Are you a person that flies by the seat of your pants? Do you fly like Maverick in Top Gun where your instincts dominate? This is absolutely cool in the movies, but it kills pilots in real life and the ones that kills are the amateurs and the experienced professionals. It's called spatial disorientation. First, let me give you a definition.

Spatial disorientation – It's the inability of a person to determine his true body position, motion, and altitude relative to the Earth or his surroundings. Both airplane pilots and underwater divers encounter this phenomenon.

 Teresa and I earned our PADI Open Water certifications in July 2001, which allowed us to dive 60 feet. PADI stands for Professional Association of Diving Instructors. We then went on an epic adventure in the Fiji Islands to vacation and SCUBA dive the Great Barrier Reef. This is one of the best diving spots on the planet. It was a life-changing experience. We saw incredible tropical fish, puffers, tiger sharks, all kinds of coral, and amazing sea life and creatures. You gain a respect for what's underwater. When a human becomes like a fish, you better respect that environment. We were trained to follow our instruments down to 60 feet, which basically included a buoyancy control device (a BCD), a regulator, a suit, and oxygen tank depth gauge. I learned to trust my depth gauge. It was crucial to follow my instruments as well as use my eyes and ears to decide to go up or down while diving. There's charts you follow so you don't get the bends. There are many more components. I'm just trying to keep it simple. I can remember a few times where I swam up, thinking I was going down. Even worse, I swam down, thinking I was going up. Thankfully, I learned to trust my instruments to correct my positioning under the water. When you are that deep, it is really hard to tell which way is up or down. It's scary, but it's true. I'm so thankful that I was taught to trust my instruments.

Here's another example of spatial disorientation. My friend Royce Repka, owner of Double R Flight Academy out of Perkasie, Pennsylvania jumped on a phone call with me to explain the phenomenon of spatial disorientation from the flight instructor point of view. He's been doing this for nearly a decade, and he knows his stuff. So I'll paraphrase.
"Ken, think of it like this. Humans spend 99.99% of their time on the ground. It seems flat, right!? In reality, we are standing on a curved surface that is spinning and rotating. We can see the ground and we can visually see the horizon. The ground is down and the sky is up. That's obvious. You have reference points."

I understood this from personal experience dealing with Lyme disease and vertigo. A physical therapist, who is trained in the inner ear for vertigo taught me that our eyes see the ground and the horizon and it communicates with our inner ear to balance your body in relation to the level of the earth. People with vertigo suffer dizziness because their inner ears are out of whack. Others can even get crystals that dangle in the inner ear. It can trick the senses to give you vertigo even when you're standing straight. And there are techniques that physical therapists can do to remove those crystals.


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