Just like distracted driving, there can be a term called distracted detecting; however, when one delves further, one realizes that distracted driving itself is one form of distracted detecting. Distracted detecting can be understood through the prey-predator analogy within the animal kingdom, with particular relevance during vulnerable adolescence. This concept is detailed in books co-authored by Barbara Natterson-Horowitz and Kathryn Bowers, titled Zoobiquity: The Astonishing Connection Between Human and Animal Health and Wildhood: The Astounding Connections Between Human and Animal Adolescents.
Essentially, all problems, including health care problems, can be considered predators preying on vulnerable humans, who must avoid detection by these predatory problems. Once detected, the predators assess their prey to decide which among them they can efficiently attack and kill. Correspondingly, vulnerable humans, as prey, must always remain hypervigilant to preemptively detect predatory problems, thus avoiding the wasted efforts and energy required to fail during the assessments by predatory problems planning to attack and kill the detected vulnerable ones. This hypervigilant detecting grows on vulnerable humans who have survived through their lifetimes of experiences while their adolescent selves are still learning to avoid detection, assessment, and attacks by predatory problems to possibly outlive others killed by these predatory problems.
In an artificially intelligent world overrun by overabundant distracting information, health care providers cannot avoid being vulnerable to falling prey when they are distracted and fail to detect predatory health care problems. Unlike the artificially intelligent world, humans rarely, if ever, have photographic senses to record and photographic memory to play back the appropriate information for its timely application. While patients need to be alert and calm to avoid health care problems among themselves, their providers must always be alert and calm to avoid failing to detect their patients’ health care problems. This distracted detecting can occur in dark rooms as well as operating rooms, whether one is a physician or non-physician, whether the situation is emergent or not, and whether the need is for diagnosing the problem or treating it.
When one is in the dark due to one’s own distracted detection, one’s refractive errors change, too. However, it all boils down to how distracted one’s mind is, regardless of whether one’s eyes and ears are also distracted because one can only see and hear something when one’s mind is focused. Whether one is listening to music, talking on a device, or refueling one’s energy, anything and everything has the potential to distract the detecting mind unless silence itself becomes distracting by making the mind restless due to inactivity. It is essential to find one’s mind’s working window somewhere between gross inactivity and gross hyperactivity to keep one’s mind active and appropriately detecting. Multitasking humans may be more likely to fall prey to predatory problems when concurrently dealing with a multitude of problems, all of which hope the multitaskers become too distracted to detect them, allowing these problems to prey on the distracted multitaskers.
In summary, distracted detecting includes distracted driving, which even going hands-free cannot undo and may worsen by turning one oblivious to undetected problems. Driving is essentially about detecting problems on the road and avoiding them to prevent catastrophes. Similarly, diseases are like predators trying to avoid detection by their prey, as overcoming diseases is only possible after their timely detection. Appropriate detecting is fascinating, and detective stories are addictive because those good at detecting survived the prey-predator balance in evolutionary history, while others failed and did not survive to pass on their distracted genes. Predators have been famished and perished if they are not good at detecting prey, and humans may have become the apex predator in the earth’s ecosystem by being collectively, if not individually, the best at detecting predatory problems and overcoming them appropriately and timely.
Deepak Gupta is an anesthesiologist.
