• April 16, 2024

Hundreds of thousands of people die each year due to car accidents related to the lack of security and different distractors, such as cell phone use, which affect our brain activity.

The statistics indicate that the traffic accidents most serious occur when drivers are turning to the left at busy intersections, depending on the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration of the United States.

In this regard, a study conducted by Tom Schweizer, neuroscientist at St. Michael's Hospital , reveals that "talking on the phone and turning to the left is one of the most dangerous things that can be done when driving because the brain has a harder time processing all that data."

Published in the magazine Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, this investigation determines that when taking a turn to the left, the cerebral activity concentrates in aspect like examining the traffic, the cars, lights of traffic light, pedestrians, makes an evaluation and must coordinate all the movements required to make that maneuver.

If you also add the processes of attention, listening and speaking while using the phone, it can be considered a "perfect recipe for fatality".

Do you drive on autopilot?

Driving is probably one of the most complex daily activities carried out by a person, because it is a competition made up of at least 1,500 subcompetences, according to A. J. McKinght and B. Adams, in the Driver Education Task Analysis study.

The test they performed on a stretch of road in Maryland reveals that certain information appeared every 0.6 meters, which at 48 km per hour means being exposed to 1320 information data, or approximately 440 words per minute. The simple encounter with a yellow traffic light puts into operation a complex brain activity.

When we learn to drive and it becomes a habit, our brain is put on automatic pilot to not stop the small routine details; however, overloading it with information is too dangerous, explains Xabier Urra, neurologist at the Hospital Clínic de Barcelona.

"The brain is configured with two totally different types of attention: the controlled and the automatic, which also work in parallel. Although we can not perform two controlled actions simultaneously, we can carry out one of each: one controlled and the other automatic. This is, just, what happens when we drive. "

Subconscious driving is what happens when we are very used to a specific path, or when we drive in a way that allows our brain to work with a minimum number of cognitive processes. This allows us to carry out another brain activity that requires our attention at that time.

In that sense, the danger is not to manage subconsciously, but to change immediately to the controlled way in the presence of more stimuli, which is most of the time in a car crash . "There is no other way, you should pay attention when driving," the experts reiterate.

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Video Medicine: Testing Tesla's Autopilot System At 70mph (April 2024).