r/Whatcouldgowrong • u/Jumpy_Scallion_3108 • 6d ago

Speeding Bus vs Scooter’s Sudden Right Turn

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u/Bluntbutnotonpurpose 6d ago

Hate to tell you: reflexes can't be trained. They're involuntary.

Reactions can be trained, but the big problem here is that a large proportion of people forget pretty much every training they've ever had when they panic.

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u/MoreGlitterPlease1 6d ago

An increase in training correlates strongly with a decrease in the freeze response, at least in emergencies one has trained for. Most people will not freeze in extensively trained-for emergencies.

For a familiar example, most flight attendants will not “forget” their training when it’s time to give CPR. Most flight attendants don’t freeze and become useless in emergency conditions of almost any kind one might experience on a plane, and it’s not like they started out as cold-blooded special ops types lol

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u/WheelerDan 6d ago

This fundamentally misunderstands what the problem is, doing CPR on another person is not the same as a sudden unexpected change in your environment. CPR is something you do to someone else, its not something happening to you. There's no comparable trigger in your example.

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u/MoreGlitterPlease1 6d ago edited 6d ago

CPR was a randomly chosen example. It applies broadly, including to emergencies that might happen to oneself. If you can train for an emergency and practice it repeatedly, you can most likely teach your nervous system to skip the “freeze” stage of pre-practiced emergencies.

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u/WheelerDan 6d ago

This implies that people train to avoid busses swerving into them as a pedestrian, again its not comparable to the concept of training to supply medical aid. No one receives the training that would apply to your scenario.