Speaker 1: Welcome to Brainstuff, a production of iHeartRadio, Hey Brainstuff Lauren Vogelbaum. Here.
Speaker 1: In the nineteen thirties, there was a bit of a
Speaker 1: war over radios in cars. All legislators argued that car
Speaker 1: radios were distracting and hazardous. The Radio Manufacturers Association countered
Speaker 1: that passengers were more of a driver distraction than a
Speaker 1: car radio. Listening to the radio, they claimed was safer
Speaker 1: than even looking in the rearview mirror. But Illinois, Massachusetts,
Speaker 1: New York, New Jersey, and Ohio legislatures all considered implementing
Speaker 1: car radio fines, and in nineteen thirty five, Connecticut legislators
Speaker 1: actually did introduce a bill that would have placed a
Speaker 1: steep fine on radio installation of fifty dollars in nineteen
Speaker 1: thirty five, which is over a thousand today. Others considered
Speaker 1: making car radio installation a crime. It wasn't until nineteen
Speaker 1: thirty nine, though, that anyone actually study weather a correlation
Speaker 1: between car radios and car crashes existed. The Princeton Radio
Speaker 1: Research Project determined that car radios played little no role
Speaker 1: in car accidents. Skipping ahead to nineteen ninety nine, the
Speaker 1: Society of Automotive engineers advised drivers to follow the fifteen
Speaker 1: second rule. That is, they said a driver can be
Speaker 1: distracted by an InCAR activity such as talking to passengers
Speaker 1: or retrieving an item from the glove compartment four up
Speaker 1: to fifteen seconds before the task becomes a visual distraction
Speaker 1: and thus becomes unsafe. But if you're zipping along it's
Speaker 1: say fifty five miles an hour, that's about eighty kilometers
Speaker 1: per hour. Your car travels about the length of a
Speaker 1: football field every five seconds. That's about three hundred and
Speaker 1: sixty feet or one hundred and five meters, so you
Speaker 1: cover three times that in fifteen seconds. Today, both the
Speaker 1: National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and the US Department of
Speaker 1: Transportation recommend that no InCAR activity take more than two
Speaker 1: seconds less to become a dangerous distraction. At the same time,
Speaker 1: would be surprised if a present day car rolled off
Speaker 1: the assembly line without at least a radio installed. Most
Speaker 1: new models have sleek digital audio systems. Today, two car
Speaker 1: audio systems are considered to be among the low level distractions,
Speaker 1: along with eating and drinking that combined are responsible for
Speaker 1: distracting us about a third of the time that we
Speaker 1: spend behind the wheel. That's not great, but activities like
Speaker 1: texting while driving are even more serious because that distracts
Speaker 1: you visually, physically, and cognitively all at the same time.
Speaker 1: And further research has found that listening to music may
Speaker 1: actually help drivers stay focused on the road during certain circumstances,
Speaker 1: like long trips on monotonous highways, although handling a media
Speaker 1: player or touching the audio controls was found to be distracting.
Speaker 1: So why then, do we so often turned down the
Speaker 1: volume of the radio when we really need to concentrate
Speaker 1: on driving, as say, when it comes to look for
Speaker 1: an upcoming exit sign during heavy traffic, or when we're
Speaker 1: approaching an unfamiliar destination. It has to do with the
Speaker 1: demands on our ability to concentrate and the limitations of
Speaker 1: the human brain. As it turns out, turning down the
Speaker 1: radio to concentrate isn't strange at all. It's your brain's
Speaker 1: natural reaction to the circumstances. The human brain has three parts. First,
Speaker 1: there's a cerebrum, the largest part of the brain and
Speaker 1: the part that controls your higher cognitive functions such as
Speaker 1: language and emotions. Then there's the cerebellum, which controls your
Speaker 1: muscle movements and balance. Finally, there's the brain stem, which
Speaker 1: controls all of the body's automatic functions such as breathing,
Speaker 1: as well as acting as the relay station between the
Speaker 1: spinal cord and the cerebrum and cerebellum. As you go
Speaker 1: through your day, you collect information about your environment through
Speaker 1: your five primary sensory systems taste, hearing, smell, touch, and vision.
Speaker 1: Each sensory system has its own sensory neurons and they
Speaker 1: send reports to your central nervous system that is, your
Speaker 1: spinal cord and brain about changes in your environment. The
Speaker 1: brain combines all of this information and decides how to proceed.
Speaker 1: That process is called encoding. The brain is constantly evaluating
Speaker 1: what its primary task should be, the chief task that
Speaker 1: the brain will focus on, and what its secondary task
Speaker 1: or tasks should be, which are the concurrent tasks that
Speaker 1: get less focus. The brain's ability to switch back and
Speaker 1: forth between tasks is called attention switching, and it comes
Speaker 1: with a price. When the brain switches its focus and
Speaker 1: attention from one task to another, it's fast, but not instantaneous.
Speaker 1: Those fractions of a second spent toggling may slow down
Speaker 1: your performance, including minor delays in your reaction times, and
Speaker 1: when you're lost, that could mean the difference between seeing
Speaker 1: or seeing the street sign that you need. People often
Speaker 1: turn down the radio when driving in crowded urban areas,
Speaker 1: looking for a specific address, or driving in dangerous conditions
Speaker 1: like torrential rain or during a snowstorm because those activities
Speaker 1: require more concentration than your typical drive. Turning the radio
Speaker 1: down or off eliminates a task from the brains to
Speaker 1: do list, shifting its focus to the most important task,
Speaker 1: finding the way and getting there safely. Research shows that
Speaker 1: at work, eleven percent of us right our to do
Speaker 1: lists during meetings, and more than half of us check
Speaker 1: email while we're on a phone call. Many of us
Speaker 1: like to think of ourselves as expert multitaskers, and we
Speaker 1: consider it the norm to perform two or more tasks
Speaker 1: at the same time, or different tasks quickly back to back,
Speaker 1: or to switch rapidly between two tasks. But despite our
Speaker 1: pride in and fondness of multitasking, the brain isn't actually
Speaker 1: built to multitask. Of course, every brain is different, but
Speaker 1: speaking generally, give the brain one task and it's no problem.
Speaker 1: Two tasks and the brain divides and conquers them more
Speaker 1: than two tasks, though, and things change. With divided focus
Speaker 1: and attention, the brain begins to perform less effectively and
Speaker 1: is prone to making more errors. The human brain, it
Speaker 1: turns out, doesn't have infinite resources, and it handles tasks sequentially.
Speaker 1: Yet it's able to switch from task to tasks so
Speaker 1: rapidly that we think we're multitasking. And because we have
Speaker 1: a limited capacity when it comes to focus and attention,
Speaker 1: especially when we're concentrating hard, the brain has to choose
Speaker 1: what information gets processed and encoded. For example, your brain
Speaker 1: can handle either visual driving related tasks like looking for
Speaker 1: an address or rocking out to the radio. When we
Speaker 1: try to multitask, each goal competes for the brains available resources.
Speaker 1: A multitasking creates a traffic jam, and in the end,
Speaker 1: we form poorly on each task. As a result, we
Speaker 1: overlook important information, we make errors, and we end up
Speaker 1: remembering less information overall. When the brain is forced to
Speaker 1: switch rapidly from task to task, it doesn't perform as
Speaker 1: well as it does when it can focus on one
Speaker 1: thing at a time. Multitasking increases our error rate by
Speaker 1: as much as fifty percent and it doesn't speed things
Speaker 1: up either. Trying to multitask doubles the amount of time
Speaker 1: that it takes to perform each of the tasks at hand.
Speaker 1: When you introduce a third task, the brain's prefrontal cortex,
Speaker 1: which makes executive decisions, will discard the one it considers
Speaker 1: the least important. It's got to do with the limits
Speaker 1: of our sensory system, we tune out what our brain
Speaker 1: determines to be of lesser importance. When we're lost, or
Speaker 1: when we have to perform a driving task that we
Speaker 1: don't do very often, like parallel parking, we edit our environment.
Speaker 1: We stop listening to passenger conversation, our field of vision shrinks,
Speaker 1: we turn down the radios of volume or turn it off,
Speaker 1: all in an effort to throw our focus into vision
Speaker 1: or spatial relationships, respectively. And that's great. When you're driving,
Speaker 1: all your attention should be focused on the road. In
Speaker 1: other environments, scientists suggest taking control of our focus and
Speaker 1: attention consciously beginning and ending one task at a time.
Speaker 1: This is called set shifting, a practice that's been shown
Speaker 1: to result in fewer errors than multitasking. Other research suggests
Speaker 1: devoting twenty minutes to one goal at a time before
Speaker 1: consciously switching to the next. Today's episode is based on
Speaker 1: the article why do we turn down the radio when
Speaker 1: We're lost? On howtofworks dot com, written by Maria Tree Marquis.
Speaker 1: Brain Stuff is production of iHeartRadio and partnership withhowstuffworks dot com,
Speaker 1: and it is produced by Tyler klain A. Four more
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