one’s senses, of my environment was skewed by my brain’s limited capacity to process information. Luckily, I made a healthy recovery and stayed alert on the field, to the best of my ability.
I think that this is a really good example of selective attention and inattention blindness. Someone hitting your head in the middle of a practice would be the last place I would expect an accident to happen to a player. Selective attention prevented you from seeing the full image around you because there were too many stimuli. This is an interesting example because it could also involve some sort of brain plasticity. Since your concussion, your brain had to adapt to be able to function the same way it did before. It also probably had to adapt to you being back on the field, maybe trying to adapt to more stimuli, so that the same thing wouldn’t happen again. Your brain capacity would change to make sure more stimuli are taken care of so that you don’t get hurt any more that what would happen during a regular practice. Overall, this is a good, real-life example.