>> up next on booktv "after words" with guest host maggie jackson, author of distracted. this week's matt richtel and his latest book is "a deadly wandering" a tale of tragedy and redemption in the age of attention. in it a "new york times" reporter tells the story of a tragic car accident due to texting from impact through the court proceeding. he combines the disturbing real-life story with a thorough examination of the distractions of technology and their impact on society. the program is about an hour. >> host: hello. i'm here today hosting "after words" with matt richtel and congratulations on your new and very powerful book, "a deadly wandering" it.

i think it's a story about a crash and yet so much more. it's a story and you write about tragedy and redemption and i say you could call it the canary in the coal mine type case of how we are living with technology both in distracted and constructive ways. i think we have a lot to talk about and i want to welcome you. >> guest: where was that when i needed an elevator pitch? >> host: i wanted to welcome you and start off by asking the words deadliest in the title so before going to the story how deadly is this trend and what are we talking about historically especially vis-à-vis drunk driving which everyone has heard about? >> guest: first of all i like your canary in a the coal mine reference. the reason i like it relative to the question you just asked is

the canary is if you are texting while you are driving it will kill you but it's really indicative of a lot of other things when it comes to distraction, sitting at the dinner table being counterproductive at work. so that's kind of an extreme example but specifically to your question drunk driving i think now is about 10,000 a year in the u.s.. it's the biggest number that we can measure up to 30 to 40,000 deaths we have a year. it's come down sharply. candace leitner and madd and strong laws have brought it down sharply. what about texting and driving? the real answer is we don't know yet. we have some very decent estimates about the amount of crashes and the amount of death caused by phone use by drivers

and just let me pause and say this is then like an eight-minute sentence and say shall i tell you why it's complicated? said the estimates from the national safety council would put if memory serves about 1.5 million of 5.6 crashes -- million crashes in the u.s. owing to phone use but those are estimates and the reason we don't know it's because it's very hard to track for police agencies. hard to get the information. people lie and we just started trying to collect the data. so the estimates are based largely on how much we know people are using phones and how many crashes there are. just to give one example of how we know the official numbers are so far off, there's a number from 2011 which is the latest data we have of death owing to

phone use. in tennessee remarks 93 cases and the state of new york one. just simply impossible. we are not tracking it accurately so the short answer is we don't know. the long answer is all the science in everything we see on the roadways say it's a big and growing problem. >> host: what is it about the story because we are dealing with a very important problem. it does seem to be on the rise even if we are not quite of the scope of the problem. tell me about the story briefly because it's very gripping model or example of what can happen to all of us. >> guest: when i thought about writing about the science and i'm sure we'll talk about it at some point i thought what would interest me when i read it anything as the story, its

character, its narrative comments emotions conflict and i could not have imagined the story i discovered. it starts with a young man, 19 years old, september 22, 2006 and these driving to work at 6:30 in the morning. happens to be the last day of summer but already be it's raining and it's dark. he's going 55 miles an hour which is the speed limit that the swerving periodically across the yellow divider. this is noticed by the guy driving behind him who happens to be a four shoemaker who has got two tons of poor shoes and portion making equipment and missile at highway speed. the last time reggie shaw, the young man do i mentioned earlier, swerved across the yellow divider he clipped a saturn carrying again you can make this stuff up, to not only find family men but rocket scientist, the real thing,

building boosters for the next day shuttle. they spin across the road, they are hit by its broadside in the two men and a saturn are killed instantly. >> host: that's quite a tragedy. >> guest: a big tragedy. >> host: of course what we are talking about is an example of so much more. so let's get into what this represents. one of the most amazing reasons and i think it might've been why he came to write this book and you can tell us about that but one of the most amazing issues related to this is why do people do this? we can talk about do they know the risks? in 2006 there were arguments but i guess we can assume now that many people have an inkling of

the danger. so let's talk a little bit about why we do such a self-destructive thing. >> guest: just to square the circle reggie was texting. he was stops down the road at 100 yards unscathed because he hydroplaned. there was a sherlock holmes like digital age experience and they discover after 18 years of looking that he has texted 11 times in the minutes and seconds around the crash and maybe at the crash. this historic precedent but you asked the question, he's texting something innocuous like good morning to a young woman he is barely even dating. he's just getting to know. what would compel a young man

who is a decidedly good person although as you read in the book he's got a little bit of a checkered past when it comes to telling the truth so he's got some issues but he's decidedly a good guy kind of the all-american guy. he could tell the difference between right and wrong look down in his lap. this turns out to be a long scientific journey and so let me try to break it down into pieces. maybe the best way to start maggie is to give you an image of us going back let's say a million years or 100,000 years. picture a caveman or a cave woman and that person is tending to a fire. he or she gets a tap on the shoulder. i would just ask you, if it were you would you be able to avoid turning around? if someone tapped on your shoulder and you were attending a fire and didn't know who it was, do you think you could

ignore the tap? >> host: not at all. >> guest: leading question, i'm sorry your honor but of course he couldn't. you don't know puts a threat come you don't know if it's opportunity or someone with a spear. that's the first image i would put in people's minds and i'm going to give you the neuroscience of this in a minute but essentially when you are driving in a car and the phone rings, the first thing to think about is what is the proverbial tap on the shoulder that could be from anyone anywhere in the world and you've got no idea, is that opportunity, is that a threat, is that my boss, is that my spouse, is that my potential mate? it's unknown and so this technology has given us a warp speed version of a tap on the shoulder. maybe i should pause here and talk before i go to the next level of the lure about the

neuroscience of that moment. >> host: tell us a little bit about the limits of our attention which has been well studied for more than a century. we are very limited animals when it comes to our attentional capabilities. >> guest: exactly so what's happening in a moment and it will go indirectly to answering that question of limits is let's go back to the cave person. the cave person tending to the fire is using this part of the head, the prefrontal cortex. they call it executive control. it's a thing responsible for architecture, civilization but when we hear werber lie in its census signal up from here, the reptile parts of the brain, much more primitive survival mechanism. in the case of a lion it says little lion run. the parts of doing these high-level tasks must listen to the lower part of the brain

because if it didn't guess what? so now let's go back in time to understand these limitations of our brains. we cannot ignore first of all that reptiles down. i mean if you can you would essentially have to have eyes in the back of your head. so going back to probably the mid-1900s right after world war ii, scientists in britain were really wrestling with the question. why was it that their pilots in airplanes fighting the battle over britain, why was it that they radar operators could have troubles with screams and cockpits and have trouble with what they are looking at? why was it that they couldn't

focus on a life-and-death situation that they were getting interrupted. part of it has to do with the civil war going on inside of your brain that i've just described. if something came from. interrupted the ability to focus even if the focus was on something very important. secondly what they discovered, and it's even more for basic point, something called the cocktail party effect. this happened right in the aftermath of world war ii, these kind of initial neuroscientist who stories i tell you in the book were gathered in britain and they were trying to figure out how much information can we possibly handle? i mentioned the key person image. let me ask you and the audience to think of another vision. you are at a cocktail party and you were talking with a person in front of you as i am currently talking to you and you try to listen to the person standing behind you.

what you will discover, because i have tried this a number of times, is that you can really only do one thing. i can focus on maggie. you deserve my attention or i can switch my brain, i can switch the track and listen to that person. at that point i can no longer listen to you. it's simply physically impossible and its 1948 cents all these tests were done with one tiny cup so much as i can listen to you and just maybe i can pick up my name for the change in gender. that is not new science. that goes back to 1950. over the years between 1950 and 2000 the neuroscientist began to refine these models. what they began to discover is

that there are networks of attention in our brain. they discovered they can literally watch inside the brain of blood flow and discover when you are at tending to one thing and you shift your focus you can see that the load shifts. you can't juggle both things. it's often said that there is a myth of multitasking. that understanding with the neuroscientist goes all the way back to 1948. >> host: we are talking about a creature with limited potential capacity. we are destined to be unexpected in our environment. if you are paying attention to something you are going to be blind. if you are paying attention to say your cell phonecall you are literally blind. the visual signals into your brain when a child walks into

the street. add to this e-mail let's talk a little pout about the lure of technology. he wrote about the social connection and the technology represents. i thought that was really fascinating. >> guest: there are three or four levels of this. one is the social connection and the social wiring is buried deep enough and it is again a survival mechanism. in fact as we go through the conversation i think what i will begin to describe is the power of these devices because they are in effect survival mechanisms that are becoming so powerful that they can be counterproductive and even deadly. anti-survival mechanisms for lack of better word. on the social pilots go back to the fire analogy. one value from being social is that we learn from each other.

so maggie if you learned that fire burns you a millennia ago that you are unable to communicate that to me then i have to burn my hand in order to not be killed, because i get burned and i get an infection and i'm dead. language itself, anything else is so deeply wired on the social level because it helps us survive. it tells us go into the bomb shelter. go down the list of ways. communication and the idea that communication could be urgent is deeply wired into us. it's not just the receipt of information that is so powerful but as i document in this book the share of information gives you a dopamine rush, helps

squirt the reward centers in your brain. it's reinforcing the idea that the sharing of social information as a reward. so now you've got the receipt being a reward and you have the sheer being a reward. i will stop there and say that's one way in which art device has lured us but it's only one of several. >> host: you are painting a picture of fumbling behind the wheel getting an extraordinary temptation from that device. it might be a computer and it's a smartphone now. is there something possibly rewarding and even the idea of peeking behind the curtain of this novelty of rewarding. >> guest: before you go on to that because you set a really important word. he said possibly rewarding. i think maybe in some ways my favorite bit of science that i learned in this, the one that really surprised me and honed in on just help powerful of these

devices are busy with think to yourself well math, maggie or whomever if i know that a lot of this stuff is spam, and it is, 67% of what we get is spam in e-mail than i would be conditioned to ignore it because i know it's worthless. going back to your question possibly important it turns out that the very fact that most of the stuff is worthless makes it even harder to resist. this goes back to bf skinner and a concept called intermittent reinforcement. the way i would illustrated is it will connect to your audience as it did for me is that you have a rat in a cage in the rat is supposed to push a lever to get food that the rat doesn't know which bush will bring the food. the rat is compelled to push all the time, all the time, all the

time. it's called intermittent reinforcement, one of the most powerful lures in all of psychology so forgive the comparison of us to a rodent. it's exactly the same thing happening with your phone. you press and press impressed and you don't when the good thing is going to come. it's a veritable slot machine in your pocket. to add that piece to the social wiring, you are starting to find something super powerful and i haven't given you the full range yet. >> host: it's really powerful. i don't think when people are doing it they quite realize what a package of dynamite is sitting in the car with them. i think it also seems as though it's a part of our daily life. it's a fixture, a tool so that perceptual invisibility adds to the fact that what it's doing to

us is kind of becoming invisible. >> guest: i like the way you put it that it's just becoming a fixture. we understand it to be part of life and maybe even to go a step further and celebrate it. if you look at the way the advertising is today it may not tell you to do this in the car but it certainly celebrates being on all the time. i document to add coming from various places try to do more, try to do more faster for wireless companies or an ad from one company and they seem to little kids of course you want to do more than one thing at a time. the kids say of course i would so it's a fixture, to become invisible and it's become celebrated. if we are enumerating you take the social, you take the slot machine, you take the cultural

and you are adding up again a prettier sister bowl thing. >> host: to push that point a little further, i don't know if complicity is too strong of a word but what was news to me is the idea that the mobile phone company in the car companies come he still see this today. the car companies want more on their dashboard. mobilephone companies want to have this device at hand at all times. tell us a little bit about that. there were echoes to me of smoking. that was very interesting. >> guest: look, there's another one of these is a report in this book one anecdote when you're on the phone reporting and you experience this where you've got the phone and you --

one of the neuroscientists in the book that played a huge role in the reggie shut case that we talked about at the beginning names david strayer. he worked as a lot of neuroscientists do, he went into corporate america when he first started. he was working for one of the cell phone companies in the early 90s. they were starting to market these phones. he went to them and he said i think we have got a problem. i understand he was in this long line of people going back to world war ii so this very fine line connected all the way back to the beginning of neuroscience were they understood the stuff we are talking about and he went to his boss and he said i'm not sure you understand. this is dangerous. they said to him why would we want to know that? and he said to him it was self-evident.

the way he describes the situation knowing that is counter to making a lot of money. i want to be really careful in this conversation because the cell phone companies have actually gotten much more responsible but i do think it's worth noting that point you brought up. early on the cell phone was a carphone. that's how was sold. he recently sold that way is because that was where you had phone service. if you are trying to build a business you will build it where you can have phone access. the early cell towers maggie went off on the highways. the money was made there and you remember what they used to charge. he was 50 cents a minute, right? marketing from the cell phone companies were loving this. they would be a guy that would have literally an ad with the guys standing in his jeep were sitting in his jeep the phone to his ear speeding down the road and it was a glorification of

this. i think there was one common closing my eyes because i'm trying to remember. we'll will be in the book but it says something wildly effective on the number of levels but something like can your secretary take dictation at 50 miles an hour and it's a guy and a sports car talking on the phone. that's the early days. the carphone, it's hard to imagine that the wireless companies didn't know and in fact early on some very courageous legislators particularly in california and in utah where this story happened got caught by the wireless companies who said what people do what they want. we are not sure of the risks. parallel to the smoking in the streets, i wouldn't use that exactly but it was a kind of prevarication that's very unnerving. now these days the cell phone

companies have really taken the mantle of no texting in particular and they have put out blocks. at&t verizon, they have campaigns and at public service announcements but right now it's ensconced in our culture. the other companies, let me possible stop. >> host: i think we are approaching a break and i think we want to talk about solutions and where is the industry and we have been. i'm getting a picture, an incredible picture of individual accountability and perhaps a vital responsibility here where it all fits in. just before the break, we have five minutes. when you bring us back to the story and we will parse the story out in increments as you did in the book because it's a real page-turner.

i think maybe vis-a-vis the issues we are talking about there were some denial. maybe as we have all had about this issue. tell me about this just briefly and how the scene was set for what came to be the trial, a judicial event. >> guest: just briefly he pulls over to the side of the road and he tells the police he didn't know what happened, and maybe he hydroplaned and the state trooper takes him to the hospital to get a blood test and notices he's texting. the trooper tells me in the first chapter this guy is a one hander. he spent the next 18 months and this hot pursuit trying to get the phone records. one of the big issues, he says he didn't do it. he gets a lawyer and a standoff is set for this first-ever historic trial.

i will tell you more as we parse it out. >> host: we have a couple more minutes so what happened, happened over many months you said and i think the initial reactions perhaps. >> to what we will go into later but the idea that it can happen to others. guess they'll all the things you are bringing up and then we are talking about all the things it represents, one of the things it represents his denial. it's a metaphor for our collective to dial and the denial when we don't want to admit to the other driver i rated t. because i was doing a status update and adding to the drama, reggie was living with a lie and has passed and he had come clean about it and he was

feeling a sense of humiliation. he couldn't stand the idea that in a small community in northern utah it's happening again. >> host: i think one thing the story represents is that it could happen to any of us. again after the break may be we will return to some of the statistics on the scope of the problem at the research i have seen shows particularly with younger ages but 40% i think in your book of people said they had read text. 30% said they had sent texts. the statistics are astonishing. we are not talking about a minority of the population, right? >> guest: you brought up something about partly why we can tonight and it won't happen to us. if you've done a 100 times and not not gotten an a record he say to yourself well 100% of the

time i have not gotten the rack therefore i won't get into a wreck. but the control group does 101 or in reggie's case who knows, 31, you guys are dead. >> host: we are dealing with a one ton slot machine on a rainy highway. we will pause will be back in a minute with more talk on attention and driving with distraction with matt richtel. beat. >> host: we have been talking about "a deadly wandering" this new book you have written and i'd like to return to the science because as many

scientists have told me you know attention really is the human faculty. where we pay attention determines our lives and the series of decisions we make or don't make about our attention every day. tell me a little bit more about some of the multitasking research. for instance some of the viewers may have heard of the fact that there are -- how many are there and can we really juggle and maybe we don't need to be as conservatives as the scientist ellis. >> guest: the short answer is no we can't really. i think there are anomalies everywhere. they are our 70 people who can dunk a basketball and a tippy toes but none of us would get a stretchy machine and do that in her home.

i think it's less than 1% if minnery serves. i'm not a super tasker or i would remember that number but i do mention the book that there are some efforts underway to understand what are the mechanisms that allow us to build our intentional -- and some of the neuroscientists in the book talk about whether we might use, actually use video games or other techniques to improve our visual acuity. there are some help with that but may i go back to something you mentioned earlier about attention and being the building block of how we see the world? as it goes to multitasking and/or limitation, you put it so so beautifully a second ago and i don't remember exactly what he just said that it may actually not just go to what we attend to that our choices in even further, and it's a big concept

believe in free will and away and i will give you a study and it even goes to reggie and how much control he had at the moment. there's a study, i'm going to get some of your audience has heard of it. i'm oversimplifying but it's a chocolate cake study. do you remember this one? maybe you could help me remember exactly but i think it goes like this. 10 subjects on a broom and on a per minute get a choice, would you like chocolate cake for a snack or would you like the freight? some of the study subjects are asked before going in to remember a string of numbers. by a statistically significant margin the one to have to remember a number chose the chocolate cake and the ones who didn't chose this route. these brilliant neuroscientists factor in for all kinds of causes and what they are really coming up with is when your brain is not even overloaded

with information but taking significant information that it has to remember it affects your decision-making. so now bring it back to the phone in the car. thinking about what's going on with your phone, anticipating the phone, talking on the phone. you are beginning to intend a little bit of your decision-making power and to cover the broad spectrum that's a potentially deadly thing in a carpeted actually can go all the way to the restaurant where you are choosing what to eat corp. how you interact with going back to your spouse at dinner. it was clearly getting a snack food. >> host: do you think something is automatic and routine as driving a car, a 16-year-old is doing it because they don't have the judgment in their frontal lobes are not all develops developed.

but people our age, people our age are doing it in part because they are assuming that they can handle this. driving is so habitual that it shouldn't take those frontal lobes. isn't that one kind of assumption? you are saying when we are tired or when we do face that particularly when they slam on the brakes the brain is able to react. >> guest: make no mistake, and driving deaths are at epidemic that we have not solved. this is not a situation where people are doing some overtly negligent behavior, drinking themselves into a coma, taking a gun into the square. this is good people driving to destinations they want to reach with good hearts and not hoping to hurt anybody and 30 to 40,000

people a year dying. i would bring up something statistically. one of the issues that for a while the wireless industry brought up and they don't anymore is driving fatalities have come down. you know maggie that is true that two other things are also true. they have come down far less than other countries and they have come down at a time when we have spent millions on the wider roads, airbags, sloths of safety measures in the car so what to put safety public advocates are saying is you would see a much better safety improvement and to bring us full circle to your point about the take for granted he can drive because tens of thousands of people a year are dying. i also want to go back to something else you mentioned. the young brain, we touch on that? >> host: i think that's important because statistics show that they are the textures and reggie was 19 at the time.

>> guest: again why he is so emblematic, you can go back to that initial image of the civil war, the tension in the brain between this directing you. their prefrontal cortex at 19 is much worse at fending off the signals from down below. so you've got no chance at the lion comes the baby if you are a little bit older and a little bit more adept that it's bringing in front of me. i have a fully formed prefrontal cortex. i shouldn't be driving in the snow in the dark and the dave predator priests frontal cortex isn't fully formed it lacks the message to fend off that reptilian signal even more.

they are at the most risk and susceptibility. >> host: which is a very powerful, very very powerful problem in society right now. let's talk a little bit again about the wider sociological trends. you mentioned the messages that we are getting. multitasking is great and you can do it anywhere and this is the picture of success etc. but let's talk a little bit more about those messages. it has everything to do with how we see technology and what technology gives us. >> guest: how to find us and there's a matisse mode associated with it. on a practical level there's a study in the book that shows especially on people but it would be true of all of us the value of the text falls sharply

literally with each minute that passes. it makes common sense so let's say you're the team or the employee or whoever driving in a text comes in and the text is party at jane's house in 15 minutes and you don't look. he missed the party, you've missed critical social information and it's your boss saying hey last-minute deal can you call me. first of all there is the practical element and there are myriad ways around that by pulling over with your car if you are so inclined. but there's also something about the fact that things are just generally speeding up. i want to talk a little bit about that. i think it's cultural and i think it's in her logical. i'm not sure, it's hard to disentangle them. there's a statistic in this book that blew me away when i saw it that people are using more and more apps each day.

i thought okay that's interesting, they must be abandoning the old apps. know gets what they are doing? they are opening more apps for shorter periods of time so they are spending less time on every given thing were to put it another way in the context of attention they are attending to things for that much less time. that may be cultural and it may be neurological but again i would like to show in her logical baby assumption or maybe more than an assumption, a hypothesis your way. do you ever have the feeling when you touch your phone or you hear the ring or you move it around that you get a jolt of adrenaline? guess gaucher, it makes you feel good. >> guest: it actually does make you feel good. it makes you feel good. the neuroscience shows because

through brain imaging and neurochemical studies we discovered that when you interact with the device particularly during certain activities like video games or the internet you get this dopamine squirt like we alluded to earlier. but scientist told me which is one of the most important parts of this phenomenon is that that dopamine interaction, that squirt to the pressure center of your brain does not have to do with information. it merely has to do with the stimulus response. so you on this primitive level you do something and something happens and you get rewarded for it. kids all the time with babies, you do something to get a response. now you have this device where you get a response. you get accustomed to these

little squirts. you open an app and you get a response. you kill an angry berger mess and angry bird and you get a response. in those actions you start to feel bored and then what you do? >> host: basically we are talking about getting behind the wheel and putting our chimpanzees self there. we are not opening the car door and putting our higher order human cell behind the wheel. let's talk about solutions because they are tricky and they are difficult. it's disheartening personally and i think professionally and societally to see how little effect. let's start with law enforcement and public health threats. do you see any signs of hope? i know you talked about one study in syracuse where they put a tremendous amount of effort into enforcement but would it

have lasting results? water sum up the good and bad points to education and law enforcement? >> guest: to lay the groundwork for this let me just give the law enforcement landscape and maybe start with law enforcement. 45 states outlawed texting and driving and i think 10 if memory serves hands-free but still go back to something we said earlier. the disconnect between attitudes and behaviors. right now 96% of aaa foundation for highway safety says save it. it's very dangerous and 30 some, 40 some still tend to receive. clearly we have got an issue. the first thing i think we need to have knowledge in this conversation is that it's not an

issue of attitude. that is what i think we thought and when i say we, the public safety advocates but for a long time this would be an issue on attitude. we should get attitudes to change. attitudes, forgive the vernacular, is the problem. >> host: can you clarify what you mean by attitude? >> guest: attitude meaning we need to know this is an issue and we need people to know this is a problem. >> host: education won't do its? >> guest: it hasn't so far because we are fairly well-educated. if you ask any of these teens they can be even more pronounced than adults in saying i know this is an issue. there's a disconnect between it. let me just go to the law enforcement side. here's what a lot of officers say. those texting laws while they are being enforced and tickets are being written it's very hard for the police to know what someone is doing.

>> host: it's almost impossible. >> guest: is tantamount to impossible. what am i doing right now? in my dialing come in my texting, and my calling pandora? in my using in-app? interesting law enforcement things around the world can abandon the u.s. you are seeing law enforcement dress up like road workers so they can peer inside the car. that's a lot of hard work so law enforcement the one to talk to me express frustration about that. i also think what the psychologist tell me is it's actually confusing for the driver for the consumer if you will. what am i allowed to do exactly? it's not easy to draw the distinctions in your head. >> host: that raises a really important question too. do we know yet whether hands-free is as bad as being on

the phone? i can imagine texting, sending a text and someone reading a text however have we gotten this all sorted out and is there anything you want to particularly warn people about that? >> guest: obviously anything we look away or you are manipulating your hands, those numbers go up. that means even if you are on a hands-free phone use still might have to dial him before he get to the hands-free question which is probably the one that has the most hard to parse, even if you have a voice-activated name at bunch of research shows that because partly because those things don't work very well you are and a veritable argument with your phone so that's a problem but also it takes you away from the road. as to being on a hands-free device most of the neuroscientists believe it's a cognitive distraction. most of the public safety experts believe it's a cognitive

distraction. what that means is that you are not focused on the road and in fact to the point where your visual cortex is somewhat superimposed by thinking about imagining the person you're talking to in the situation you are talking to. so when that comes into play is when you have to make a split-second decision going very fast. there are some traffic safety advocates who disagree with that and there is not a big argument that there is a low-level discussion going on. i will tell you that the auto industry, which we didn't talk about earlier advocates for hands-free being okay and it's also true that they have financial interests in it being okay because they are selling lots of gadgets for cars that relied on those systems and one

step further, right now they are trying to get people into the showroom. >> host: it's a more enticing car when you have more ability to do more things in the car obviously. so the jury is still a little bit out and yet scientists really feel that hands-free is dangerous. >> guest: most scientists the jury is not out but i think you will get an argument from a small handful in the scientific arena. >> host: we have time for just a few more points and questions. i think the viewers really want to hear where you see the hope lying. we can't change it all. we are in this incredible universe of technology where there are messages being driven home including the fact that it's dangerous but also the fact that it's alluring. we talked about the primitive brain. tell us three things that you

think will work and that ucs hopeful. >> you asked for three things and i will give nine. i will give you three concretely and one is personal. they get in to this in the bud. we mention the chocolate cake study. take some time away from your device not just when you are driving but broadly speaking. to an extent you don't realize your audience and i didn't realize from experience the amount we are on all the time is impinging our ability to make a lot of good decisions and that might affect your decision by the wheel. some of his personal responsibility. the two others are tried-and-true from drunk driving. one is public education and one is tough laws and tough enforcement but i want to hit home on both of them. when it comes to public education reggie shaw turns out

to be a hero. what a redemption. i don't want to give the book away. >> host: it's very powerful. >> guest: he deserves for whatever tragedy he caused, and it was serious and all the terrible, how he felt and how we deserve to feel he has redeemed himself like no one i've ever seen and it's a story worth reading. so public education. reggie speaks to audiences. loftus -- lots of victims families. >> host: what kind of an impact will that have? >> guest: like madd. it will also have an impact on legislators. i want to be careful not to be too prescriptive but on the tough loss side i think what i'm hearing from public safety advocates is unless laws are tougher and less people really feel afraid that they are in

jeopardy where not going to see a reconciliation between attitude and behavior. they won't come together until people feel like it's more than a slap on the wrist. what does that translate to again? i do want to be too prescriptive but there are solutions in the book and i think legislators coupled with public safety advocates are talking about tougher penalties. >> host: it's important and it's very helpful. tell us a little fit in the last few minutes about your personal experience and how did you come to write the book? how did it change her behavior? you were a reporter in the thick of it in silicon valley. what changes in your life have you made and how is it changed your thinking about attention and distraction in our society? >> my thinking has change manifestly. i think about attention so bradley to your point about how it forms my worldview.

i have two little kids now and i watch my behavior in the years before i had them but i would watch the allure of this device. i'm a journalist on my thinking about what's happening and something was going on. part of it was feeling the leeward and wanting to understand it. part of it was meeting reggie but i mention my kids. may i tell you a quick story about my son and? he was only two years old and now he's six so this was a bit ago. he barely knew any words and he walks by at his grandparents house, my wife's folks and his foot kicks this little motel plastic phone and because of the terrain. he picks up and he puts it to his ear and i don't even know he knows all these words and he says maggie, i will call you back from a landline.

>> host: wow. >> guest: i just burst out laughing but it was one of these moments when i realized i had a kid who is mimicking my behavior and seeing my behavior with devices and you know, i want to know for myself and how i raise my kids and i was a big part of it, simply coupled with having run into any resistible story with reggie shaw. >> host: so was there anything in particular, it can even be a piece of the research, and i know as a journalist you are surprised all the time when you get research and talk to people but was there anything you would say surprised you the most about this issue especially if it changed her behavior at all? i want to push that a little bit further. did you use to texan dr.?

>> guest: i've been asked that before in the short answer is something like a politician. i don't remember when i got my first phone capable of texting but i suspect not because i don't think i could text by the time i was reporting on the subject. by then i was like no bleeping way my doing that. i don't think i did but i did talk on the phone and i stopped doing that. the phone goes the middle and goes because often it doesn't get answered but i do want to go to one surprised me the most. i'm picturing something in my mind that i will describe. it wasn't the science. honestly maggie and you have done some great journalism too. i'm sure you know this experience. what surprised me the most was the outpouring from the characters in this book. the raw candor and honesty and sharing and i want to say for a

moment in particular from the widows of the men, jim for far of and keith a. dell. this book on some level is built on grief. what reggie's hunters of the will, the prosecutors and victims advocates opened up to me the stories in their own lives of domestic abuse, sexual abuse. those were not ancillary to this. those were not irrelevant because they went to the question of attention. what do you pay attention to? how does your life history dictate to how you relate to the world. reggie story was on the razors edge of morality and the way people attended to it depended on the places they came from. so i think what surprised me the most and gratified me the most, i just feel truly honored to have been a vessel for it was the outpouring of candor,

emotion, raw energy from people. i think it was once-in-a-lifetime. >> host: i think to understand this issue we need to look carefully and skeptically at all the different layers of it. again and again technology throughout history hasn't been a matter of what is said or how we use it at that moment or what it was when it was first in your pocket. it's a very dicey changeable shape shifting powerful aspect of our lives. what do you hope, maybe ending on a big nod and we have a few more minutes, how do you hope we evolve in terms of our attitudes towards technology? >> guest: i love the question and i like the idea of taking a

critical look. there's an analogy in the book that really hits home for me and i hope i answered. in the end i tried to add up what all this means. scientists gave me an analogy. they said we would compare technology today to the industrialization of food and to back down what they meant by that. when we industrialized for a lot of amazing things happened like less expensive food giving calories to more people, survival mechanism but when we got -- it also gave us the vending machine maggie and what the vending machine is as you walk down the hall and he hit the button and you get a bag of chips that has all this sugar and fat than you ever needed as a cave person but when you needed it as a cave person you had to walk halfway through the jungle, kill that there, bite off the fat. now it's going to make you a

diabetic. this survival thing turns into a problem. the same thing as true today with our devices. they are incredible. make no mistake and i have used that phrase more than once or today. this technology is amazing. its utility is incredible. we should not lose sight of that fact. it's tantamount to the industrialization of food and we needed to survive everyday. just like that vending machine it has the potential to short-circuit us by providing an e.'s going right to her our nerve centers with primitive social rewards that can hijack us. that's the word we use. what do i hope? i hope we become critical of this the way we have become critical of food. i think it's a metaphor that's been used before. i think that's what i talked some about in the book. disconnect to find a real diet

but it really does take a concerted effort because we are just at the beginning of understanding what is fact, what is sugar, would assault. >> host: we are out of time but you have left us with so much to think about them so much to be skeptical about in so many ways that we can think about this issue in a new way so thank you very much for writing the book. >> guest: thank you. it was a real pleasure. >> that was "after words" booktv's signature program in which authors of the latest nonfiction books are interviewed by journalists, public policymakers and others familiar with their material. "after words" airs every weekend on booktv at 10:00 p.m. on saturday, 12 and 9:00 p.m. on sunday and 12:00 a.m. on monday. and you can also watch "after

words" on line. go to booktv.org and click on sublime "after words" and the booktv series and topics list on the upper right side of the page. .. >>