Paul Messam, Contributor

Your sense of sight is of paramount importance to the safe-driving process, although you also use the senses of hearing, smelling, and feeling as you drive. A motorist obtains all of his in-car driving information through what he sees.

It does not take a complete examination by your doctor to obtain a fair idea of your physical capabilities behind the wheel of course, determining the sharpness of your senses, like strength of vision and hearing ability, must be left up to your doctor.

"One needs to see clearly and quickly to be a good driver," says Dr Hame Persuad. "The eyes move rapidly, making an average of three to five stops per second," he says. "The stops are called fixations, one only sees through these fixations."

According to Dr. Persuad, the brain directs your eyes to focus rapidly on objects and events to your path. Messages are sent back to the brain to be used along with stored information to help you identify hazards, predict conflicts, and decide how to execute your driving manoeuvres.

Depth perception is the quality which permits the individual to judge the relative distance of objects ahead. Depth perception and reflexes also vary greatly from driver to driver, as do vision, judgement and others. A driver should be able to spread his arms straight out from the sides of his body and still keep his hands in sight. The peripheral vision can be extremely essential factor in driving, especially in heavy traffic. The fact is many accidents occur when a 'road hog', whips out of a lane and cuts, smack into the path of an overtaking motor vehicle. Some of these unfortunate mishaps are caused by sheer neglect, as the driver never even bothered to look before he leaped. "In other circumstances, the driver may actually look before turning but just did not see anything ... maybe lack of peripheral vision was at fault," says Dr. Persaud.

LOW BEAMS

A good driver should make it a habit to switch on his low beams whenever he is approaching or overtaking traffic. The glare of high-beam headlights in a driver's eyes or in his rear-view mirror can radically reduce his vision. Your field of vision is all the area you can see when looking straight ahead. From a stopped position, many persons can see about 90 degrees to each side, which is a full half circle, or 180 degrees.

"As you learn to drive, your brain begins to direct central vision toward objects and events important to driving," says Norris Christian, a driver instructor with over 20 years experience.

He was of the view that good side vision attracts your attention to possible hazards, which you then identify with central vision.

Visual acuity is the ability to see clearly and distinctly, both near and far away. A safe, conscious driver must be able to read gauges on the instrument panel and road signs far ahead. It is no wonder that the winning combination of reading, seeing and understanding what is read is important to safe driving on our roads.

Drivers must demonstrate that what is seeing, read, and understood is out into practice to foster safe driving and put the brakes on the recklessness, which seem to parade some of our roads.