This Is Your Brain on Cell Phone

A National Safety Council paper shows how distracted driving affects mental processes and creates serious road hazards

You probably remember those old public service announcements:

This (egg) is your brain.

This (hot fry pan) is drugs.

This (egg frying) is your brain on drugs. Any questions?

The National Safety Council (www.nsc.org) isn’t taking that dramatic a stand in its campaign to ban cell phone use while driving. But the council has published a white paper that describes in scientific terms how the brain is affected when its attention is divided by distractions, such as phoning while behind the wheel.

The paper’s findings are sobering, and reading it may lead you to re-examine your policies on how your people in the field use cell phones.

Being ‘blind’

The paper, “Understanding the Distracted Brain: Why Driving While Using Hands-Free Cell Phones Is Risky Behavior,” starts with the story of a 2004 accident in Grand Rapids, Mich., in which a young woman ran a red light while talking on a cell phone and slammed into another car crossing the intersection.

Police found that the driver never touched her brakes and was traveling 48 mph when she crashed, killing a 12-year-old boy. Witnesses said the driver wasn’t looking down, dialing or texting. She was looking straight ahead. “Researchers have called this crash a classic case of inattention blindness caused by the cognitive distraction of a cell phone conversation,” the paper states.

Even drivers using hands-free phones tend to look at but not see objects, NSC experts say. “Estimates indicate that drivers using cell phones look at but fail to see up to 50 percent of the information in their driving environment.”

Growing concern

There are nearly 300 million wireless subscribers in the United States. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration estimates that 11 percent of all drivers at any given time are using cell phones, and the NSC estimates that more than one in four motor vehicle crashes involve cell phone use.

A few states have acted to ban driving while talking on a handheld phone, but the NSC says evidence shows that hands-free phoning is not safe, either. Here are some observations from the white paper:

The brain can’t multi-task. Unlike a computer, it can’t perform two tasks at once. It handles tasks sequentially, switching from one to another. When we try to handle two complex tasks, such as phoning and driving, “Important information falls out of view and is not processed by the brain. For example, drivers may not see a red light.”

Distraction affects reaction time. A driver’s speed of response to a hazard can make the difference between a crash and an accident avoided. “When the brain is experiencing an increased workload, information processing slows, and a driver is much less likely to respond to unexpected hazards in time to avoid a crash,” the NSC says.

Phone talkers may drift out of their lane. While inattention blindness and slower reactions are the most serious issues, phone talkers can also have trouble staying in their traffic lane.

“(When) we are driving at roadway and freeway speeds with vehicles spaced less than a few feet from each other in parallel lanes, the margin of error for decision-making and response time to avoid a crash is very small,” the NSC says. “Perhaps drivers who create a hazard by straying from their lanes must depend on other drivers around them to drive defensively and respond appropriately, and it may be those reacting drivers whose cell phone use should be of concern.”

Who is at risk?

The paper cites evidence showing that people know the risks of distracted driving in general, but tend to exempt themselves. “In a AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety survey, 83 percent of respondents said drivers using cell phones pose a ‘serious’ or ‘extremely serious’ problem,” the paper says. And yet, more than half the people in the same survey said they had talked on cell phones while driving in the previous 30 days, and 17 percent reported doing so often or very often.

The NSC paper goes into some fascinating physiology that describes how the brain actually reacts when trying to process two or more tasks at once. It’s enough to make anyone think twice about talking on a cell phone while driving – let alone texting, programming a GPS, or checking e-mail on a smart phone.

Are you, and are your field personnel, fully aware of the severe distraction caused by phoning while driving? If you think you might not be, the NSC paper is well worth reading.



Discussion

Comments on this site are submitted by users and are not endorsed by nor do they reflect the views or opinions of COLE Publishing, Inc. Comments are moderated before being posted.