Driving tips: don’t use cell phone while driving (your brain cannot multitask).

If I can watch TV while having dinner, and if I can walk listening to my iPod, then I can also answer a call or listen to my voicemails on my cell phone while driving without any problem.

That’s what many of us believe that we are very good at multitasking and we are capable of performing multiple demanding task simultaneously.

But it isn’t so, unfortunately.

A research team from Carnegie Mellon University found in their study that a simple task of listening to sentences while driving degrades the driving performance significantly and also decreases brain activity in key regions that control the driving task.

In their experiment, twenty nine participants were scanned using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) while they steered a virtual car in a driving simulator in single task condition. In dual task condition, while driving the virtual car they also had to listen to general knowledge sentences and answer true or false.

The simulated driving performance was evaluated in terms of road maintenance error (hitting a road barrier) and path maintenance error (deviating from the lane). The listening performance was evaluated in terms of accuracy (true/false) and response time.

What researchers found is quite interesting:

• The participants answered the listening comprehension with 92% accuracy level. This confirmed that they were paying attention to the sentences.
• There were significantly more road maintenance errors when the listening task was added to the driving task.
• There were larger deviations from the ideal lane when the listening task was added to the driving task.
• There was significant decrease in the activation of brain regions that control the driving task when listening was added to the driving task as compared to driving alone, though the language regions showed considerable increase in activation.
• There was no additional activation in the executive functioning regions when driving with listening as compared to driving alone. Generally, our executive functioning regions show increased activation when we do multi-tasking in the form of task-switching, such as, checking emails while writing a report and watching TV.

Thus, even though the driving and listening tasks draw resources from different non-overlapping regions of the brain, when performed concurrently the activity in the driving related regions is significantly decreased. So, does the brain divides its resources when performing two demanding, but moderately difficult, tasks concurrently?

According to the researchers,

We interpret this diversion of attention as reflecting a capacity limit on the amount of attention or resources that can be distributed across the two tasks. This capacity limit might be thought of as a biological constraint that limits the amount of systematic neural activity that can be distributed across parts of the cortex.

It is highly likely that other activities, such as, tuning radio, talking to fellow passenger, eating or drinking, can also degrade your driving performance though their impact has not been researched yet.

Just imagine if a simple task of listening sentences can degrade your driving performance, how adversely your driving will be affected if you talk/text on the cell phone while driving.

I wonder how the pilots manage the challenges in flight operations posed by multiple tasks that need to be performed simultaneously.

Also read:

• Just, M. A., Keller, T. A., & Cynkar, J. A. (2008). A decrease in brain activation associated with driving when listening to someone speak. Brain Research, 1205, 70-80.
• Learning and multitasking are not good friends

 

 

[image credit: Kyle May]