Unawairness

            Verification of one’s lucidity generally involves the battery of straightforward questions, generally designed to ascertain whether the person in question has at least a perfunctory awareness of their current situation.  Though these questions often vary, once one has successfully answered the old saw, “how many fingers am I holding up?” the typical follow-up involves some form of the question, “where are we now?”  This seems fair, as without much thinking a functional brain can deliver an answer to that question.  Currently, I am on the second floor of a building in the Philadelphia suburbs.  Were a greater level of specificity required, details such as the neighborhood, street name, and numerical address would come to mind easily and supplement an already fairly specific description of location. 

            However, as human beings, we often deprive ourselves of such seemingly constant states of awareness.  Consider the example of a person who falls asleep as a passenger in a moving automobile – upon awakening, were they to be asked “where are you?” though they could, of course, describe that they were inside a moving vehicle, immediately, they would not be able to place themselves.  That said, scenery offers contextual clues, which often allow for repositioning, whether a mile marker on a highway, or a familiar building.  One location is unlike these others, it is near total deprivation of positioning. 

            Recall the last time you have fallen asleep while aboard an aircraft in flight.  If you are anything like me, your first reaction upon awakening has nothing whatsoever to do with location analysis, but rather, with the glance at your wristwatch to determine how many minutes of otherwise mind-numbing thumbing of the in-flight magazine you have spared yourself.  Despite this piece of information, if you have ever bothered to ponder this notion, your personal knowledge of your whereabouts is shockingly uncertain.  Consider the proverbial flight from New York to Los Angeles.  While most of us possess some perfunctory understanding over American geography, the plane neither flies at a constant velocity (climbing and descending are indeterminately faster or slower than cruising altitude), nor follows a linear path between the point of departure and the destination.  Given the geodesic patterns traversed by commercial airliners (I never fail to be amazed at how little time geometry teachers spend discussing the limitations of Euclidian geometry upon a globe which is anything but flat), even the flight path is unknown.  At best, upon awakening somewhere in the middle of a trans-continental flight, I could vaguely speculate which state might be lingering miles beneath the plane.  

            What was disconcerting that this did not, in any way, feel disconcerting.  Were I to have awakened from a protracted slumber in any other context and found myself unable to discern my location, even to the level of specificity of which of the fifty states currently housed my body, the sensation of disorientation would have been profound and unsettling.  In this case, despite being housed in a metallic cylinder hurtling through the troposphere at six hundred miles per hour with windows that reveal clouds that obscure any salient geographic detail, my information deprivation is thoroughly uninteresting. 

            Thus, allow me to posit that the concept of a handful of necessary factoids, which are necessary for lucidity and functional awareness, is actually context dependent.  Were pseudo-concussed football players to be similarly incapacitated on airplanes, their trainers would be forced to ask tremendously different questions…