Our Mind’s Antivirus Programme: Situational Awareness (3) Comprehension and Comparison

Before moving on to the second main part of situational awareness, it is worth recalling: Unless the first part is carried out correctly, the efforts made afterwards will mean nothing.

The backbone of the second part is formed by the comparisons between the picture we accept as our reference and the picture before us. The psychologist Mica Endsley sums up the second part as perception, comprehension and anticipation. Perception covers gathering data and cues through the senses; comprehension covers processing the data admitted to the mind and making sense of it in all its dimensions.

The final stage is to make predictions about the near future with the outputs obtained, to anticipate what the next development will be and to decide on the most suitable course of action.

At this stage the act of comprehension is of critical importance. The processed information will be synthesised as the 2nd picture, and in this way comparison with the reference mental picture will begin. The outputs produced will lay the ground for forming the answer to the question “What is next?”. Returning to comprehension, we can say that there is a strong relationship between performance here and the quality of the product.

Here, the many things the individual has read, heard, observed and learned up to that moment, that is, his intellectual accumulation, have a significant effect. Just as an untrained body can lead to physical movements being limited, an untrained mind works with low efficiency in processing the data that reaches it.

Through examples, let us try to see the awareness process as a whole. Let there be a Twitter account that you follow with great pleasure. Its number of followers is quite good, and you have followed the account thinking that so many people probably cannot be making the wrong choice. When the mechanism of situational awareness is activated (ideally this ability is brought into play by the subconscious, but of course, to build the habit, we will run the system manually at first), the first thing we will do is to form the mental picture.

This operation is not as simple an act as pressing a camera’s shutter button. That is why we will observe the account closely for a while. We will analyse the Twitter account by asking one by one the questions mentioned earlier in the article. After a while the analyses will turn into a synthesis and we will have obtained a baseline. Baseline is another term found in the literature on the subject. It means the same thing as mental picture.

In the part of our example so far, we have defined the first stage and at the same time the foundation of the process. The mental picture we formed of the Twitter account now waits on the sidelines for the tasks it may take on. Later, while following the account in LOOSE AWARENESS (Level One) mode, something caught on our radar drew our attention. In fact, saying it caught on the radar is another way of expressing the mismatch between the reference picture and the current picture. The first step of the second stage, PERCEPTION, took place with the data that drew our attention being gathered and transmitted to our brain. As part of the second step, COMPREHENSION, which analyses the difference between the two pictures, came into play.

Comprehension is much more than comparing two pictures. A rich and solid intellectual accumulation (background) will act as a catalyst at this stage. In the shared tweet we caught important points that contradict the reference mental picture. We noticed that the author was trying to draw us towards a different line of thought. In direct proportion to the situation, we moved from the default level of awareness (second level, loose awareness) to the fourth level, high alert mode. Notice that we moved up by skipping the third level (focused awareness). We mentioned the importance of “background”. We began examining in our minds the “grey propaganda” file we called up from there. We established that the content of the tweet we read matched the items on this file’s “checklist”.

Why did we move straight to the high alert level rather than to focused awareness? The reason is that the person doing grey propaganda is highly professional at his job. Until the right time and place arrive, he avoids risky posts that could expose him. So he does nothing that would make you suspicious. If you had sensed something, you would change mode and move to the focused awareness level, coming one step closer to bringing down the mask.

That is why they do not want you to pick up a magnifying glass (picking up the magnifying glass means the third level, focused awareness) and question the account’s credibility. Since they will keep posting normally, like accounts on the same line, until the moment they make the move on their agenda, they send no danger signals. In other words, since the thief is already someone inside the house, you can only grasp the situation when you see him trying to jump out of the window with the sack on his back. That means High Alert.

The last step will be ANTICIPATION. The most suitable course of action is developed. The crucial point of the situational awareness process is its ability to provide PREVENTIVE ACTION. The course of action developed serves to ward off the possible danger. In our example, we unfollow the account and find a way to reach the other followers and give the necessary warnings. In this way, by running the wheels of the situational awareness system correctly, we say “stop” to those who want to cloud our minds before they even cross our borders.