It makes sense: If you hold a phone, you have only one hand for the steering wheel; if you dial, you look away from the road. But studies show that the effects of driving while yakking go beyond difficult auto mechanics (as it were). In fact, fMRI studies show that talking on the cell while driving makes the brain itself a dumber driver.
The brain’s parietal lobe is responsible for spatial processing and generally knows if you are or aren’t going to messily whack something with a Buick (it’s also responsible for high Tetris scores). But the brain drain of talking on the cell while driving results in less parietal lobe activation (a 37 percent decrease, according to one study).
It’s as if our brain is a city with rolling blackouts: We can’t power everything at once, and if energy goes to cell conversation, it’s taken away from driving.
So is multitasking a tool of the devil, leading to the devolution of the brain and the loss of human planetary dominance? A study published in the journal Science says yes (OK, they didn’t quite put it that way).
Researchers compared heavy media multitaskers (computer, music, web, texting, talking—all at once), to light media multitaskers and found that even when unplugged, the heavy media group was worse at filtering relevant information from the environment, worse at quickly retrieving relevant information from their memories, and worse at quickly switching cognitive tasks.
iDread
Nomophobia: fear of being out of mobile-phone coverage.
Genius Tester #3: Meeting in the Middle
Imagine you’re going on vacation and your mother has agreed to watch your Labrador. You live an hour’s drive apart. At 7:30 a.m., you’ll both start driving toward each other and will exchange the dog wherever you meet in the middle, presumably around 8:00 at the exact midpoint. But you’d really like to get back to your house as soon as possible. Should you leave a little earlier or later than 7:30? Should you drive fast or slow? What’s your best driving strategy to get you home ASAP?
These results are far from conclusive—much more research is needed—but they suggest that rather than training the brain for this brave, new, media-rich world, multitasking makes us less suited for pretty much everything.
