Inventing Iron Man by E. Paul Zehr Page A

human body with technology has its limitations. A reasonable place to start is with one of the most commonly seen pieces of technology—the cell phone. Love ’em or hate ’em, almost all of us have used a cell phone and we have certainly seen many, many cell phone users. Just based on cellular subscriptions, almost 90% of the U.S. population uses cell phones. What I want to focus on here isn’t just to do with using a cell phone, but rather using a cell phone while doing something else. Particularly, how much attention does it take up to use a cell phone and should you use one while driving a car? Or, even better, a mechanical suit of high-tech armor? Just this morning while driving to work I was stuck behind an SUV at a light with an advanced green signal flashing. Where I live, drivers who are paying attention realize that the advanced green signal means we get to turn left. However, the driver ahead of me failed to notice the signal. When I looked closely, I realized that the driver was instead talking on a cell phone and not really paying attention to what was happening. Why does that happen? To answer that means asking how much attention do you have to play with and are all tasks created equal?
    Is it really a problem to use a cell phone while driving, or was I just a little put off because the driver kept me from turning left? Only if the answer to the first question is yes is it relevant to figure out why. It has been estimated by Marla De Jong that 85% of cell phone users in the United States use their phones while driving. Other studies have shown that cell phone use can increase the risk of a crash during driving fourfold. So, clearly, it is more than just a guess that using a cell phone while driving impairs driving performance. Why? Part of this has to do with the attention demands of speech and the idea of “inattention blindness.”
    Speaking and talking are motor acts that involve listening and attention. It turns out that listening takes up less of the activity in our brains than does speaking and getting ready to speak. The interesting part of all of this is that when we are on a phone listening tosomeone, preparing to speak to them, and then actually speaking we are constantly trying to figure out where the person is. A kind of mental image of where the person is and who they are forms. Maintaining this takes up a lot of the processing power in our brains. It is almost like the ancient part of our brain is constantly searching for who we are talking to. But it cannot “see” them. “What is that voice in the air?” we might ask in “Cirroc” (aka Phil Hartman’s) voice right out of
Saturday Night Live
’s “Unfrozen Caveman Lawyer” fame. This is likely why just listening to music or talking to someone in the same vehicle does not cause the same distraction as talking on a cell phone. By the way, this applies to hands-free phones as well as normal cell phones. The difference is that with the hands-free phone the motor act of holding the phone is gone. This makes it marginally better but still doesn’t address the issue of attention.
    It should go without saying (but I will say it anyway) that this problem is even more dramatic when the cognitive task is combined with a motor act, like texting and driving. This actually does happen and that can have horrific outcomes. Tragically, on July 24, 2009, a driver ran her car into the back of a public works truck in Edmonton, Alberta. A city worker who was collecting pylons from the road behind the truck was crushed to death. Witnesses reported that the driver of the car did not apply the brakes at any time and even exited her vehicle after the accident while continuing to text. The driver pled guilty to a charge of careless driving. Many jurisdictions have now moved to ban handheld cell phone use (and texting by default) while driving. Distraction during multitasking with technology even as