A Startling Discovery About the Effects of Driving--On the Brain!

Distracted driving is now conventionally understood as driving while texting, updating your Twitter page, or talking on your phone. However, what is not often discussed is what neuroscience tells us about the impact driving actually has on our brains: 

Did you know that driving is actually one of the most distracting activities for a human being to take part in, and that which can lead to serious attention lapses simply because it can be so boring? 

According to research in lapses of attention done by Ian Robertson (A neuropsychologist),  keeping one's mind on a particular routine task, such as driving a bus or car, is one of the most difficult things for the human brain to do. In fact, as Robertson explains in Psychology Today, since the Autobahns in Germany were built, civil engineers have discovered that they have needed to build unnecessary bends in the highways--simply to keep the drivers alert. And this is not just the Autobahn; for other highways are putting such neuroscientific research to work on the designs of their roads, spending, collectively, trillions of dollars simply to keep switched on a crucial network in the driver's brains that controls attention.

The system, according to Robertson, is called the "Sustained Attention System," and is controlled by the right-half of your brain. The core feature of this system is that it is "internally drive": you keep your mind on a book, lecture, or the road, even though those stimuli are not offering you any attention-grabbing features. Your cognition is thus 'internal controlled,' meaning that you are the one who has to keep yourself engaged. Conversely, an external stimulus is one that is controlled from the outside, such as a really exciting computer game, or a hilarious movie. Here your attention is in the hands of the director or creator of the game. As such, we can give our internal control system a rest, and let the external system take over. 

The problem with driving is that there is very little external stimuli to keep your attention focussed, which thus leads to distraction and accidents.

The rhetoric is that cell phone use is a distraction that can increase the likelihood of accident. What neuroscience tells us is that the biological reaction driving has on our brains leads to lapses of attention before the distracted driving activities can even have a chance to start.