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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
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!
How about a whole site full of them?.
Or maybe you can tell her off yourself.
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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.
Gruesome mess. Just awful.
When the cops finally arrived, the poor git - dressed in women's panties and covered in blood - was screaming "Can you hear me now, bitch?! Honk-honk!"
"The fight for freedom has only just begun." - Geert Wilders
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)
Fine, so lets ingrain driving before language!
Baby cars!
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.
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.
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
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.
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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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