By Bruce Bower
A special corner of hell is reserved for drivers who weave from one lane to another at a crawl while blithely chatting on their cell phones. Even a simple form of multitasking — driving while listening to someone else talk — disrupts the ability to navigate a car safely, a new study finds.
An intriguing neural response underlies vehicular mishaps associated with such distractions, say neuroscientist Marcel Just of CarnegieMellonUniversity in Pittsburgh and his colleagues. Attending to what someone says galvanizes language-related brain areas while simultaneously reducing activity in spatial regions that coordinate driving behavior.
This finding suggests that people who combine relatively automatic tasks, such as speech comprehension and car driving, exceed a biological limit on the amount of systematic brain activity they can accommodate at one time, the researchers propose. As a result, the less-ingrained skill — in this case, driving, which is learned long after a person grasps a native language — takes a neural hit.
“What’s exciting is that now we have a biological account of how multitasking affects driving behavior,” Just says.