My Work with Dr. Whiteley
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Iya Whiteley was on Dr. Mayim Bialik’s podcast, “Breakdown” to talk about her work. It’s fascinating and below is an excerpt from Iya’s Substack. It gets at the type of information available to all of us, but we have forgotten it, for the most part. Iya has spent her career ascertaining the techniques and strategies that people like astronauts, pilots, and as below, firefighters… have used to stay alive. I’ve learned a lot from her, and I’m excited to be co-teaching the course, Navigating Inner Space with her. I know a lot of you have checked it out and are in the course, and if you haven’t, check it out, it might be of interest:
From Dr. Whiteley’s Substack:
“The Firefighter Who Lifted His Ear Protection
When Australian researchers, Prof Mary Omodei and Prof Jim McLennan, studied firefighters entering burning buildings, they used head-mounted cameras to capture what the firefighters saw. Afterwards, watching the footage, the experienced firefighters revealed something extraordinary: they had been lifting the heat protection from their ears to listen to the sound and feel the temperature change inside the building. A shift in wind. A change in heat. Fire behavioural signals that told them, seconds before anyone else knew, that the structure was about to collapse.
They had never mentioned this. Not because it was secret, but because they did not realise they were picking up the information in this way. It was so deeply part of their expertise that it had become invisible to them.
And they would never articulate this to trainees, because removing ear protection is dangerous. So this life-saving intuition existed only in the bodies of the people who had earned it through experience, and it had no language.
This is what I have spent my career chasing: the knowing that has not been put into words yet.”