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Driving While Distracted More Dangerous Than Supposed
Science News reports on recent research indicating that any kind of multitasking while driving is dangerous. Not just the obvious distraction of juggling a cell phone, but even talking to a passenger or listening to a book on tape. The researchers used a driving simulator inside an MRI machine to measure brain activations. "Attending to what someone says galvanizes language-related brain areas while simultaneously reducing activity in spatial regions that coordinate driving behavior. This finding suggests that people who combine relatively automatic tasks, such as speech comprehension and car driving, exceed a biological limit on the amount of systematic brain activity they can accommodate at one time, the researchers propose. As a result, the less-ingrained skill — in this case, driving, which is learned long after a person grasps a native language — takes a neural hit."
because I'm driving right now while typing this post on my laptop and I'm not in the least bit distra
Please tell us yet another anecdote about that one asshole soccer mom driver who cut you off while yapping on her cell phone. We love that one.
Thanks!
Drunk driving being outlawed, for example. But there comes a time when you just have to trust that people will do the right thing. I don't want to get to the point where we use this as a scientific basis to putting noise detectors in a car and refusing to start if you're talking. I'm already a litle hesitant when it comes to cell phone bans in cars, what will this lead to?
Perhaps what this really is is more evidence that we should automate as much about driving as is possible.
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Face it some people are just bad drivers, without any distractions or other cars around, and they will be forever.
First of, a "driving simulator" inside an MRI does seem rather distracting. Those things are LOUD.
Secondly, is the summary actually advocating driver's training before a kid even learns to talk?
While I'm sure everyone's driving ability decreases when multitasking, I don't think it does at the same level.
They need to have a multitasking test to qualify drivers to do certain things, and everyone else be blocked. I mean this in a joking way, but if I ruled the world I'd make it that way
The biggest problem is enforcement. Of course, a police officer can always pull you over for unsafe driving, even if you're not multitasking. But there needs to be some sort of citizen-level enforcement.
Some way to point a radio-id-tag tracker and zap another car and comment on how it's driving (weaving in traffic, distracted while on the phone, going the limit in the fast lane with two other lanes open, etc.).
Don't take one person's word for it, wait for a couple dozen complaints - they'll come fast enough - and then yank all their driving privleges, or limit them to driving with no other multitasking going on.
Ah, only in Jason-land
Even so there are levels of risk that are acceptable. Life is risky but we take the risk of taking a shower knowing that we may slip and fall and become injured or die as a result. We drive because going somewhere is worth the risk of having an accident. We listen to books on tape or the radio because the risk of being to distracted is better than being bored. We talk on the cell phone because the communication is worth the risk. These risks are manageable but a life without risk is not worth living. Get over it already. OH, and we eat food at the risk of getting food poisoning because it is better than dying of starvation. However if you don't want to risk it perhaps the world is better off without another idiot.
The company I work for, we're on the road a lot. We're a small company, but as well as software development we do on-site support, consulting and deployment. As a result of this, we tend to be on the road a lot while also talking on our phones (hands free of course).
All of the people in our organization are better drivers on the phone than most of the average public is otherwise. Why? Because we all have constant experience doing it.
I wonder if the quality of speech coming from the cell phone has anything to do with the amount of processing required. When people can't hear things very well, they start piecing together the dropped parts of the conversation by using some sort of contextual implication. You know what the subject is, so you have a good chance of surmising the dropped words due to context. I would think something similar could be possible for talk radio as well. I think if you listen to one talk show host consistently enough, you develop a better ability to understand what is being said, but a new talk show host can take some getting used to. Just some thoughts.
When I'm driving with a passenger and conversing with them, I seem to only be able to actually focus on one of those tasks at a time.
If I am concentrating on the road, I've noticed that I tend to block out the passenger. Sometimes what the passenger says will get processed a good 5 seconds or so later when I'm in safer circumstances (straight driving in my lane). And if I'm instead thinking about what the occupant is saying, I will tend to miss turns that I know full well I need to take.
During any of this, however, I am driving fairly well. I have never had an accident in my 14 years on the road. But my brain is apparently focusing its full cognitive abilities on the road and traffic, but leaves little else to work with in that regard.
You can either tell me how your day went, or we can get to the restaurant. But they are somewhat mutually exclusive.
Adapt, adopt, or get out of the way!
While this article seems to state that doing anything passive task while driving impairs the drivers ability to drive at full capacity, I don't think it is as cut and dry as it is being made out to be. I know that I start to lose focus on the road when I am doing NOTHING ELSE but driving. The monotony just turns your brain off to the whole situation... which is why if for whatever reason I can't listen to the radio, I limit my driving to any place I can get to in 10 or so minutes.
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
Yes, even just talking to a passenger distracts one while driving. I almost always drive alone. When I have a passenger with whom to gab, especially if it's a topic that I find interesting, I miss exits way more often than I do when there is no conversation. Granted, I consider myself a below-average navigator and only a modest multitasker, but consider this additional anecdotal evidence that seemingly innocuous distractions can lead to deficient driving.
Virtue finds and chooses the mean.
Aristotle, Ethica Nichomachea
...of why traffic is so damn slow, everyone is distracted.
,,, uh like this is rush hour city traffic.....
Its must be like a domino effect, one person gets distracted via cell phone and a few others get distracted by the stupid pointless slowdown of the first on a cell phone, so they call traffic advisory... etc... or someone pulls off to the side of the road and causes the same domino effect. And then there are the instigators who have a bumper sticker that reads "I slow for tailgaters"
I listen to audio books while driving 3hr trips most weekends. What I know for sure is this: whenever there is a challenging bit of driving, I miss a large chunk of the audio book. This is not noticable with music...but with an audio book you can definitely tell that your attention switched to driving the car and not listening to the book because the story moved on and you know.
So I certainly agree with TFA that we can't multitask listening to speech and driving. But I think they are 100% wrong to assume that the driving (being the "newer" skill) is the thing that suffers. To the contrary - I think we're sufficiently adaptable to drop out the least important task.
That may be different with live humans (eg a passenger or cellphone) - but for audio books, TFA is clearly wrong.
The only real solution is not legislation but full commercial use of the technology designed in the DARPA Grand Challenge. Then laws will be a moot point when no humans error results in car accidents.
Give it about 10 years.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
So a hypothetical 22 year old who started driving at 18 is automatically a good "distracted" driver now because they have been texting / talking while driving for 4 years, so now they are good at it??
what the hell this has to do with Microsoft?
Fine, so lets ingrain driving before language!
Baby cars!
because I happen to be very risk adverse, and also smell very bad.
... in this case, driving, which is learned long after a person grasps a native language
Assuming that in the near future most people will not ever get a grip on a 'native language', their driving capability will not be impeded by their 'ingrained' language skills.
CC.
TaijiQuan (Huang, 5 loosenings)
... posting on Slashdot while distracted by driving seems to produce some pretty weird material.
Have gnu, will travel.
I don't know about other drivers, but personally, I get BORED when I drive, especially on freeways (traffic or no traffic). And when I get bored, I get SLEEPY. Driving has to be one of the most complex yet automatic tasks that my brain does on a daily basis. So I have to find some way of keeping myself alert and occupied...and that might include listening to NPR (Republicans tend to piss me off, thereby keeping me alert). If I have a passenger in the car (especially a cute one!), I have no problem staying alert.
But anyway, the point is that I think making sweeping generalizations about the nature and complexity of the driving task is problematic not only from a scientific and cognitive point of view, but also from a social and legal standpoint. People have been driving for, well, since driving was INVENTED--with passengers in the vehicle, or with distractions present. You can't enforce drivers to focus solely on the driving task, and for the reasons described above, even if you did, you'd probably INCREASE the risk, because half of the population will fall asleep at the wheel from the sheer boredom of it.
But as for those drivers who I've seen sending TEXT MESSAGES while driving--argh, I just want to smack them. Seriously, they aren't even looking at the road. I've had to lay on the horn several times because they're weaving erratically, or stopped in traffic.
I don't need an MRI and a driving simulator to know that when someone gets messed with while they're driving or doing anything that requires focus they're going to do LESS GOOD at it.
"Most people, I think, don't even know what a rootkit is, so why should they care about it?"
Driving lessons and the test have to be done with someone talking to you all the time.
Blazing Spiders
I've seen far more dangerous swerving by Moms in SUVs reaching back to their kids while gabbing to their friends on the phone or in the passenger seat than almost any soused crew leaving a bar.
At least, in most cases, the majority of other people on the road at the same time as the drunks are other boozers. I find myself having to dodge the Soccer Moms all day long.
And how often do people have accidents because they were talking to a passenger? Sure they see spikes in neural activity, and they would expect higher incident of accidents, but it's really not that significant in reality. Therefore, I think they should investigate why they think the brain is overwhelmed when it's really not (or performance anxiety inside of a simulator).
This research might be true for driving in heavily urban areas, where safe driving requires the processing of many, many variables such as cars all around, lane changes, keeping your blind spots clear, reading road signs, and general navigation so that you end up where you are trying to go.
However, the OPPOSITE is true for driving long distances on relatively empty freeways in rural areas. Take, for example, the 600 mile stretch from El Paso, TX to San Antonio, TX which consists of an abundance of two things: diddly and squat. If drivers on this stretch has no other stimulus, they are in danger of entering the highly dangerous state of hypnotic disassociation (sometimes calls highway hypnosis or white line fever), where the conscious brain practically shuts down and you go into auto-pilot -- completely unable to react to anything quickly. If something does happen suddenly, the driver "snaps out" and is disoriented for a second. Usually by that point, its already far too late.
Keeping your mind alert through talking to a passenger or listening to heavy metal on the radio actually helps prevent this condition.
The
It's OK for me to multitask - I'm a better than average driver, as indeed are 90% of people.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
The answer is simple. We should teach people to drive at a much younger age, at the same time they learn to talk and walk, for instance.
If I can be modded down for being a troll, can I be modded up for being an orc, or a balrog?
The radio is all commercials and crap so it was pretty easy to lose but it can be a challenge getting passengers to shut up sometimes. One of these days I am likely to taser somebody for saying "Hey look!" and pointing somewhere while we're in the middle of a busy intersection.
Lets ban babies from the car, because they can be more distracting than a cellphone because natural instinct is to give them attention when they cry. No books on tape, NPR, or any other radio programs that cause the driver to think. Also, no eating or drinking... that includes morning coffee on your commute, since spills can distract you.
People rely on the crutch of the law, when such laws are rarely enforceable - how many people get pulled over for being on a cellphone?, and have marginal effectiveness - hands free doesn't help much because the distraction principally comes from the conversation itself not holding the phone. Ultimately it comes down to personal responsibility and knowing your limits, laws won't protect others on the road they just allow greater penalties after-the-fact.
D6 63 0D 70 89 81 BB 8E 7B 7C 5F 5D 54 EA AB 73
By that logic ... I've been driving drunk for years, and am good at it, so clearly it is ok for me to drive drunk.
XML causes global warming.
What about the innocent person who ISN'T texting/talking/readingthepaper/puttingonmakeup who gets killed when the asshat who is doing so crashes into them?
Duh.
First we need to test people for driving while incompetent. Perhaps with real simulators? I shouldn't have been able to learn things about driving from Gran Turismo AFTER having been driving for years. With effective simulators we can simulate high-stress high-risk situations without actual danger, so we can do it in a lot less time.
Parent seems to confuse being brilliant at calculus with being a good driver. Those are pretty much totally unrelated skills. At 18, she MUST be an inexperienced driver, because she couldn't have been driving very long - and because we don't use effective simulators to condense high risk driving situations, so you only get into them as a small fraction of your driving (unless you're very reckless)
The level of qualification that we apparently think is sufficient to let people drive is ridiculously low. They're not tested under even the tiniest of duress or stress, or in any sort of challenge that involves any real skill at driving or even having any reflexes at all. Even a 15 mph slalom would rule out SO many people, or force them to acquire greater skills.
We're getting in a giant death-machine here, people - we need to do a reasonably good job of knowing who is qualified.
I knew a case of an 80 year old man whose reflexes had clearly gone, but he wanted to keep driving. He rear ended someone with no extenuating factors whatsoever. Just up and drove into them, over a long lead distance.
To their credit the state made him take the driving test again... His family told everyone who would listen (his doctor, the DMV) that he shouldn't be driving. And he passed, and kept driving. (He passed the vision test, so apparently he could SEE what was going on, but he couldn't DO anything about it.) The family eventually prevailed on him to get rid of his car, but it was substantially later.
Also people who get _multiple_ DUI convictions... really? A serious DUI ought to be grounds for license suspension and ought to come with a stern warning - that if you drive on that suspended license you go to jail until you convince them you aren't going to wield any more implements of destruction.
I would be willing to wager that I could drive better in a manual transmission car after being awake for 30 hours while having a heated discussion on a cellphone, eating pasta, and/or changing my shoes than at least 10% of drivers, perhaps more. Note that I'm not saying I SHOULD do these things, or that I have a superhuman ability to multitask or drive, only that the state of things on the road is terrible.
The FUNDAMENTAL problem, of course, is that we treat driving more like a right than a privilege, which it needs to be since so many of our living spaces are designed to only work if you have a car. *sigh*
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sigh, even more useless expensive micro-science
clearly, once you've learned to to do anything physical, you shouldn't be over-focusing on what you are physically doing. The real zone is where the physical act happens faster than when you can think about it; just ask any martial artist or race car driver!
"Don't just think your faster, know you're faster!" ~ Morpheus
Words to men, as air to birds.
All this is, is modern Phrenology. We simply don't know enough about the human brain to even come close to being able to decipher what they are thinking about from an MRI.
Second, people do distracting things while driving. This was the case before cell phones, and this will be the case if cell phones where banned in cars. The whole cell phone in cars is simply a place where the neo-luddites feel they have found a chink in the armor of the evil tech using populace. If this where not the case, we would have the same kind of outcry against stereos in cars. Heck, we don't even see an outcry that stereos should be hands free. When was the last time you saw a bumper sticker that said "Turn off the radio and drive". That's right. Never. Why? Because the radio was invented before the arbitrary date that neo-luddites have decided technology should stop.
I realize that this 'study' is not limited to cell phones, but if you read the other comments, you will see the luddites are out in force.
We all start driving motorcycles, seriously you can't hear anything even if you have a headset, there is no way you can do anything besides drive!
I can very well see why audiobooks would have such an effect, since most audiobooks I've come across are read in a boring, monotone voice and make me sleepy.
Usually I'm able listen to them for 20-30 minutes without blending them out for a few minutes or completely, but those 20-30 minutes take a lot of concentration.
Radio plays on the other hand tend to be spoken by several people, so they're rather nice to listen to while I work/code and help me stay awake on long days.
My intuition tells me that concentrating less on driving is dangerous, but MRI images are hardly compelling evidence. Showing a correlation between books on tape and an increase in accidents would be far more valuable. How much does a book on tape increase the chance or accident? Is it negligible or the greatest threat to drivers' safety? This study proves it's one or the other, or somewhere in between.
Got to keep the passengers safe
No help can be found in this part of the world
Don't brake for animals tonight
Don't let the night slow you down
Got to get the passengers home
The road is empty, your lights are bright
Don't let the night slow you down
B-b-bus plunge (One more cup of coffee and I'll be alright)
The driver says bus plunge (pop a bennie, another bennie)
The driver says bus plunge, bus plunge
Stay to the right of the line
Don't get the passengers scared
The curves in the road are not really there
Stay to the right of the line
B-b-bus plunge (One more cup of coffee and I'll be alright)
The driver says bus plunge (pop a bennie, another bennie)
The driver says bus plunge, bus plunge
Don't brake for animals tonight
(Never mind the creatures in the road ahead)
The driver says don't brake for animals tonight
(Run the stoplight, run the stoplight)
The driver says don't brake for animals tonight
(Don't think about the lady in the Chevy turning left)
The driver says don't brake for animals tonight
(Almost home, you're almost home)
The driver says bus plunge, bus plunge
by The Bobs.
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
Driving while having an MRI.
I make websites and stuff. Buy one.
+1. In this state, driving with passengers under the age of 18 IS a crime if the driver is under 18 him/herself, and IMHO, that's a Good Thing.
The one on-road accident I've been in over my ten years of solo driving (not counting being bumper-dinged in parking lots) was caused by a teenager with five of his best buddies shoehorned into a Ford Escort (!), blaring the radio while eating Mickey D's while yakking on the cell phone. He pulled out of a subdivision at 35 MPH, swerved across two lanes of rush-hour traffic, and T-boned into the right side of my Explorer. To boot, the kid had just gotten his license back after having it suspended for - you guessed it - reckless driving and teenage passenger violations. Suffice to say, it was gone for good as soon as the police arrived on-scene.
Normally I'd be the last one to call for government intervention in personal conduct, but I think they ought to require chauffeur's licenses for anyone who intends to transport more than one passenger on any regular basis. Especially when the passengers are juveniles, it's just too damned easy to get distracted, cause an accident and possibly injure or kill somebody.
First rule of trauma: Bleeding always stops.
When you crash into a family and kill them because you were taking 'acceptable risks' what about the kids you're gonna kill? Do us a favor. Take your car our right now on a deserted backroad and crash it into a tree while going 120 kph. Maybe it will save some lives. Fucking twit.
While I am not an advocate of cell phone use (especially texting) while driving, I have often gotten a large chuckle from those who advocate a ban on cell phone use.
Clearly these people do not have families. Cell phone use is in no way as distracting as having a spouse in the car. Having a spouse in the car is in no way as distracting as having kids in the car. Having kids in the car is in no way as distracting as having a spouse AND kids in the car.
I find it is very difficult driving with my family. It is far more distracting than any cell phone use that may occur in the car. Personally, I would not at all be opposed to a sheild between the driver and any passengers -- similar to that in a taxi. (I would be opposed to it becoming a Federal mandate -- we surely don't need anymore of THOSE.) It sure would make my driving life easier and quite a bit safer.
While admittedly, cell phone use is distracting, there are plenty of things that are far more distracting than cell phones.
What they tested 29 people 18 - 25? They should try testing people who have multi-tasked their entire working lives. . .
I started to write a post on a similar topic and my draft was blown away by browser lossage, so I'm glad someone made this point in the interim.
This is probably a complicated optimization space involving multiple variables, of which this research only explores one, and one should be wary of premature conclusions because they will likely lead to overly political effects ... like someone claiming we would be safer if we all rode motorcycles because there will be fewer passengers to distract us and it will be harder to comb our hair while driving.
For example, I totally agree that they need to control this experiment against research on drivers falling asleep at the wheel, since it seems unlikely that those who choose to have someone along to talk to in order to keep them awake are making it more likely they will crash. Now you might wish they wouldn't be driving at all in that state, but it's an imperfect world, and if we only allowed people to drive under optimal conditions, so few people would be able to drive that they'd probably just outlaw it as a frivolous extravagance. For example, global warming will probably mean a lot more carpooling, and hence a lot more conversation, and we aren't going to make it more likely that people do that if we tell them they can't talk while they ride along.
Also, the study mentions people 18-25, which car rental places won't even rent to, probably not just because they're more prone to have friends along, but maybe the entire way they think about driving, being new to it, is different. I found (just speaking about intuitions here, so not scientific, but maybe suggesting an area of continued investigation) over the decades I've been driving that it's become more automatic in some ways, not that it doesn't require judgment, but that I'm more aware of more things without having to try hard. I can look in the mirror and just directly understand the scene without having to interpret it. I think "I should slow" and my foot slows without me having to say "which is the brake". And many other more subtle things. Newell and Simon in studies decades ago made observations about the progression from short term to long term memory, and I suspect there are (and probably even documented in research) analogous effects related to the wiring of neural pathways for efficient use over time, so that what starts out as a cognitive process becomes a wired-in wetware and mechanical subroutine, freeing the brain for other tasks as one gets better. And there's been recent research (though I couldn't find a pointer on a quick web search) that I think was talking about the idea that people perceive certain kinds of interfaces as if they were extensions of their bodies--actual limbs--which I can imagine is how cars come to feel to experienced drivers. But anyone in the 18-25 range may not have been driving long enough to exhibit that... I seem to recall it took me a number of years before I felt those responses were truly automatic.
It's hard to tell if the research took issues like this into account from this news article because, although it cites the underlying research paper by name, it doesn't make the research paper clickable--it may not be web accessible.
Kent M Pitman
Philosopher, Technologist, Writer
The results are a Blinding Glimpse of the Obvious. Conflict between verbal and manual dexterity processing is a very well known and easily replicated phenomenon. I use it in every psych lab course. Not said here is that people with more left/right differentiation (right handed males, mostly) are more prone to this than those with less differentiated hemispheres (left handed males, most females, and so on).
However, supporting it with MRI is near to bogus. Activation as seen on MRI can be true 'activity' as in excitatory, inhibitory (far more important in that it pulls intended action out of the random background of spontaneous activity as well as selecting among the possible actions being preprocessed) or a combination of the two which results in a WTF answer to the question.
Worse yet, studying a phenomenon with two active behavioral components in a situation where no behavioral reaction is permitted (can't move in an MRI) cannot conclusively show the effect being claimed in TFA. It can theoretically show the tendency, but it cannot produce the behavior to correlate with the brain activity and so cannot show the two being linked. For that matter, if the processes that lead to the behaviors are triggered, but the person is stuck in an MRI, you'd pretty much have to expect a good deal of inhibitory activity as they expend effort to subdue that and stay still. Such effortful inhibition would produce MRI its own results, and they would have had this in their results.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
Tell me about it! Last week I almost got _seriously_ broadsided by a mom reaching back while she was coming up to a red light thinking she could make a right turn on red. She completely overestimated how much room she had to stop - the she was a good car-length (acadia) past the white line before I laid on my horn, and the next I saw in my rear-view, her entire front end was where my car would have been had I not swerved.
Scary shit, it is. In acadia-vs-camry land, I was definitely not in a good place. Someone was looking over me in that I was far enough ahead of the person to my left to let me swerve.
Mothers against distracted driving
Hmmm, like someone said, they first came for those that wanted more than 120 characters, but I did not speak because I didn't want more tha
So, I can certify this is true - the fact that you see a danger several seconds late can really put you in an accident
If you're going to drive while distracted you need to be trained to deal with it.
Pilots manage a vehicle in 3 dimensions, with no marked paths or lanes. Their aircraft will fall out of the sky if speed is not managed. At the same time they need to make constant radio calls to inform tower, controller or circuit traffic of their position, and follow instructions or rules on where they should be. The difference is that they are trained to manage all the tasks much more thoroughly than drivers are. They're not taught to occassionally glance at their instruments the way a driver is. They're taught to scan them constantly. They're not taught nothing about how to communicate with the tower - they're taught to aviate, navigate and communicate prioritizing in that order.
What we need is to train drivers to handle the distraction. Want to see if the distraction is going to make them worse. Well first give them some experience dealing with the distraction and give them some guidelines on how to deal with it so they can practice. Only then should they be tested on how safe they are.
This idea that we can somehow eliminate all distractions and make driving safer and that we should all feel guilty otherwise is nonsense. In the real world, distractions will happen. Kids will fight in the back seat. (correctly dealt with by either pulling over or ignoring them). The radio, conversations, and books on tape are distractions that we need to teach drivers to deal with (it should be part of the practical driving exam). Other distractions are unacceptablet because they take full concentration and should be banned. Anything that takes your eyes off the road for more than a second would fall under this category. So changing a radio station should still be permitted but watching a dvd or texting should not.
The trouble is in this risk adverse society common sense has been thrown out the window and has been replace with scaremongering and guilt. Moronic!
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
In the article, it mentions that the virtual car was steered by mouse or trackball. This is not the normal way to steer a car or truck. Also, they are leaving out the immersive nature of real life driving. I know I am a lot better a driving a real car than even a top of the line, arcade video game car.
I am not saying the data is useless, but the study is flawed and the conditions of the simulation probably play a significant role in the difference.
Don't try to out wierd me, three-eyes. I get stranger things than you, free with my breakfast cereal. --Zaphod Beeblebr
Please assist in enhancing the captainobvious tag, it should be captainoblivious.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
Another study also shows that replying to forum topics while watching TV leads to the beauty of my book is, if you don't have a coffee table, it turns into a coffee table!
Glad to read this, as it confirms many of my pet suspicions. To take it a step further, I think this phenomena is most pronounced with mobile phones for two reasons: 1. You cannot see the person you're talking to, so your brain makes efforts to visualize them. This leads to ever greater distractions as our consciousness is less in the present and more with the person you're talking to, combined with 2. The mobile nature of the mobile phone amplifies this effect over a regular phone. Regular phones tend to be in a relatively fixed location, most often one of some familiarity. This both grants more room for distraction, but also can ground the person to their physical location. But on a mobile, especially while driving, there's little grounding, and so the level of distraction is far, far greater. Just an idea. If anyone has any studies that indicate something along these lines, I've love to see them.
It's not the multitasking per se, its "process" prioritization.
If you do smalltalk with a passenger and can stop talking/listening when traffic requires your attention, fine.
OTOH, if you're having a heated argument with your spouse, you'll probably give it a higher priority than watching what's going on around you.
I always leave a *lot* of distance to people who talk on their phone or who have an animated conversation with a passenger. You can tell - head turning all the time, hands gesturing...
Those people are dangerous - thye are the ones who drift left and right all the time. I learned that lesson as a biker (from a couple of close calls) and it helps a lot in the car too.
thegodmovie.com - watch it
Ok, so measuring brain activity is great and all, but it doesn't really tell you too much about how _dangerous_ it is. I mean, yes, talking to a passenger distracts you a bit, because you're paying attention to them. But if there's some condition where you need to be paying attention to the road, odds are they'll see it too and shut up.
But my driving skill is still better there than 70% of the drivers on the road who are not distracted?
Ah well... nanny state continues unabated.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
If you get bored/hypnotised on long highway drives, you aren't going fast enough! :)
I read advertisements on the billboards and bumper-stickers to prevent myself from being distracted by all of these technological gadgets in my car. I love having a foolproof method to keep myself from getting distracted. There's an endless supply of billboards and bumper-stickers to read out there.
How 'focused' do you have to be to drive a car? Neurosurgery focused? A night carrier landing in bad weather focused? Sniper focused? MLB pitcher focused?
Seriously if driving a car were that hard there would be a million fatalities a day. This is just more nanny state bullshit foisted on us by the soccer mommies of the world who want to slap a bike helmet on everyone everywhere at all times.
Imagine if the automobile had just been invented today and was trying to get approval for use by the general public. Studies predict thousands of fatalities each year, and many more serious injury accidents. Can you imagine the legislature of any country passing a law that would allow this carnage?
I like this study because it helps highlight what an ignorant and knee-jerk reaction it is to advocate banning cellphones in cars, or forcing drivers to use hands-free kits. Cellphones are under fire because they are an easy to spot cause of distraction. Someone driving poorly can be spotted a good distance away with a cellphone to their ear, so drivers near them think, "Aha! More proof that cellphones are causing dangerous driving." The truth of the matter, as this study shows, is that having a conversation -- any conversation -- while performing any task is distracting. A hands-free kit does not remove the problem of distraction while driving since it is the act of being in engaged in a conversation that is the problem. The problem for law enforcement, the courts, lawyers, knee-jerk politicians, and well-meaning but misguided citizens is that once we accept the fact that any conversation distracts us from driving and makes us less safe on the the road, then we have to question the wisdom of putting passenger seats in cars. We have to question the wisdom of allowing radios to be in cars. Anything that might make our minds stray from the task of driving. Of course it is lunacy to think our society would ever accept outlawing passenger seats from cars, or radios from cars. But that's the dilemma. If the cellphone is dangerous because it distracts us with conversation, then so are passengers (perhaps even more so)... and so are radios. But there are those who could argue that not using a hands-free kit is more dangerous because we take our eyes off the road. Those people are not arguing that the conversation is the dangerous thing, they're arguing that taking our eyes off the road, or one of our hands off the steering wheel is what's so dangerous. To be consistent, then, those people would have to oppose cupholders, radios with knobs/dials on the dash, A/C switches on the knobs -- hell, even instrument clusters since the instrument guages force us to completely remove our eyes from the road umpteen times an hour. Those people should be opposed to vanity mirrors of any kind and frankly, they shouldn't like the idea of having in-car GPS or anything that could cause us to remove our eyes from the road. And for anyone who suggests that only having one hand on the steering wheel is less safe, I would remind them that there was a time in the not so distant past that every car was a manual trasmission and we always drove with one hand on the steering wheel. I even know an amputee with an automatic transmission who has no choice but to drive with one hand on the steering wheel and he's a fantastic driver. My point is simply that this study forces us to ask a lot of questions about what it is about cellphones that is any more dangerous than all the distractions in which we've been engaging since the invention of the automobile. I think its grossly inconsistent to moan and whine about cellphones without screaming about in-car radios, GPS, instrument clusters, cup-holders, passenger seats, vanity mirrors, map lights, manual transmissions, etc... and for a person to complain about everything distracting inside a car is to basically complain about cars themselves. Cars and everything in them... and life and everything about it... is distracting. Either accept it, or at least be consistent and blame all forms of distractions. It's just so much easier to blame cellphones since people can finally SEE one cause of distraction. It's a little harder to notice someone driving poorly because they are looking at themselves in the mirror, or because they're talking to a passenger seated next to them, or because they're glancing down at a GPS, or fiddling with their ashtrays, or adjusting a drink in their cupholders. But everyone can easily see a cellphone next to someone's ear so they say, "That's it, That's the problem!!! Ban cellphones from cars." That is very shortsighted and incredibly inconsistent.
-- I'd give my right arm to be ambidextrous
If they're on a game or simulator there is no risk of death, then otherwise cautious people will screw around more than they would on a real road.
Simulator derived stats are BS.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
...talking to your friend on the cell (even with a hand's free set) and your friend in the car is your friend in the car is in the same environment as you are, and knows when to shut the fuck up!
"Quote me as saying I was mis-quoted." -Groucho Marx
From the article : "Science News reports on recent research indicating that any kind of multitasking while driving is dangerous." : :)
You see, from where I come from, women always brag about how much women can multi-task, while guys can't.
If this is true, there is a question to be answered
If their Multi Tasking is better than ours (men), why do they drive like that? I mean,God's sake, what's so hard about parking your car ?!?!
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I can see how texting while driving can make you a bad driver; but talking while driving? People have been talking while driving for years. I don't think it's anywhere near as distracting as this experiment makes it out to be. The percentage of bad drivers on the road increases with car density. I didn't see a huge jump in bad drivers when cellphones got popular. Just a gradual climb as more and more drivers tried to fit on the same roads.
Personally, I feel less comfortable riding in a car with someone who holds the steering wheel with both hands and refuses to be distracted by anything.
The path to enlightenment is truly through homemade drugs!
You wrote "Parent seems to confuse being brilliant at calculus with being a good driver.". I'd go further...being brilliant at calculus doesn't mean you have the thing that's usually called "wisdom". You might be even simply STUPID if you think that using your mobile while driving is ok...
BTW, I wonder if manual transmission, that you mentioned in your example, is among the things that impede driving...perhaps it forces you to focus more on the activity of driving vs. automatic? (or, even worse, automatic coupled with cruise control) Not to mention that basically you have to have both hands free, so perhaps you'll think again before holding cellphone in one of them...
But what do I know, I drive manual exclusivelly...
One that hath name thou can not otter
I hate such stories, automobile/driving analogies suddenly make sense :/
One that hath name thou can not otter
Oh whoopees! News, I suppose that is what I recall seeing "Don't speak to the driver" in buses for public transport.
What will "Researchers" prove next. Heck they might find out we can not breathe under water or you burn your finger when you stick it into a wood fire.
Oh the joy of research, where would we be without it.
For many years I have been perplexed with why I ran off a canyon road while trying to dip my Burger King french fries in a ranch tub balanced on my knee, the mystery has been debunked. Who would of thought that not paying full attention to what the fuck you're doing could compromise that task.
Seems to me that there's a significant methodological problem with this study -- "driving" by using a mouse isn't the skill that most folks have done a lot. Seems that they've realy shown that answering questions or listening to a conversation can interfere with exercising a NEW skill -(mouse-driving navigation). What's this say about real driving? -TBD. Might be interesting to see if skill with FPS or other mouse-nav intensive games correlates with impact from distractions.
i\hbar\dot{\psi}=\hat{H}\psi
After reading the comments its quite apparent that some people can multitask or even do better multitasking, while many others do worse. If the problem really does need fixed (a question i don't have the information to answer) the answer is not to ban distraction, its to make the penalties stiff enough that people will stop and evaluate their own abilities.
What i propose is that if someone gets in an accident, which they are at fault for, while talking on the phone, revoke their license for a full year or more.
Yes its excessive, but that's the point. And it shouldn't be hard to check, just a simple subpoena to the cell phone provider to see if the phone is active at the time of the crash and if possible where it is, so as to avoid situation where the phone isn't in someone elses possession at the time
Seriously, ANYTHING that distracts people from driving is dangerous. Booze, conversations, cell phones, fiddling with the radio. ANYTHING. I didn't know that having common sense was newsworthy...
This post expresses my opinion, not that of my employer. And yes, IAAL.
Cell phones, texting, eating, etc are nothing compared to "Driving While Parenting". I keep hoping they will ban it so I can stay home.
"As a result, the less-ingrained skill â" in this case, driving, which is learned long after a person grasps a native language â" takes a neural hit." Just teach them to drive before they can talk. And there's the added bonus that rather than talking back or crying your tot can drive you home from the bar, making it safer for everyone.
is this concept that "if only the driver wasnt distracted, they would devote 100% of their cycles to driving, and that will make them better and safer drivers"
People NEVER devote 100% of their attention to any task for any extended period of time, they just arent wired that way.
Only drivers completely out of their element and suffering anxiety attacks are the ones who have their eyes glued to traffic, two handed sweaty grip on the wheel and riding an adrenalin high for every single lane change.
A good driver is one who can drive well while stoned sleepy on two calls simultaneously while using the navigator and eating dinner.
Otherwise, for the experienced driver, driving would be so boring, you would feel compelled to invest your efforts into driving on the edge, honing your precison cut-off and lane change moves. This is actually a lot more dangerous.
Or you could enter the "mode" where your mind is someplace completely else while you drive, perfectly, in auto-pilot.
Because driving can be monotonous and boring and any baboon can do it, in their sleep.
The real problem is that {some|most} people just dont drive all that well, and distracting them in any way is really a bad idea. Ideally, these people shouldnt actually be driving.
When you sit still for a long time and don't really concentrate on anything intricate, your brain starts to shut off. Pretty soon you start nodding off... where you lose consciousness suddenly and without control. It can be in a recliner or a bed or a car, doesn't really matter. I'm in the Army Reserve and drive 140 miles one way to my Reserve Center once a month at four in the morning, and it's a killer. At my day job I go in whenever, anywhere from 9 to noon and it's a five minute drive. So I'm not used to driving that far that early... I have two vehicles, a huge, old, 4x4 gas guzzler and a newer, more economical. In the truck it's easy to stay awake, you've got to constantly adjust your steering because of the worn-out suspension, the exhaust is loud, there's no such thing as cruise control, and you're bouncing all over the place. Keeps the blood flowing. In my car, I have to stop and walk around every 40 miles or so so I can stop falling asleep. I think part of the problem is that most newer cars require so little input to drive. You can drive with one knee and most cars float over bumps. Even if you take your hand off the wheel you'll just go straight. There's no sense of speed when everything is so smooth. Perfect for sleeping.
If I recall correctly, a UK study (one of the early ones that was studying mobile phone usage effects on driving) showed quite clearly that talking on a mobile phone you were holding while driving made you more likely to crash.
This seems kinda obvious, but I believe it was generally used as the basis of the legislative efforts here in Oz to make it illegal to do so.
The same experiment showed that talking on a hands-free mobile phone had a similar level of risk. This didn't seem to get picked up by the legislators, sadly.
What amused me was that the same experiment also showed that a passenger talking to you in the car produced the _same_ level of distraction and risk.
No one seemed to notice or care about that when making legislation, but I do note that our busses have prominent "Do not talk to the driver while the bus is moving" signs, so at least one area of professional driving has noticed. (Then again, people who insist on talking to Taxi drivers are really putting themselves on the line, given they already have trip-monitors and radio systems to operate)
Paul "TBBle" Hampson
Paul.Hampson@Pobox.Com
Your sig saddens me... New Zealand always used to be a country of sense and reason. I am honestly shocked to see a climate change denier website based in NZ.
My book about LSD and Self-Discovery
Also on facebook as: DroppingAcidDaleBewan
Other lethal combinations: driving & sex (virgin drivers live longer); sex & talking (obviously sex suffers that "neural hit")
Ok hopefully I'm not repeating some already useful info that others have said but- if any lawmaker that has considered the validity of outlawing talking on a cell phone while driving...
-Talking to a passenger is statistically more dangerous than talking on a cell phone. I don't make hand gestures while on a cell phone, and a cell phone user doesn't point out things passing by me to look at.
-Anything you have to look at to verify its correctness is dangerous. Texting is dangerous. So is looking at your radio to figure out what station you're on.
-There is a correlation between slow drivers and dangerous drivers, and people talking on a cell phone. This is the same group of people who instantly dial-up someone on their cell phone the moment they get out of a college class with absolutely nothing in mind to talk about. I call them "dumb people".
-Outlawing people on a cell phone creates a more dangerous environment. Not only are people going to continue to talk on their cell phone while in a car, but now they are more distracted because they have to look out for cops while they are at it. In addition, they'll panic when they see a cop.
-The only difference between talking on a cell phone and using a hands-free headset is one hand (or a titled head). Are one-handed people (or people with kneck injuries) unallowed to drive?
-Reaching for something in a difficult place is dangerous, however you cannot enforce that people are putting their cell-phones in an easy to access spot.
-Men talking to their wives on a cell phone are 100% not distracted. All of their attention is on the road, and none of it is on the yapping in their ear.
That's not to say that distraction doesn't happen in actual driving situations, of course. But I would strongly caution jumping to conclusions on the basis of this research.
Also, I have another problem with this research, one that is much more of a deeper problem. Neural imaging or EEG reading only measure gross neural activity. And not even directly. We assume that if activity appears to drop by the measures of the imaging device that it automatically means attention is being diverted or that it's creating a more dangerous situation. I am not entirely convince that that is a reliable assumption to make in all cases. We don't have the foggiest notion of what is really going on at the neural level. It's the same problem with IQ test -- we don't have a definition of "intelligence" that anyone can agree on, and yet we think we can measure it and quantify it with a singular scalar number. And well, we have a whole sordid history of the IQ score being misinterpreted and misused across the board.
So, let's not jump to conclusions until more research is done. For instance, an easy one to do is check accident rates of single drivers against drivers with one or more passengers in the car. Oh, I can see it now -- laws being passed to make it illegal to drive with passengers!!! Which bring up another thorny issue -- the way lawmakers interpret research results. A topic for another time.
Ruby Neural Evolution of Augmenting Topologies
I learnt a long time ago, if I'm going to drive at highway speeds ... I need to shut up!
I only respond to my wife's comments in mono-syllables, and won't listen to music much.
It seems to me that anyone who advocates their "right" to do something else while driving,
does not understand the basic laws of physics,
let alone the laws of the road.
I have often wished for a "micro-wave" gun to shoot into silence the mobile/cell phones
of those people who seem to think they have a "right" to talk on the phone while driving,
thus endangering every other road user in the vicinity.
Don't blame me, it's usually 2 in the morning when I post
I've notice that police tend to treat new traffic laws like a kid treats new toys -- They become very eager to use them, even when it is not merited. They tie up your time in court and your money in legal expenses all to no avail since the inferior court judge is also eager to "enforce" the new toys -- whoops, I mean laws.
Wow, and all at our expense. No thank you!
Ruby Neural Evolution of Augmenting Topologies
I am highly aware of what level of distraction any given activity creates and compensate for it in my driving in various ways. Like increasing my buffer zone gap, driving a bit slower, maybe shift to a slower lane, etc.
I had one nasty accident back when I was 17, and it was due to a major distraction. I had a girlfriend in the car and I was thinking about dumping her and persuing another girl. I ran a red light at a turn across a busy road and crashed into an oncoming car. Not pretty.
After that experience, I completely reworked how I drive and what I focus and concentrate on. Awareness is the key, as I keep constant awareness of the other drivers around me and occasionly run scenarios through my head of how I'd react if they did something untoward on the road.
Suffice it to say, I have not had another serious accident in 30 years. I've had quite a few of near events, but the majority of them involved the faults of other drivers that I was able to react to in time. I've only had a couple of nears that would've been my fault, but again I was able to react to the situations in time!
What's the point of my story here? That passing laws will NOT make better drivers. Driving is a complex task, a very dangerous task, and becoming a better driver involves a willingness to face the nature of the problem and devise solutions to many, if not all of the possibilities and scenarios that might ensue. It is basically a risk management issue, and if you consider than annually 41,000 people die on the roadways in US, it's one we need to look at. With all the laws passed over the decades, it's done nothing to turn down the annual death toll.
We can bicker and banter over cell phone usage in the car, but that death toll was there before the advent of cell phones, and it will be there in the foreseeable future. The only thing that will work is raising the awareness of the nature of driving to your average driver with the hopes that he or she will take it to heart and begin to do some of the things I have outlined here with my own experiences.
Ruby Neural Evolution of Augmenting Topologies
Unskilled and Unaware of It.
Mart"I know I will be modded down for this": where's the option '-1, Asking for it'?
RTFA, the title of this article should be "Maneuvering a virtual vehicle with a mouse while distracted...".
Big difference between that and actually driving, starting with the level of experience. Even people who play driving games generally do so with a wheel or a gamepad, not a mouse/trackball, so this would be an unfamiliar task for just about everyone.
The fact that their performance suffered on the unfamiliar task while performing a familiar one (talking) isn't surprising. The problem is that it doesn't really translate to the driving scenario, unless you're 16 and just got your license.
I for one have a fairly sophisticated "auto-pilot" that makes routine driving tasks automatic, and allows me to concentrate on watching out for unusual traffic events, etc. That automatic mental process is just as well ingrained as listening to a conversation, IMHO, which could make a big difference in the results. But it only applies to real (or realistic?) driving --not to lying on a table and "driving" with a mouse.
All of these articles and comments about "worse for safety" miss the point that everything has impact, but the key point is where the threshold is. Driving 25 is safer than driving 55, but no one seriously expects the speed limit to be set to 15 or 25 mph. If cell phones were really as dangerous as everyone seems to think they are, accident rates would have soared over the last decade. People have been multitasking and driving for then entire life of the automobile, and the wagon before that. It only matters when your load increases past the threshold of your ability to handle it, and only the individual can judge that.
This study appears to have used the 29 least multitaskable drivers on the planet. The study composition and small size make it highly questionable. Is 29 drivers enough to make broad pronouncements about all drivers? How did they select the drivers to use? If this study's results are accurate, then why is it necessary at all. According to the results, the millions of people who have driven since the creation of the car, and who have spoken to a passenger or fumbled with a control, would have had enough near misses and accidents to have made driving with a chatty passenger too dangerous to do without crashing. Cops would never be able to call in a high speed chase without pulling over and stopping. According to this study they would simply crash while trying. There is no question that accidents are more likely with distractions, but this study seems to really exaggerate the risks. Akin to warning all people to avoid going outside due to the danger of being hit by a meteorite.
What's worse, an inexperienced teenager or otherwise bad driver in a small sedan, or a bad driver in gigantic SUV? Even good drivers have difficulty staying on the road, fitting in parking spots, etc. in a large SUV. Also the amount of damage an SUV causes compared to a sedan is tremendous.
Also, whats worse - a bad driver with full road visibility due to be surrounded by small vehicles, or a bad driver with large SUVs in front of and behind her preventing her from seeing traffic?
SUVs are absolutely the problem. Not the only problem, but a major one.
I believe this is only true in the US, I've never seen low speed rated tires anywhere else - Certainly here in the UK I've never seen a new (of course you can fit cheap tyres if you want, but most dealers wont do it) with tyres rated at less than the maximum speed of the car - mine has 150 mph tyres and the car probably wont go over 130.
US laws used to be crazy - When I lived there (1980's) most cars had 85mph speedometers so you didn't have clue what speed you were doing... Somehow that was meant to make things safer.
I observe cel phone drivers who are totally oblivious. Driving is a highly dangerous activity. It demands all of the efforts of your cortex. You need to be aware of the road ahead, and where drivers are around you, especially on urban multilane roads laden with traffic. When you are distracted, EVERYONE is in mortal danger. Pay attention.
They tested it on 18-25 year old drivers.
Would the results be different if they tested it on drivers with 10 years of near-daily driving experience on very familiar roads in familiar conditions?
On an unrelated matter: How much distraction is too much? If we are going to outlaw talking on cell phones, should we also outlaw driving while fatigued? How about driving home after a hard day at work when you've got a lot on your mind, or, for students, driving home after school when you are thinking about tonight's big football game, tomorrow's important exam, or how you are going to ask the cute red-haired girl out? I contend that a typical high school student with things on his mind is more of a hazard than a typical 40 year old with 20+ years of driving experience who is yakking on a cell phone. For that matter, an 18 year old driver who is completely focused on the road may still be more dangerous than that distracted 40-year-old.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Unfortunately it's a no-win situation. If the soccer moms keep their kids tied up and gagged, they get dinged for child abuse. If they don't, they get distracted and will ding YOU.
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
It is not dangerous. It just adds some improbability to the driving. And everyone knows that improbability drive is the way of the future.
Now all we need is an effective way to clear off the remainings of the sperm whales and we're good to go.
I have mixed feelings. I think that listening to music can enhance my alertness, but I have had several occasions where listening to an interesting news show has made me miss an exit, and in general I discourage anybody from talking to me while I'm driving--passenger or phone. I honestly can't drive safely and have a conversation at the same time. If the road is familiar and I know where I'm going, it's not a significant problem, but talking to me on a strange road is asking for trouble.
Then again, I've got a variant of ADD, which may have something to do with it. I don't think I'm an unsafe driver by any means, but I'll be the first to admit my biggest flaw when driving is awareness.
Re: video games, everyone interested in the genre should go look at Live for Speed, which is probably the most realistic driving simulator available today. Just don't try to play it with a keyboard or mouse.