Highway Hypnosis
How to Survive Highway Hypnosis
You’ve driven a car, but have you ever driven a desk?
I have. For about a hundred miles, across the Utah desert, I was parked behind a desk as the countryside crawled by around me. It’s the most dangerous driving I’ve ever done, and perhaps the most surreal experience of my driving life…which, now that I think about it, is saying something.
Life On the Open Road
Growing up in a large family, family vacations were always taken on the road. Long nights and long days in the back seat of the family car, and then the family van, watching the miles roll away out the window.
Every summer, the whole clan would pile into the road trip vehicle and head off to the home of some distant relative or longtime family friend.
I’d seen all but three of the lower 48, plus bits of Canada and Mexico, in person, by the time I was twelve. But with every trip, I watched the driver and dreamt of the day when I would be the one to take the wheel, and point the bus, and seek out fun and adventure on the open road.
So, as soon as I got my driver’s license, I started practicing endurance driving. I picked a school that had an hour-long commute each way. At night, when I got board, I’d hop into my car and blast down to Santa Cruz, or explore Marin County, or see how long it took to get to Modesto and back. I took my turn as pilot on little family trips to Reno (a mere few hours from my San Francisco suburb home base) and L.A.
I was seventeen the first time I headed off on a long solo road trip. It was a five hour drive up to a little cabin nestled in the arms of Mount Lassen. As I was on the way out the door, my father reminded me to be careful of “highway hypnosis.”
I’d never experienced highway hypnosis, but I’d heard about it. Occasionally, on long driving days (which could sometimes stretch to twenty hours), one or the other of my parents would invoke the phenomenon for an unscheduled driving change. They described it as a trance-like state, where you lost the ability to move your eyes around and watch the whole road.
Sounded kinda weird to me, but I watched out for it, and made a point to stop and rest whenever I found myself watching the road right in front of the car or keeping my eyes glued to the side of the road. When your eyes get tired, that’s what happens, and I figured that was what they were talking about.
Until one evening when I was nineteen, in the eighth hour of a drive around the Olympic Peninsula in Washington state, when I crested a rise and the whole world narrowed into a narrow tunnel in front of me. I couldn’t see anything in my periphery—everything looked like I was staring through a toilet-paper tube.
I was so happy to have finally experienced this fabled altered state of consciousness that I almost forgot to pull over and rest my eyes (fortunately, better sense prevailed).
And, for years, I thought that I’d experienced all the phenomenon had to offer.
Until Utah.
Sensory Deprivation
Why does highway hypnosis happen?
It’s an altered state of consciousness brought on by sensory deprivation.
Back in the 60s, during the height of the psychadellics craze, researchers discovered that you could induce hallucinatory experiences by climbing naked into a dark, soundproof tank filled with water kept at body-temp.
Your brain normally gates most of your sensory input—this keeps you from, for example, being persistently aware of the texture of your socks, your clothes, the tiny movements of your individual hair follicles with movement and breeze, and all the other sensory noise your body generates.
When this input fades, your brain, being accustomed to having to gate the input, turns up the sensitivity. It starts to interpret random neurological noise in your body as actual sensory signals. As your brain’s job is to keep the information you encounter organized, it starts to construct narratives and images and sounds out of this random noise, and you enter a state that’s very like being in a dream.
You can try it yourself—sense-dep tanks are popular for meditation and relaxation in major cities, and you can rent an hour or two in one if you’re so inclined.
But here’s the fun part: your brain will pull this same move if you’ve been in the same situation for too long. Just as it gates the texture of your clothing, it gates the road noise as you drive, and your sense of heat as your climate control keeps you at a comfortable temperature. If your drive is long enough, and boring enough, it can start to do the same thing with your vision.
When I went through that vision tunnel, that was my brain gating my peripheral vision.
But a dark forest road at night is nothing compared to what Interstate 80 in Utah has to offer.
The Salt Flats
For around a hundred miles in eastern Utah, Interstate 80 runs through the flat, white bottom of an ocean long-since evaporated: the Bonneville Salt Flats.
The “flats” part is important here. The land is so flat, and so vast, that this is the main staging grounds for Western Hemisphere attempts at the Land Speed Record. Strap a rocket motor, or a jet engine, to a set of wheels, point it, and hit the gas. You’ll run out of fuel before you run out of flat places to drive.
The Interstate that crosses the salt flats runs right along the surface. You can see the distant mountains on the whole drive. It’s hot (except in the deepest parts of winter).1 It’s dry. The sunlight reflects off the salt like it was snow, wrapping everything in a dazzling white haze. Even the road is whitish from all the salt dust that settles and crystallizes on it.
And, for 100 miles or so, the road is dead straight.
It was mid-day, I was behind the wheel of an overloaded 26-foot box truck, and the temperature was well north of a hundred degrees. I warned my passenger as we passed Wendover that the conditions were right for highway hypnosis, and she needed to prompt me to pull over if I seemed to zone out.
She did her bit. She kept talking to me. Kept my mind engaged. Kept me glancing in her direction every minute or three. Kept me supplied with cold drinks.
But despite all the precautions, as we talked, I realized, to my surprise, that we were not actually in a truck.