I watched a really cool video from VW (the motorcar company) that brings home the idea that texting and driving, or more generally distracted driving, is a BAD idea, with serious consequences. Check out the video here. Not only is a great Public Service Announcement, even though it’s an advertisement, it also highlights one common myth about human beings brains. It is commonly believed that humans can multitask, but research shows this to be a myth. Actually humans are really good at switching between tasks very quickly. We can do one thing for a short time, then switch to another task very quickly, then to another, or back again. It –looks– like we are doing many things at once, but we are not. (For those of you who point out we breathe and do other things at the same time, realize that breathing is an involuntary action–we don’t normally decide to breathe, we do it automatically.)

The problem with distractions while driving is they draw our attention away from the primary task – driving – toward other tasks like talking to the kids, reading a text, checking out the wreck and associated traffic slowdown in the other lane… So we have to switch between driving, and the distracting tasks. Unfortunately many or most people underestimate the cognitive requirements of driving in traffic, so even though we can switch back and forth quickly, we end up doing a poor job of both tasks. And doing a poor job of driving is really not an option…