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Jewish World Review July 26, 2005 / 19 Tammuz, 5765 How cell phones sap your brain By Clarence Page
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com |
Dear motorist: If you like to drive while chattering away on your cell phone, pull over.
Or, at least, think twice. According to some new studies, you'd have to think at least twice, or maybe three or four times as much as normal to make up for the useful brain power your cell phone conversation drains out of your brain, whether you use a hands-free device or not.
A study of Australian highway crashes published recently in the British Medical Journal found that yakking on a cell phone while driving is four times as likely to lead to a serious crash, regardless of whether the driver is talking to a handheld or hands-free phone device.
Researchers for the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety conducted the study, the first to link actual accident data with phone records, in Western Australia, because phone companies in the U.S. would not grant access to wireless records, citing privacy concerns.
Closer to home, brain imaging tests at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore found that, even with a hands-free device, cell phone use forces the brain to redirect its resources to what it hears and says, draining resources away from the visual task of driving.
That must come as harsh news to lawmakers in states like New York and New Jersey and cities like Chicago, Washington, D.C., and Santa Fe, N.M., that prohibit motorists from using handheld phones.
Although more studies need to be done before more laws are changed, the results so far tend to confirm a position that some communications theorists have argued for years: The most powerful communications medium is not television, radio or newspapers; it's the cell phone.
The late media guru Marshall McLuhan labeled the visual media like TV and newspapers the "cool" media because they demand our undivided attention much more than radio or music players do.
But those who argue that cell phones are no more distracting than radios underestimate the power of the cell. By McLuhan's standard, the telephone is extra potent. It not only provides the "theater of the mind" that radio broadcasters like to boast about, but it also forces us to talk back.
"The phone is a doubly-cool medium," says Professor Paul Levinson, chair of communications and media studies at Fordham University. "On our cell phones, we are not just listening, but talking and conversing. Our eyes tend to zoom in on one thing at a time. Our ears are built for multitasking. Because of that, telephones may engage us more than any other medium."
For the record, Levinson, whose latest book is "Cellphone: The Story of the World's Most Mobile Medium and How It Has Transformed Everything!" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), spoke to me by cell phone, but he assured me he was not driving.
Indeed, the phone is special. It rings and we feel compelled to answer it. Right now! Its sound quality is low, so we feel compelled to shout even louder! It deludes us into thinking that we are someplace else, conversing in private, so we reveal secrets out loud to strangers in public, secrets that, had we our wits about us, we would not want to tell our own mothers.
We can see that in some of the goofy scenes modern cell phone life has offered us:
Take the well-dressed young professional woman who seems to be talking and gesturing to no one in particular, until you realize she's talking on a hands-free cell phone.
Or the similarly serious young man sitting alone in a restaurant, talking to no one in particular, it seems, until you spot the little hands-free cell phone cord hanging from his ear.
Or the highly-wired lawyer on a high-speed train from Manhattan to Washington blabbing his firm's private business over his cell phone for everyone in the car to hear, whether they want to or not.
I've witnessed each of these modern urban creatures. As cell phone use continues to grow, I expect to see more of them — although, I hope, not behind the wheel.
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Comment on Clarence Page's column by clicking here. © 2005, TMS |
Arnold Ahlert | |||||||||||||||||
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