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