If you want an example of how even the most academic ideas in psychology can turn out to be relevant to our daily lives, then you need look no further than the work of Douglas Stewart (see This Week).
Stewart is a road safety engineer who became interested in what information a driver uses at the wheel. That led him to the work of David Lee at the University of Edinburgh's Department of Psychology.
Lee had realised that the optic flow field - the way objects change in size as they approach you - might contain a lot of information which could be used to guide behaviour. He developed equations which showed that measuring simple parameters of an approaching object could predict, for example, the time to collision with the object. These are the kind of calculations our own brains might make, explaining why we are so adept at catching ...
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