Daniel's wife said something to him once that stuck. She was out shopping with her husband — the guy who worked a protective detail — and he'd notice things she didn't. A construction crew on a rooftop. The kind of thing that maps straight onto "potential threat" if your job is keeping someone alive. And Daniel's been turning over the same question ever since: is that kind of situational awareness something you're born with, or can you train it? He also wants to know whether that story from intelligence memoirs is real — the one where a recruiter takes you to lunch and later asks which way the napkin was folded.
The napkin test.
That's the one. Is it apocryphal, or is it a credible model of how awareness screening actually works? So we've got three things on the table: what situational awareness actually is at the cognitive level, whether you can train it or whether it's mostly hardware, and where the napkin story came from. I want to start with the napkin.
Me too, because I've heard versions of that story for years and I finally dug into it. The short answer is: the specific napkin-folding anecdote is almost certainly apocryphal. You won't find it in any official CIA training manual or declassified document. But — and this is the important part — the underlying cognitive demand it's testing is entirely real and validated. The CIA's Officer Candidate Assessment Program, OCAP, includes something called the Memory for Details exercise. Candidates watch a staged interaction — someone walks into a room, has a conversation, leaves — and later they're quizzed on environmental details. Wall color, objects on the desk, what the interviewer was wearing. It's the napkin test with the serial numbers filed off.
So the memoir writer probably sat through something like that and it morphed into the napkin story over a few retellings.
And the reason it works as a screening tool is that it tests incidental detail recall under low-stakes conditions. Nobody's shooting at you. You're just having lunch. If you can't notice the napkin when the stakes are zero, you're probably not going to notice the guy on the rooftop when the stakes are life and death. The correlation holds up.
Which gets us to the bigger question. Before we can ask whether this is trainable, we need to define what we're even talking about. Because "situational awareness" gets thrown around like it just means paying attention.
Right. And it doesn't. The gold standard framework comes from Mica Endsley, nineteen ninety-five. She broke situational awareness into three levels. Level one is perception — you notice the elements in your environment. The construction crew on the rooftop. The car that's been parked across the street for forty minutes. Level two is comprehension — you understand what those elements mean in context. A construction crew on a Tuesday afternoon near a government building is normal. A construction crew on a Sunday morning with no work trucks and no permits posted is not. Level three is projection — you can predict what's going to happen next. If that car pulls out, it'll cut off the motorcade at the intersection. That three-level model is still the dominant framework thirty years later.
And for a protective detail, this isn't a nice-to-have. It's nearly the whole job. The principal's safety depends entirely on the officer running all three levels constantly — perceive, comprehend, project — while also looking relaxed enough that the principal doesn't feel like they're in a war zone.
That's the tightrope. You're scanning constantly but you can't look like you're scanning. The principal wants to feel normal. Your job is to be the most observant person in the room while appearing to be the least.
So Daniel's question is really about level one. Can you train someone to perceive more? To notice the rooftop crew in the first place? Because if you don't catch it at level one, levels two and three have nothing to work with.
And the napkin test is a level-one screen. It asks: when you weren't trying to notice anything, what did you notice anyway? That's baseline perceptual capacity. The question is whether you can move that baseline.
So can you?
Yes. And the evidence is surprisingly strong. There was a study out of the University of Chicago — covered in Scientific American last year — where researchers gave participants brief training in what they called noticing strategies. The core instruction was to mentally narrate what you're seeing. Not out loud. Just a running internal commentary. "Man in blue jacket, woman with stroller, car turning left, construction crew on rooftop." Participants who got that training improved their recall of visual details by thirty to forty percent compared to controls.
Thirty to forty percent from a single training session.
A brief one. Not weeks of drills. A single session of being taught to narrate your own visual field.
So that's... that's a lot. That suggests most people are walking around with the perceptual equivalent of a muscle they've never been taught to flex.
That's exactly what it suggests. And it makes intuitive sense. Most of us move through the world on autopilot. We're thinking about what we're going to say in the meeting, or what we're having for dinner, or whether we remembered to lock the car. Our eyes are open but we're not really seeing. The narration trick forces you to see, because you can't narrate what you haven't noticed.
So the answer to "can it be trained" is a clear yes. But I'm guessing there's a ceiling.
There is. And this is where the "born with it" side of the question comes in. The same research found that people with higher baseline perceptual capacity — measured by something called the useful field of view test — improved more from the training than people with lower baselines. So aptitude sets the range. Training fills it.
Which means if you start with a narrow range, training helps, but you're never going to be the guy who notices the rooftop crew from three blocks away.
Never say never, but the data points that direction. There's a two thousand twenty-four study on sustained attention — that's from PMC ten eight eight two four nine two — that found about ten to fifteen percent of the population has naturally high sustained attention capacity. These are the people who can stay focused on a monitoring task for hours without their performance degrading. On the other end, about the same percentage — ten to fifteen percent — has very low capacity regardless of training. Their baseline is low and training doesn't move it much.
So the middle seventy percent is where training does the real work.
Right. And that's the group most people fall into. You can take someone from the middle of the distribution and, with structured training, get them to a level of situational awareness that would have seemed impossible to them before. But you're probably not getting them into the top decile. That top slice seems to be hardware.
Which makes the napkin test — or the OCAP memory exercise — make sense as a screening tool. You're trying to find the people in that top ten to fifteen percent. The ones who walk into a room and their brain just... records it.
And the intelligence community has been doing versions of this for decades because they need that top slice. You can't train someone into the top decile, but you can identify who's already there and then train them further. The screening and the training serve different functions.
So that's the napkin story — apocryphal in detail, credible in spirit. But what does the actual training look like for the people whose job it is to notice everything? Because "mentally narrate what you see" is a good start, but protective details aren't running on a single study from Chicago.
No, they're not. And this is where it gets systematic in a way that surprised me when I started looking into it. Protective details use structured scanning protocols. The most common one I've seen documented is called the five-by-five-by-five rule. Scan five meters out, every five seconds, for five seconds. It's a rhythm. You're not just looking around randomly — you're running a grid.
Five meters, five seconds, five seconds. That's... surprisingly specific.
It is. And the reason it's specific is that it's designed to work with the limits of human attention. We can't sustain broad vigilance indefinitely. What we can do is cycle our attention in a structured way that covers the environment systematically. Five seconds is about how long it takes to register what's in a five-meter radius. Then you shift. Then you shift again. By the time you've completed a full sweep, you start over.
So it's less about having superhuman perception and more about having a system that ensures nothing gets missed.
And that's a teachable framework. You don't need to be born with it. You need to practice it until it becomes automatic. Which it does, eventually — the same way a musician doesn't think about where their fingers go after enough practice.
But there's a difference between scanning a room and knowing what matters in what you're seeing. That's the comprehension level — level two in Endsley's model.
Right. And that's where the real expertise lives. There was a study published in twenty sixteen in Frontiers in Psychology — that's PMC four eight eight one six nine nine — that compared expert police officers to novices during simulated scenarios. The finding was striking: the experts didn't have better raw perception. Their eyes weren't physically catching more pixels. What they had was better attentional allocation. They knew where to look and what to ignore.
So they weren't seeing more. They were seeing smarter.
That's it. The novice scans the whole scene equally because everything seems potentially relevant. The expert's attention goes straight to the things that are out of place — the car that doesn't belong, the person whose body language doesn't match the context, the construction crew on a Sunday. The rest of the scene gets processed at a lower resolution.
Which is a learnable skill, not a gift. You can teach someone what "out of place" looks like in a given context.
And that's exactly what the military's Left of Bang methodology does. It's a teachable framework for pattern recognition. You learn the baseline for a given environment — what normal looks like — and then you scan for deviations. The person facing the wrong direction in a crowd. The vehicle riding low on its suspension. The bag left unattended. These are all things you can be taught to notice.
But that still leaves the question of how you sustain it. Because noticing everything is exhausting. I've heard people describe coming off a protective detail shift and being unable to hold a conversation because their brain is fried.
That's the hidden skill that doesn't get talked about enough: cognitive load management. The two thousand sixteen study I mentioned also looked at this. Expert officers didn't just allocate attention better — they also had strategies for managing their mental bandwidth. They knew when to go into high-alert mode and when to dial it back to a sustainable level. Novices tended to run at full alert the whole time and burn out within an hour.
So part of the training is learning when not to be alert.
Yes. And that's counterintuitive. People think the goal is maximum vigilance at all times. But that's not sustainable for anyone, not even the top ten percent. The real skill is modulating your alertness to match the threat level of the environment. Low-threat environment, you run at sixty percent and save the battery. High-threat environment, you go to ninety-five. But you never run at a hundred for more than a few minutes at a time. The brain can't do it.
There's another piece of this I want to get at. The thing that separates the truly exceptional from the merely well-trained. I've read about something called prospective memory — the ability to remember to notice something in the future.
That's a huge part of it. Prospective memory is what lets you set a mental alarm. "When we turn that corner, I need to check the rooftop on the left." "If a vehicle pulls up to that curb, I need to note the license plate." It's not reactive — it's anticipatory. And protective officers train this deliberately.
How?
By running what-if simulations during downtime. When you're standing there while the principal shops, you're not just scanning — you're mentally rehearsing. "If a threat comes from that direction, I move the principal to that exit." "If that car accelerates, I need to note the make, model, and plate before I do anything else." You're pre-loading responses so that if something happens, you don't have to think. You've already thought.
So the standing-there-looking-bored part of the job is actually the most cognitively active part.
It's the part that looks like nothing and is everything. And here's the thing — prospective memory is trainable. It's a metacognitive skill. You can teach someone to run mental simulations. You can teach them to set those mental alarms. It's not a personality trait.
Which brings us back to Daniel's core question with a more interesting answer than just "yes" or "no." Yes, situational awareness is trainable — significantly so, for most people. But the people who end up on protective details are probably drawn disproportionately from that top ten to fifteen percent of natural perceptual capacity. The training takes them from gifted to operational.
The screening — the napkin test, the OCAP memory exercise — is how you find them. You're not training someone to notice the napkin. You're identifying the people whose brains already do that, because those are the people for whom the subsequent training will produce the highest return.
The napkin story is real in exactly the way that matters. It's not a training method. It's a filter.
A filter that's been validated by decades of cognitive research, even if the specific anecdote about the folded napkin never happened exactly as written.
Which brings us to something we haven't talked about yet. The cost.
The cost of being that alert.
Yeah. Because everything we've said so far makes it sound like a pure positive. Train the skill, get better at noticing threats, protect the principal, go home. But I've heard enough from people in these roles to know that the skill doesn't stay at work.
It doesn't. And the research on hypervigilance bears this out. When you train someone to scan for threats constantly, the brain doesn't automatically compartmentalize that to working hours. You find yourself cataloguing exits at your kid's school play. Noticing which hands are visible in a restaurant. Running what-if scenarios during a family dinner.
That's not a superpower. That's a pathology.
It can become one. The line between exceptional situational awareness and clinical hypervigilance is thinner than most people realize. The same cognitive machinery that keeps a principal alive can make you miserable in ordinary life.
I want to hear what Hilbert thinks about this. He's been quiet.
He has.
Hilbert: Nineteen ninety-eight. I worked loss prevention at a mall in Paramus for three months.
Go on.
Hilbert: My supervisor was a retired NYPD detective. Every morning, he made the team do an observation drill. Walk into the food court, take one look, come back and describe the first three people you saw. Shoes, bags, which hand they used for their phone, what they were eating, whether they looked left or right when they sat down. First two weeks, I was terrible. Couldn't tell you if the first person was a man or a woman. Third week, something clicked. By the end of the first month, I could give you a full description after a single glance. Shoes, bag, phone hand, the works.
And?
Hilbert: Then I couldn't turn it off. I'd be at the grocery store on my day off and my brain was still running the drill. Exits, sightlines, everyone's hands. I wasn't protecting anyone. I was watching for teenagers stealing CDs. But my brain didn't know the difference. After three months I quit. Couldn't stand being that alert all the time.
You trained it, and then you couldn't untrain it.
Hilbert: The training took two weeks. The untraining took about two years. I still notice exits. I still clock hands. It's quieter now, but it never went all the way away.
That reframes the whole question. "Can you train it" is the wrong question. The right question is "should you."
Hilbert: I wasn't even good at the job. I was just okay. But the thing they taught me stuck. I've still got the drill sheets in a box somewhere. Handwritten. My supervisor made us do them on paper so we couldn't fake it.
The cost is real. And it's not just anecdotal — the sustained attention research shows that even the top ten to fifteen percent of natural performers need structured downtime. The brain's attentional resources are finite. You can train someone to allocate them more efficiently, but you can't increase the total budget.
How do protective officers sustain this over a career without burning out? Because Hilbert did three months and quit. These guys do twenty years.
Part of it is selection. The people who stay in these roles are probably the ones whose baseline is high enough that the cognitive load is manageable. They're not running at a hundred percent all the time because their sixty percent is most people's ninety. Part of it is the modulation training I mentioned — knowing when to dial down. And part of it is probably that the job selects for people who find the scanning rewarding rather than draining.
There's a personality dimension we haven't touched. Some people's brains find threat-scanning aversive. Other people's brains find it... satisfying. Almost like a puzzle.
If you're in the second group, the hypervigilance might not feel like a cost. It might feel like being engaged with your environment in a way that's enjoyable. The same cognitive activity that exhausts one person energizes another.
Which means the screening isn't just for perceptual capacity. It's also for how you experience the act of perceiving.
That's probably what the OCAP memory exercise is really measuring — not just whether you noticed the details, but whether your brain naturally encodes that kind of information without effort. If it feels effortful during a low-stakes lunch, it's going to be unbearable during a high-stakes operation.
Where does this leave us on Daniel's three questions? One: what is situational awareness? It's a three-level cognitive process — perceive, comprehend, project. Two: is it trainable? Yes, significantly, for the middle seventy percent of the population, with diminishing returns at the extremes. Three: is the napkin story real? The specific anecdote is probably apocryphal, but the underlying screening concept is validated and in active use.
The fourth thing we landed on that Daniel didn't explicitly ask: the cost. Training works, but it doesn't come with an off switch. Hilbert's three months in mall security rewired his brain for two years. That's not a small side effect.
The misconception I want to nail down is the idea that situational awareness is just "paying attention." It's not. It's a structured cognitive process with three distinct levels, and the people who are exceptional at it aren't just trying harder — they're running a completely different mental operating system. Perception without comprehension is useless. Comprehension without projection is academic. You need all three, running in real time, while looking like you're just standing there.
The second misconception is the binary one — either you're born with it or you're not. The reality is messier and more interesting. Baseline aptitude varies, training fills the gap for most people, and the real differentiator at the elite level is probably how your brain experiences the act of constant scanning — as a burden or as a baseline state.
One thing I'm left wondering about. As AI-powered threat detection becomes more common — computer vision systems that can scan a crowd and flag anomalies faster than any human — does the human skill shift? Maybe the future of protective work isn't level one perception at all. Maybe the machines handle perception, and the human officer's job becomes pure level two and three: comprehending what the AI flags and projecting what happens next.
That's already happening in some contexts. Surveillance systems that flag loitering, unattended objects, vehicles moving against traffic patterns. The human operator isn't scanning raw video feeds anymore — they're triaging alerts. The skill becomes judgment rather than vigilance.
Which might actually solve the burnout problem. If the machine handles the exhausting part — the constant low-level scanning — the human brain is preserved for the part that requires actual intelligence.
That's a more sustainable division of labor. Machines don't get tired. They don't develop hypervigilance disorders. They just... scan.
We should do a whole episode on that at some point.
We should.
Thanks to Hilbert Flumingtop for producing, and for the three months in Paramus that none of us knew about.
This has been My Weird Prompts. If you enjoyed this episode, leave us a review and tell us your own version of the napkin test — we might read it on a future episode. We'll be back soon.
