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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."
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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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
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.
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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.
On that point, I can't count the number of times i've driven from point A to point B without even being able to remember the intervening time, because I was too engrossed in something I was thinking about... basically driving completely on auto-pilot.
It gets so bad that sometimes I arrive at a destination I wasn't intending to simply because that's my most common route, and when on auto-pilot my brain just goes where it usually does.
I've done this during rush hour traffic even. Clearly, some part of my brain is able to function without much higher level control and avoid accidents, and pay attention to traffic, and signs and lights, and everything else. All while my conscious mind is somewhere else.
Is this unsafe? I don't know.. I've never been in an accident because of it. The few accidents i've had have been the fault of others (getting rear-ended while at a stop light, etc..)
I *DO* find my driving is worse when i'm talking to someone in the car, because this is not a common practice. Talking to someone on the Cell Phone, i'm typically more paranoid about my driving, over compensating even for my distractedness by ensuring to leave enough room at all times to react.
I think Most people who are distracted drives don't drive defensively (or offensively).
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Driving lessons and the test have to be done with someone talking to you all the time.
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I have to disagree with at least one point for serious reasons.
I drove 3 hours a day for 4 years. About 6 months into this I started listening to books on tape, and I found my alertness level while driving was improved significantly. When I was just listening to the radio or my ipod, and it was the same stuff I've heard a thousand times before, my mind drifted. When I started keeping my mind awake and aware with audiobooks, I found I was surprised by traffic around me much less often.
I touted this to several coworkers who also had long drives, and collectively we all agreed: audiobooks keep your mind more active, and increase your overall awareness of arising traffic situations, we found ourselves in fewer close calls and surprised by things around us less often.
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Boy howdy. Thirty-odd years ago, my uncle was a traveling salesman in west Texas and one fine day he slammed into the back of a stopped Greyhound. He survived but the only thing he remembered was being in sort of a catatonic state before the crash. He drove several hours every day and couldn't recall much of it.
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!
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No, what I mean is that I'd be startled by the car in front of me braking less frequently, and not need to slam on my brakes, or realizing I was drifting over the center line, or suddenly looking around me and not being certain if I had missed my exit because I didn't immediately recognize my surroundings.
Things which I couldn't have helped noticing before because they would have made themselves known to me eventually if I had missed them.
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This study didn't mention it, but hints at the reason people turn down the radio when they are trying to find an address. I also remember a comedian in the 80's that used that as a joke.
Anecdotal evidence. Here's my counterexample:
I was once being driven by someone who turned her head directly at me and asked me "Why do you always criticize my driving?" *Boom* - she rearended the guy in front of her. Thank god it was low speed in a parking lot.
The precedent has been set. Nearly all people drive OK when they've been drinking, some don't with catastrophic consequences and now it's illegal for everyone. If you can justify criminal penalties when driving while drunk (which is reasonable, in my opinion, though not the way it's being enforced now), then similar distractions ought to bear the same penalties. Be consistent!
I lived near a women's college when I lived in Tokyo. The only time my health was in danger on the sidewalks was from students riding bicycles while talking on cell phones and smoking at the same time.
The only time I've ever been responsible for an accident was when I was driving with a Big Gulp between my legs and I squeezed the cup a bit too hard and soda spurted out over my lap. Dang. If it had been McDonald's coffee, I'd have been a millionaire.
While I'm happy that you think books on tape might have helped your driving, it's really the same confidence people have when driving drunk.
the difference is this - do you remember anything the audiobook tells you?
No, of course not. If it did, it'd be because you were concentrating on the words and not on driving, but because the book is providing enough 'background' distraction, you end up shutting it out and find that you stop distracting yourself.
An example: a student once walked into a professor's office and was made to wait, and he started fidgiting and fidgiting, barely unasble to stand still. The professor told him to count the books on the wall behind him, and the student calmed down completely.
The reason: left to yourself with (apparently) nothing to do, your mind wanders all over the shop. Give it a little task to do and it remains settled. A lot of people find music to be better as words tend to make people listen too hard to them - ie, if you want to concentrate on something, wordless music is better than the radio that interrupts every so often to speak to you. You will always change focus when that happens.
So yeah, your audiobook isn't surprising to help you drive better.
I've held a driving license for around 13 years now, and over the last 5 years have been averaging between 600-900 km per week, mostly 2 hour trips twice a day. I find that it's very easy to let your mind wander once you've been behind the wheel for a while. I noticed that my mind wandered a lot less when I had some music going or something like HHGTTG or Little Britain. There would be far less instances of me suddenly realising that I had no memory of the last 20 minutes, or making a right turn and after completing the turn not being certain that I checked for oncoming traffic first (i'm in Australia, so a right hand turn involves crossing the lane for oncoming traffic). I'm pretty sure I did check first, but not remembering if I had or not is a bit unnerving...
I live in a rural area, so I find driving in the city a bit of a pain, and quite stressful. Once I start to get a lot of cars sharing the road with me as I get into the city, I find the radio really irritating and have to turn it off, and my mind doesn't wander at all.
My best theory for this is that having some music or something going occupied the part of my mind that would otherwise lead me to a lack of concentration on the task at hand, but once the task at hand got more complicated, I needed that part of my brain too so I'd have to turn the music off.
In the last few years I have gotten a car kit for my mobile phone, and am quite aware of how distracting that is, so I try and keep conversations short (eg I'll call you when I reach my destination) or just pull over. Maybe that's just me though, some people claim that it doesn't distract them at all.
I wonder how much variation there is to the effect of distraction on people...
Speaking from experience... driving on most amphetamines is a REALLY bad idea. Overconfidence, other effects of the drug not directly related to the "pick me up" (e.g. the very minor hallucinogenic effects of MDMA), and physical jitteriness are all things that cause problems for operating a vehicle.
That said, it's still probably better than driving while extra-ordinarily tired (to the point that you're falling asleep at the wheel).
Oh, and as a tangent, also from experience, driving on actual hallucinogens is also REALLY REALLY bad (although I guess that's probably obvious).
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