The Hellhound on the Patio

Written by Mike on 30 June 2010

Do you remember the first time you read about Sir Henry Baskerville running down the lane between the yew trees to escape the great beast from the moor? A timeless story from the living history of demons of the evening we still carry with us for all these millennia. Creatures from times before when we were much closer to the red tooth and claw of nature and were prey and predator.

How do you think you would respond facing a dark canine shape in the shadows? What would be your response? This is a little episode about that from a recent summer evening very near the Holy Solstice of the Druids among us.

If you look at other musings on this site you will find one that talks about pattern recognition. That is part of this also. If you have caught some of the Charlie Rose series on the human brain you might also want to mix that in with the patterns you see and actions you might take in the hypothetical example suggested.

When I went to close the sliding door to the patio the other night it is was dark and the patio was in deep shadow. One hand was reaching for the door handle and I was looking absently into the darkness on the way to bed. There was a huge yellow dog standing right by the cement steps leading into the house! The back of my arms and the back of my neck instantly started to tingle as the hand holding the door pulled it closed. That is where it got very interesting.

One of the bits in the brain series with Charlie was about autonomic emotional response to danger. The involuntary “fight or flight” switch that sparks from the amygdala and causes the body to freeze while activating physiological defensive systems, like blood pressure, adrenaline, breathing, etc. The freezing is preparation to act with the next millisecond of information that says: “GO!” The studies talked about in the brain series suggest this “just happens automatically” and runs ahead of, faster than, the slower cognitive processes of the thinking prefrontal brain. The conclusion is that the thinking brain has to catch up after the fact and reprocess the situation from feedback signals it gets from the amygdala, as well as other sensory information. You know, TV science that is interesting to speculate about in the armchair.

Now throw in the studies of rapid pattern recognition and narrow focus written about by people like Malcolm Gladwell in Blink. The story of the police officer who reacts in 1/3 of a second to a dangerous situation and shoots or doesn’t shoot. In fact that very thing has come up in the California trial of BART transportation police officer Johannes Mehserle, for the New Year 2009 shooting of Oscar Grant in Oakland California. In expert testimony one witness for the defense cited the “1/3 second rule” for shooting in a dangerous situation. We all can see that this is not true from our own experience because we always think about what we are doing. Everybody has time to make decisions, no matter how fast, with correct information and good training, if they really want to. Otherwise it is just and excuse for sloppy police work – or deliberate racism in some cases. That is just common sense, as seen from the armchair.

My response to the hellhound on the patio was a very small thing compared to a police shooting or a detailed scientific study. But, it was very complicated too. Several things happened all at once.

First my auto response to danger came on, like I said. My thinking mind was already telling me that it was a shadow of the plastic patio chair next to the table.

Second my thinking mind watched the shadow and looked down at my right hand closing the door and locking it quickly. It also stopped my left hand from turning on the light to look at what it knew was there. I caught the sight of my left hand stopped next to the light switch as the door locked. Then I turned on the light, confirmed the chair in the dark, and the prickly skin went away.

All this happened in about 1 second give or take. I was aware of all of it. But, the automatic closing of the door, to lock out the pattern recognition of the big dog on the patio, happened exactly while my mind was telling me that it was just a shadow and to turn on the light and see. The argument in my thinking mind never stopped my right hand from closing the door and locking it in one smooth movement.

Near as I can figure three things were happening all at once, in less than a second±. First, I saw some pattern that represented primal danger: a hellhound in the dark. I automatically turned on defense systems and took an instant action to close the door without thinking at all.

Second, my thinking mind analyzed the pattern more and developed a plan to test it: turn on the light. But, it never stopped the automatic response of closing the door even though I saw my hand doing it and the argument in my head was, “Now wait, just turn on the light. It’s just a chair.”

Third, at the same time I sensed that my left hand was going to turn on the light to see, but that was overridden and delayed until the door was closed and locked. I felt myself stop that action until I felt my thumb lock the door, even thought I was thinking: “turn on the light and look.”

What a fascinating thought experiment it was. It might have also involved years of old martial arts training form a decade or so back. I was relaxed and acting automatically to neutralize a danger with my hands while taking a deliberate action to think and not freeze in the middle of it. So, the emotion would not get in the way. Yes, it was very much an emotional response at the same time too.

Hellhounds in the mind are very, very complex creatures, it seems.

Was this all a result of seeing the Charlie Rose show a few weeks back that I connected up later? Did I use the memories of the show, and of thinking about pattern recognition before that, to build the thoughts and memories of the event? Meaning that, if I had a different context to explain it with, would I have built a different reality out of it, both while it was happening and afterwards?

Who says that Victorian novels and TV shows are not entertaining!

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Tags: Culture, Life, Pattern Recognition, The Brain
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