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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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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.
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
...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
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.
You know, SUVs are not the problem. The people behind the wheel are the problem. Most SUVs are worth jack shit and most people who buy them are too stupid to know this. They're purchased by women who feel disempowered and by men who don't want to be seen in a minivan, which would suit their needs better in about 99% of the cases - and just to back that up, sans lift kit an Astro AWD will go places that 4WD pickups get stuck. I can drive an SUV without killing anyone, but I don't, because they're stupid.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
There's a major difference between flying a plane and driving a car: a fast moving car is always one or two seconds away from utter disaster, whereas a plane nearly always gives its pilot much more time to react.
Think about driving on the highway. You're driving along at 75MPH at a minimal safe distance from the guy in front of you. He slams on his brakes. You have at best perhaps three or four seconds to slam on yours, and that's assuming that your minimal safe distance is larger than is typical and that your braking system is at least as powerful as his. There are many other situations when driving a car where you only have a second or two to react. A small twitch of the steering wheel can send your car straight into a concrete pillar.
Flying, on the other hand, is much slower and more cerebral. There are very few events which require immediate reactions. An engine failure on takeoff comes to mind, and other major mechanical failures, as well as suddenly spotting someone nearby on a collision course. But these are all extremely rare events. For most of the trip on most flights, nothing happens which the pilot can't stop and think about for ten seconds first. For the phases of the flight which are really critical in this respect, such as takeoff and landing, the FAA enforces a sterile cockpit rule which basically says that all non-essential communications should be avoided, precisely because of this problem.
Ultimately I don't think pilots deal with this particularly better than drivers do. It's just that if a pilot is distracted for five seconds it basically never matters, whereas a driver being distracted for five seconds is likely to kill a whole bunch of people.
One thing that pilots do better and are trained to do better is to actively eliminate distractions. If you ever fly in a small plane, try asking the pilot a bunch of inane questions during some important task, such as landing. If he's any good, he'll tell you to be quiet and ask him again on the ground. If this attitude carries over to driving then he will be a safer driver, not because he can deal with distractions but because he can prioritize and is willing to stop them when he's in a position where he can't deal with them.
And yes, I am a pilot. One of the things I love about flying is how it doesn't demand that twitchy reflexive on-top-of-my-game attitude that safe driving requires.
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