My name is Paul Atchley.
I'm a Professor of Psychology at the University of South Florida.
My area of research for the past 30 years has been trying to understand how we use our brain to move about the world.
I've worked with helicopter pilots, pedestrians, but most of my work has focused on drivers.
Daydreaming while driving should be a concern to everyone, because despite the fact that driving has become, on average, safer over time, it is still the single riskiest thing that we do.
One of the questions I get is, what about the radio?
What about a passenger conversation?
Aren't these things distracting too?
Don't they occupy your brain?
And the answer is yes, absolutely they occupy your brain.
But the nice thing about a passive task, like a radio or a conversation in the car, is that those passive tasks can get tuned out or, in the case of a conversation, can stop when traffic gets heavy.
Probably all of us have had the experience of listening to a program and 10 minutes later we recognize,
I don't remember anything from that radio program.
What happened there was your brain recognized that there was some need to really pay close attention to the environment around it.
Maybe you're on the freeway and traffic got heavy.
Maybe there's a driver doing something unexpected and potentially risky.
And so you really started to focus your attention on the driving task, and when you did that, decision making centers in your brain took over and started to pull resources away from the areas of the brain responsible for listening to the radio.
The bottom line is, that a conversation on a cell phone is very different than a conversation with a passenger.
Sure, they both occupy your brain, but that cell phone conversation isn't going to stop when traffic gets heavy.
Whereas the conversation with a passenger will.
Plus, because that person's in the car with you, and they're at risk too, they'll actually help you spot hazards that you might otherwise miss.
So they might help you spot that deer that's getting ready to cross the street, or that driver that's getting
ready to pull in front of you unexpectedly.
