Human brain cannot multitask
Your uncle Jo may claim otherwise, but it is one thing at a time.
Want a proof? Look what happens when a driver indulges in sweet nothings over his mobile phone and you hold your heart in your sleeve and escape unhurt by the breadth of your hair.
Yessir. Humans aren’t as multi-functional as they would like to believe. I wish the eminent neuroscientist Dr. Vilayanur S.Ramachandran bears me out on this!
I read somewhere that laws that allow hands-free use of cell phones while driving will increase accidents.
Here is a first hand account (source forgotten):
Terror because this law will do nothing to curb the abuse of talking on the phone while driving, the main culprit behind accidents involving cell phone use in cars, and will in fact encourage fools to keep on talking while driving with the results like the one I witnessed this week on the one way street.
According to Dr. Marcel Just, at the time co-director for the Center for Cognitive Brain Imaging in the psychology department at Carnegie Mellon University, in Pittsburgh and his team said that when the brain is asked to divide its time between two high-level tasks, it gives each task less attention than if it had to do the tasks one at a time, according to Just.
There are now enough distractions to the person on the wheels – phone, children, pets, TVs, GPSs, radios, etc.
But listening to the radio or talking to passengers in the car is found to be not as hazardous as talking on a cell phone while driving. When you use a cell phone to talk to someone, you make a mental image of that person, such that in your mind they are in the car with you. Hence your brain cells are preoccupied with that mental imagery. And that puts even more mental load and focus on the conversation than on driving. Your mind is in effect absent on the road. But you are not so preoccupied while listening to a radio or talking to a person actually in the car.
Want to talk and continue to breathe? Pull over. Period.
Do not drink and drive. Ok. But do not think and drive either. It is more dangerous.
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