Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
other traffic on the road and to listen to instructions. In fact, the student
might still be so occupied with the driving itself that she hardly has any
mental space left to digest the information and advice from the instructor.
4.1.5 Getting Out of the Vicious Circle
The critical mind will now oppose: How can we learn to perceive? This
learning process seems to be caught in a vicious circle. If we do not know
that something exists, we cannot perceive it yet and if we cannot perceive
it, we can never learn to know it. The solution is to study how children
learn to perceive. Actually, they make many very small steps in a circular
process during which their concepts of the world grow in an organic way.
Three steps in perception:
1. Learn that it exists
2. Learn to distinguish it
3. Learn to recognize it
Three elementary steps are needed in learning to perceive:
Learning that something exists (a face),
Learning to distinguish it from other things (a face of a doll), and
Learning to recognize it (the face of a particular person).
Once we can recognize it, we can start anticipating it. Employees new
to a plant and employees from contractors will lack a lot of information
and will have a higher tendency to create dangerous situations because
they don
t understand and/or do not know that they do not understand.
Due to that, they will miss meaningful parts of communication between
colleagues. Although colleagues think that information has been given,
they forget that the receiver is not yet ready to receive it.
'
Case 1
When the mechanic arrives in the area of the cooler for the first time,
he will have no idea what
s really going on. Later, he will experience
that the radiated heat from the pipes around the cooler is an indication
of the activity of the cooler and an indirect indicator of pressure in the
system. As experience increases, he might even be in the position to
estimate how long a cooler is disconnected just by touching a few pipes
and estimating the heat. The temperature of the pipes then begins to
reveal information about the system.
'
