My partner discovered just how difficult the roads on the Isle of Man can e when driving here for the first time - he got stopped by the police and breathalized due to having been reported for "erratic driving". He had not been drinking at all; he was merely finding the road system more challenging than expected.

You need to be aware of how your mind works, and how driving in fact becomes habitual, because it is falling back upon habitual actions which causes accidents when driving in a different country. When you first learn to drive, everything is new and so you have to pay attention to every little thing and you have to consciously think about what to do and how to do it. As you become more used to driving your brain begins to store patterns of behavior, and these get stored in your subconscious mind. Now you begin to find yourself instinctively reacting to situations without having to logically think about it.

You eventually reach a stage of real driving confidence, such that you can more often get home and subsequently realize that you cannot even remember the drive home at all. Most people who decide to drive abroad are at this stage. They are comfortable and confident when driving; they don't have to think about how to drive - they just drive. Now you arrive in a different country and have to drive on the "wrong" side of the road. You have to think about driving once more, you have to pay considerable attention to driving, and instead of learning something new you are adapting a well worn pattern of behavior. You are now acting in opposition to your instincts.

I have been driving in California on and off for a year now and I have noticed something interesting. When I get in the car which I usually drive when there I find it relatively easy to head for the correct side of the road, but when I was in a golf cart the other week it felt all wrong. It was clear to me that my new "pattern match" with driving in California was attached to the car and not to a golf cart. I had to learn a new pattern in the golf cart even though I had already learned a new driving pattern in the car.

A further observation I made was that each time I returned to the Isle of Man from California I tended to get into my own familiar car and slip into driving on the left with relative ease…but when I borrowed a friend's car, I really had to think about which side of the road I was meant to be driving upon.

This whole "driving thing" highlights how our brains store patterns of behavior in the subconscious mind, and how automatically we so often act. We think that we are focusing on driving, but in the main, we are not really focusing; we are acting instinctively instead.

It also demonstrates how difficult it is to alter habits. Although I had altered my "driving on the left" habit to allow myself to drive confidently on the right, this deviation from the original pattern only extended to one particular car, and definitely not to a golf cart. And because my initial deviation from my original driving pattern was in a different car, this left a "confused" instinctive response when driving yet another different car; I was now in the Isle of Man and so the pattern match was to drive on the left, BUT I was also driving a different car, and my pattern match relating to different cars was to drive on the right!

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