
137
The Challenge What Experts Do
Science of Badass Building Skills Perceptual Exposure
The results were astonishing
Within two hours, non-pilots were faster at accurately
interpreting the cockpit instruments than seasoned pilots with
an average of more than 1,000 hours ight experience.
Think about that.
These weren’t novice pilots, these were non-pilots with no
prior knowledge or experience with ight, aeronautics, and
instruments. Yet within just two hours they were performing a
crucial skill better than experienced pilots.
Of course this didn’t mean they could y a plane, but if they
were to start ight training, they’d have a dramatic head start on
a crucial skill. With instrument perception at such a high level,
they could focus their effort learning and practicing other things.
The perceptual training these non-pilots experienced
compressed what typically takes more than a thousand hours,
into just 120 minutes!
The biggest surprise of all? The non-pilots received less
than ve minutes of actual instruction. Just a quick
orientation on the instruments. The actual “training” was
another variation of chick-sexing: repeated exposure with
feedback. The perceptual training consisted of two sessions,
each lasting under an hour. Each of the two sessions included
216 trials, divided into 9 blocks of 24 trials per block. Even
more remarkable, the feedback was only given at the ...