Brain Says No to Cell Phone Use
It seems your brain is a little too slow. A new study by neuroscientists Paul E. Dux, Ph.D., and René Marois, Ph.D., of Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, shows that mental strain for driving and cell phone use is too much for it to handle. It seems the brain is a uni-tasker.
They used functional magnetic resonance imaging to lend evidence to the concept of a processing bottleneck in the brain. The bottleneck leads to a processing queue in the brain to take care of everything you are doing. Since both driving and conversation takes a lot of information to perform they make quite a bottleneck.
Now I have evidence to support my argument whenever anyone says, "It's okay, I use a hands free head set." The problem with cell phone use while driving was never about holding a phone, though having two hands on the wheel is not a bad idea. It was about the mental distraction. Hands free or not, it is still a problem.
This study was published in the December 21, 2006, issue of the neurology journal, Neuron.
Comments
I don’t even try to pretend that talking on the phone doesn’t distract me…it does! I think this is going to continue to be a big issue in the future as more powerful cell phones and other mobile devices get to be even more distracting.
I have been thinking about this issue a lot recently. Is the problem the phones or the cars themselves? Which one will be more reasonable to control? Should we give up driving so we can jabber and click away on the bus/train, or should we cease extraneous activities altogether while driving?
Personally I vote to do away with cars because they are so awful for many other reasons.
In general, I think this issue is represenative of a larger issue: after we can invent cool things, do we lose all control of how these things are acceptably applied in society?