Awareness Lag

“150-300 ms - Occupant becomes aware of collision.”

Catching up on my RSS reading, my eyes were drawn to this article, from the excellent “Mind Hacks” blog (which you really should subscribe to if your feed selection could do with some broadening). The drive of the article is just how slow a human is to react to a fast-changing situation - that a person in a car crash is not actually aware of it until after it’s ‘complete’. Their timeline of a crash, however, also gives an amazing insight into just how much self-analysis a modern car is doing at any moment, and how much computing goes in to what happens - what a car physically does - to keep us safe in a crash.