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Flight Simulators And The Neural System (Real)Neurological Effects Of VR Flight Simulators Can Have Real Impact
Date: 1996/04/18 Agree? Disagree? : Have Your Say Buy Books About This Topic At: Amazon UK Amazon US Send This Article To A Friend: Email It Use Telepathy Training professional pilots, regardless of whether those pilots will end up flying F-15s for the USAF or 747s for KLM, is extremely expensive. One way of controlling costs is the extensive use of full-motion virtual reality flight simulators [1]. Virtual reality flight simulators have become very similar to reality in the visual domain, but have obvious limitations when it comes to simulating movement: if you integrate all the accelerations your simulated plane seems to be doing, you end up traveling the distance the plane would if it were actually flying [2]. The part of your inner ear that measures acceleration is only briefly stimulated by the start of a movement in the simulator; the rest is done visually, which works because the visual system, having acquired extensive real-world experience, is capable of generating the same sensations as real accelerations [3]. Moreover, your neural system is capable of learning, and quickly at that: in a flight simulator, especially a military one where maneuvers are much more extreme than in a civilian simulator, the pilot learns within an hour to associate visual movement with only very little input from the inner ear. When the pilot next happens to accelerate in the real world (and it reportedly has happened just quickly walking down the stairs after a simulator session) his system revolts [4] because of the cognitive dissonance caused by conflicting actual input and experience. Not a good idea at Mach 0.8 and 50 meters above the tree tops. Fortunately, one un-learns (or, rather, re-learns) within a day or two.
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