Why you don't remember pushing your limits
As Team Paddler Kailee Hutchison calls it “the white wall” and hitting it isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Unfortunately, when you hit the whitewall, it takes whatever you were just doing and fragments it in your memory. There are a variety of psychological phenomenon at work here, but at the end of the day it is a stress response that affects your memory. When you’re charging hard it alters the way you perceive your surroundings and creates adrenaline fueled gaps in your memory.
Memory Inconsistency
When boaters are confronted with a stressful or perceived life-threatening situations, like rafting, their mind will experience the "fight or flight" response. During this response, your body prioritizes resources to physical functions that are essential for survival, such as increased heart rate, heightened senses, and the redirection of blood flow to vital organs and muscles. This can lead to more focused attention and a reduced awareness of peripheral information.
Tunnel Vision: High-stress situations can cause individuals to focus intensely on the immediate threat or problem at hand, leading to tunnel vision. This narrowed focus can result in a reduced awareness of their surroundings or other relevant information. In life-threatening situations, individuals often prioritize tasks and actions that are immediately necessary for survival, such as fleeing from danger or fighting off an attacker. Tunnel vision often disrupts your ability to process or identify details other than immediately running your line through a rapid which in turn blinds you in retrospect as to what happened in the moment.
Cognitive Overload: In stressful situations, your brain may become from tons of chemicals squirting at once overwhelming you with information and decisions that need to be made quickly. This cognitive overload can impair your ability to process and retain information, leading to lack of awareness about your surroundings or the broader context. The intense emotional and physiological responses associated with high-stress situations can affect the encoding and consolidation of memories. Off the river you may struggle to recall details of what happened in a particular rapid due to these memory disruptions.
Time Dilation: Some people experience a distortion of time perception during high-stress situations like running rapids. Events may seem to happen in slow motion or very quickly, this distorts your recall as to how fast or slow you were moving through a rapid. This in turn will cause you to perceive the river or rapid differently and help to contribute to the feeling of the “white wall” with the experience feeling like a blur of activity.
A boater’s awareness can vary widely from person to person and from one situation to another. Some individuals may remain relatively aware and composed in high-stress situations, while others may experience a more pronounced lack of awareness. Training, experience, and psychological state can also influence how well different boaters maintain awareness throughout an event. Having a baseline of training and experience or an even emotional state can help to reduce memory fragmentation by having a point of reference for comparison.
Memory Fragmentation
Memory is not just stored as a stored as a coherent and continuous whole despite what out minds will later rationalize the experience into. Memories can become broken and divided especially when tunnel vision may make us focus on the scarry white part of the rapid alone. This creates incomplete and disjointed recollections of the rapid or river trip. This fragmentation often manifests in the following ways
Highly Emotional Events: The intense emotions experienced during boating something harder than you’re used to can disrupt the brain's ability to process and store information in a linear and organized fashion. Instead, the brain may focus on certain aspects of the experience while neglecting others.
Divided Attention: Boaters who are not used to multi move rapids are exposed multiple threats simultaneously during a high-stress situation forcing their attention to be divided among multiple river features. This focus may be directed at a specific feature in great detail while neglecting or forgetting other features entirely.
Memory Gaps: Memory fragmentation can lead to gaps or missing pieces in your recollection of an event. These gaps can create a sense of discontinuity in the memory, making it difficult to replay what happened in detail.
Inconsistencies: Fragmented memories may also lead to inconsistencies and contradictions when individuals attempt to recall the event. Different fragments of the memory may not align perfectly, leading to your mind filling in the blanks possibly even with parts from another rapid entirely.
Reconstruction and Distortion: As individuals work to reconstruct fragmented memories, they may inadvertently introduce errors or distortions. This can occur because memory retrieval is a dynamic process influenced by various factors, including suggestion, external information, and emotional states. This is why GoPro footage of boating is such a powerful tool in reconstructing our memories of what happened on a trip.
How the White Wall Affects Boaters
Memory fragmentation is a common aspect of memory, especially in stressful scenarios like adventure sports. Memories are not static recordings of past events but are instead dynamic and subject to change and reconstruction over time. The problem for boaters with entering the state of the white wall happens both in the moment and in the future when you’re trying to work through what happened.
In the Moment – While you are currently in the stressful scenario your mind can easily forget your training and your emotional state can cause you to freeze. This manifests in the idea that that you are only as good as your lowest level of mastery. As you train you become so good at a specific movement or skill that it is no longer becomes a conscious action and takes very little focus to achieve. For many people this could be the forward stroke, a knot, or how you bandage a particular injury. When you begin to experience the white wall, it is nearly impossible for you to put advanced reasoning or skills into play. You may also be completely unresponsive to stimuli like someone telling you to stop or start paddling. In this state you may resort only to the skills you are so experienced with that it is unconscious.
After the event has passed - You will likely have no recollection of what happened and your memory may be so fragmented that you cannot recall anything. I have had experiences with several boaters who watched GoPro footage after the fact and have not recognized any of their actions and do not remember anything that happened in the footage. This puts you in a state where little actionable knowledge, experience, or feedback can be gleaned from the event in question. There is an easy way to deal with the white wall though:
Dial it back by not pushing too hard too fast.
Train consistently and purposefully by isolating skills and developing them as much as possible.
Surround yourself with a community of boaters who will support you and share a similar risk profile.
