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."

I have to disagree

because I'm driving right now while typing this post on my laptop and I'm not in the least bit distra

Re:I have to disagree

Huh. I think someone just had an accident outside my apartment.

and why did that laptop just come flying through the window?

cted

Re:I have to disagree

It was awful nice of you to click on "Post" for him.

Re:I have to disagree

The "Post"-mortum button?

Re:I have to disagree

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.

Re:I have to disagree

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.

Re:I have to disagree

Another way to look at this is to ask what was done in the study? Did they look at long trips, or just take short samples?

I was curious, so I went and read the article...

During one-minute virtual trips, participants listening to sentences drove onto the shoulder of the pavement or into the wrong lane 13 times on average, compared with 9 times on average for undisturbed drivers.

One minute trips!

Also take note of the fact that the participants were laying down and driving with a mouse. So pretty much this is nothing at all like driving.

After conducting a lame study like that, they concluded with some idle speculation:

Listening to talk radio or to spoken directions from a navigation system while driving probably have similar effects to what we found,â Just says. âoeMultitasking puts high demands on the brain.â

Yeah - um. Probably.

This was at Carnegie Mellon, and it's reported in what looks to be a respectable science magazine. Worse yet, this is the kind of stuff that drives public policy.

What a joke. Sorry to rant - you can look at my history and see it's not my usual MO. But sheesh. Come on.

Re:I have to disagree

I thought that too, but I think he's made a good point. Perhaps his driving while listen to audio books is less attentive than it would be without for short journeys but on long monotonous journeys, your attention can just as easily wander, or you can get sleepy and your attention will be even worse than if your mind is being stimulated by more than just the driving. Personally, the only accidents (not serious ones, just bumper scuffles, two of which were shortly after I learned to drive, and one of which was about 5 minutes after I woke up.. :s ) I've had were when passengers were present. I do tend to rush more if I have passengers too, because I feel a responsibility to get people to their destination quickly, when I'm driving around town by myself I tend to chill out and just enjoy my music.

I do lots of observation while driving - frequent mirror checks at all 'hazards' (you should be checking your rearview mirror every 10 seconds anyway - that sounds like a lot but it isn't once you do it automatically, and it keeps you aware of what's going on around you in case you need to break suddenly or something like that). The checks are all pretty much built in now, I remember a few times that I've just stopped mid sentence while speaking to someone because I'm approaching a 'hazard' and need to concentrate more on my driving: I learned the police 'Roadcraft' System of Car Control on an advanced driving course a few months ago, and I highly recommend any such courses (mine included defensive driving, skid control and a more rigourous driving test than the standard UK driving test) to people to improve their driving and make even those times when you're driving on 'autopilot' safer.. though it's never really a good thing to let yourself drift into that kind of state while controlling over a ton of metal moving at speed!

Re:I have to disagree

The plural of "anecdote" is not "data".

You're right, it's "empirical evidence."

I'm all for a certain amount of regulation...

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.

Re:I'm all for a certain amount of regulation...

I'm totally against (hands full) cellphone calls while driving. I really don't care if somebody wrecks his or her car against a tree while calling and breaks all the bones in their body, but there are other people on the road aswell.

When on the road there is only one thing that is important and that is safety.

Re:I'm all for a certain amount of regulation...

Banning regular cell-phone talk in cars is not going to do much to improve safety.

I'm blowing several moderations I've made to write this, but I think it has to be said: the research shows (beyond any reasonable doubt, and in plentiful quantities) that driving while using any mobile phone (hand-held or hands-free, the statistics are near-identical) is worse for safety than driving several times over the legal blood alcohol limit in most jurisdictions.

Now, you can act on this information in spectacularly the wrong way: the UK introduced a law to ban only hand-held phones, leading to the false impression that hands-free is safe and a rush of marketing implying that from hands-free vendors. The authorities then failed to enforce the new law anyway, to the extent that almost all drivers who admit to using a mobile illegally in studies also say it's because they don't think there's any serious risk of getting caught. That's hardly a deterrent, and in implicitly supporting the use of hands-free (which has near-identical danger stats, remember), if anything it has made things worse.

But there is no doubt that viewing use of a mobile phone while driving in the same socially unacceptable light as driving while drunk or high should be a good thing for road safety in the long run. Whether the correct answer to this is to make new laws, or simply to run a public awareness campaign to tell people the facts (how many people have you seen on Slashdot claiming, probably quite sincerely, that they can drive just fine while using a phone?), is open to debate.

Multitasking test

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 ;-)

Re:Multitasking test

An eighteen year old girl from my town who is the valedictorian of her senior class was driving and was also text messaging. She went left of center and hit an older couple head-on killing the wife immediately and the husband died a few days later.

So here she is... having everything her way (having to choose between Harvard and Yale) and suddenly she is facing the awesome responsibility of killing two individuals through neglect... something that was preventable.

Yeah... these stories are anecdotal... never-the-less one may learn from others bad judgments and experiences.

The couple are dead. She is brilliant having taken calculus in the 7th grade... and yet her cleverness can not restore these two humans back to life.

It will haunt her for her entire life.

Some risks are manageable.

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.

Sound quality has an effect, yes/no?

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.

Re:Sound quality has an effect, yes/no?

In my experience, yes. Also, the amount of background noise makes a difference. Following a conversation inside a car while the radio is on is more difficult (to me) than having that conversation in a quiet room.
Last year I visited some friends in the UK. English is my second language, and I've no trouble understanding any of them (various regional accents notwithstanding). But in a crowded restaurant, I found I could only understand half of what was being said.

I can testify

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.

Not completely straight-forward

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.

Re:Not completely straight-forward

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).

Well that answers the Atlanta question....

...of why traffic is so damn slow, everyone is distracted.

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" ,,, uh like this is rush hour city traffic.....

Listening to audio books.

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.

Highway hypnosis is even more dangerous

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.

Re:Dear Slashdot readers

How about a whole site full of them? [lacantdrive.com].

Or maybe you can tell her off yourself [platewire.com].

Re:I think it's dependent on the level of experien

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.