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PaperclipPerfector  8mo ago (text post)   3243 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for August 25, 2024

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I've been taking driving lessons recently in my late 30s (never bothered to before as I lived in the city) and I'm surprised by how it drains me. It's not anxiety, I'm not nervous about driving. There's nothing different about me before I go to a class. But I feel extremely tired after a 1 hour driving class, almost as if I'm sick, my brain get foggy. My current theory is that driving being an unfamiliar and potentially deadly activity my brain goes in an hyperfocused state that is extremely tiring to maintain for an hour. If that's the case I imagine it will get better as my degree of familiarity improves?

Did anyone else here have that experience of extreme tiredness for an only moderately long driving session? Did it improve? Were you a teen or an adult when you learned? I'm wondering if maybe teen brains get used to it faster.

You're brain hasn't been trained to automatically read the road and the environment to pick out what's important. You're actively evaluating everything on the road because it's a new experience and your automatic systems don't know how to handle things.

Long term drivers just cruise around on autopilot. You need to drive more to establish a baseline of what's normal on the roads in your area.

My best advice is to make sure your first car is something that would be described as an "old lady car". You can wobble a bit in your lane and everyone will give you plenty of space. If you start off with a BMW everyone will assume you're an aggressive asshole driver and won't let you in.

The first time I drove on a public road was driving home from right after getting my licence. I was going very slowly (maybe 20 or 30 km/h in a 50 km/h) at first as a I pulled out of the parking lot and approached a red light. The driver behind me blared his horn for a full second or two before rushing around me.

Shit, I learned in a Toyota Sequoia. It didn’t earn me any charity, but at least the visibility was good.

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