he is aware of billionaire activism can get you in trouble in your home government so he is telling the government officials i want to work with you. i am not working against you on this issue. so lots of interesting things in that area. we are out of time but i want to thank our parliamenelist. i think your comments added a lot and i appreciate your insight. if you want a book, we have them in the hallway. thank you very much for coming. [applause] >> booktv is on twitter and facebook. tweet us or post comment on our

facebook page at facebook.com/cspan. >> up next, after wards with maggie jackson author of "distracted" matt richtel and his latest book "a deadly wandering: a tale of tragedy and redemption in the age of attention." "the new york times" reporter tells the story of a tragic accident from texting and welcomebines the story with a thorough examination of the impacts of technology and safety. >> i am here hosting after wards with matt richtel. congrats on your new powerful book "a deadly wandering: a tale of tragedy and redemption in the age of attention." i can i think it is a story about a crash and yet so much more.

you know? it is a story as you write about about tragedy, redemption and i would say you could call it the canary in the coal mine. i think we have a lot to talk about. >> where was that i needed an elevator pitch? that was great. >> i want to welcome you. >> thank you. >> the word deadly is in the title. before we go into the story how deadly is this trend? and what are we talking about historically? especially the drunk driving which is what everyone heard about. >> first of all, i like the canary and the coal mine reference and i like it because the canary is that if you are texting while driving it will

kill you. but it is indicative of a lot of other things when it comes to distraction and sitting at the dinner table and being counter productive at work. that is the extreme example. drunk driving i think is about 10,000 a year in the united states. is the biggest number we can measure of the 30-40,000 deaths we have a year. it has come down sharply with the likes of mad and stronger laws bringing it down. what about texting and driving? the real answer is we don't know yet. we have decent estimates about the amount of crashes and deaths caused by phone use by drivers. and let me pause and say now this has been like an eight minute sentence and say shall i

tell you why it is complicated. >> yeah. yes. >> so the estimates from the national safety council would put if memory serves about 1.5 million of 5.6 million crashes in the united states owing to phone use. they are estimated and the reas reason we don't know because it is hard to get the information, people lie, and we just started collecting the data. so the estimates are based on how much we know people are using phones and how many crashes are. just to give an example of how we know the official numbers are off. there is a number from 2011 which is inila -- the latest

data -- tennessee has 93 case and the state of new york has 1. not possible. the short answer is we don't know. the long answer is all of the science and everything we say on the road way say it as a big and growing problem. >> tell me about the story a little bit. we are dealing with a very important problem, you know? it does seem to be on the rise. tell me about the story/accident briefly. it is a gripping model of what could happen to all of us. >> when i thought about writing the science, i thought about what interested me when i read anything is story. it is character, narrative, emotion, conflict, and i could not have invented or imagined

the story i discovered in reporting this. it starts with a 19-year-old young man on september 22, 2006. he is driving to work at 6:30 in the morning. it is the last day of summer but there is freezing rain, it is dark and he is going 55 miles per hour and he is swerving. this is noticed by the person behind him who is a horse shoe makers who has two tons of horse shoe making equipment. a missile at highway speeds. the last time reggie shaw serves across the divider he clipped a saturn carrying two fine family men and rocket scientist -- the real thing -- building boosters for the next space shuttle.

they spin across the road and they are hit by the farrier, broadsided, and the two men in the saturn are killed instantly. >> it is quite a tragedy. >> quite a tragedy. >> but of course as we are talking about this it is an example of so much more. let's get into what this represents for instance. one of the most amazing reasons and it might have been why you came to write the book and you can tell us about that but one of it most amazing issues related to this is why do people do this? you know we can talk about do they know the risk? in 2006 arguments to and from were coming in. i guess we can assume many people have an understanding of the dangers.

let's talk about why we do such a self destructivdestructive. >> reggie was texting. there was a sherlock holmeshunt and they discover after 18 years of looking that he had text 11 times in the minutes and seconds around the crash. you have the first criminal trial and precedent. but you ask the question he is texting something like good morning to a young women he is just getting to know. what would compel a young man who is a good person, but has a

little bit of a checkered point. he has issue. but he is the all-american guy. what would compel someone to look down in his lap who knows the difference between right and wrong? this turns out to be a long scientific journey. let's break it down into pieces. the best way to start maggie is maybe an image going back a million or a hundred thousand years. picture a cave man or woman and that person is tending to a fire. he or she gets a tap on the should shoulder. were you it you would you be able to aroid turning around? do you think you could ignore the tap? >> not at all. >> leading question.

you know if it is food, threat, someone with a sphere. that is the first image i would put in people's mind and i will get into neuro science of this is a moment but when you are driving in the car and the phone rings the first thing to think about is that is a proverbal tap on the shoulder. you have no idea is that my boss, spouse, potential mate. it is unknown. this technology gave us a warped speed version of the tap on the shoulder.

>> tell us about the attention that is being well-studied. we are limited animal when it comes to paying attention. >> what is happening in that moment and it will go indirectly to answering the question of limits. let's go back to the cave person. the cave person tending to the fire is using this part of the head. the prefontal cortex. they call it executive control. it is thing responsible for architecture and civilization. but when the tap comes, it sends the signal up to the reptile part of the rain. let's say in the case of the lion, it says boom lion, run. the part that is doing the high level tasks must listen to that lower part of the brain because if it didn't, guess what? you get eaten.

let's go back in time to start to understand how we begin to understand the limitations of our brains. we cannot ignore, first of all, that reptile sound. if you can, you know, you would essentially have to have eyes in the back of your head. going back to probably the mid-1900s right after world war ii the science in britain were wrestling with the question of why was it their pilots in airplanes fighting the battle over britain, why was it there radar operators could have trouble with the screens in cockpits and what they were looking at? why was it that they could not focus on a life and death situation that they were getting interru interrupted?

part has to do with the civil war going on inside of your brain. if someone came from here, it interrupted the ability to focus even if the focus was on something very important, but secondally what they discovered and it is more basic point was something called the cocktail party effect. this happened in the aftermath of world war ii. these initial neuro scientist whose stories i tell you if the book were gathered in britain trying to figure out how much information can we possibly handle. i mention the cave person image. let me ask you and the audience to think of another image. you are at a cocktail party talking to the person in front of you as i am 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 only do one thing really. i can focus on maggie. you deserve my attention. or i can switch my brain and switch the track and listen to that person. but at that point, i can no longer listen to you. it is simply impossible. we have known this since 1948 and all of these tests were done. with one tiny exception and that is i can listen to you and pick up my name or the change in gender behind me. that is not new science. that goes back to, you know, 1950. over the years between 1950-2000 the neuro scientist began to refine these models. how limited it is on what we can do. and there are networks of attention in our brain and they can literally watch the blood

flow and discover when you attend to one thing and shift your attention the load shifts. there is a myth of multi tasking it is said and that understanding by neuro scientist goes all the way back to 1948. >> and so we are talking about, again, a creature with limited capacity. we are destined to jump to what is unexpected in our environment and attention is something that is -- if you are paying attention to something you are going to be blind to it. if you pay attention to your cellphone call and you are literally blind. the visual cortex centers are

literally blind when a child jumps into the street. let's talk about the allure of the technology. you wrote about the social connection that technology often represents and i thought it was really fascinating. >> there is three or four levels of this. one is the social connection and the social wiring is deep within us. it is as a survival mechanisms. in fact as we go through the converation, i think what i will begin to describe is that the power of the devices are survival mechanisms that are becoming so powerful they can be counter productive and even deadly. so anti-survival mechanisms for lack of a better word. but let's go back it the fire aa anaturalry. if you learned that fire burned you back long ago but you are

unable to communicate that to me i have to burn my hand in order to not get killed. the telling world, written world, anything else is so deeply wired on a social level because it helps us survive. it tells us don't get -- go into the bombshellter, you know? communication and the idea that communication could be urgent is deeply wired into the us and not just that. it is not just the receipt of information that is so powerful but as i document in this book, the sharing of information, harvard rfrp researchers have shown gives you a dopamine rush. it is reinforcing the idea that

the sharing of social information is a reward. so now you have the receipt being a reward. you have the sharing being a reward and i will pause there and say that is one way in which our devices lour us but that is only one of several. >> and so you are painting a picture of someone behind the wheel getting temptation from that device beside them. it might be a computer, it is often a smart phone now. there is a person at the end and it is rewarding and maybe a peeking behind the curtain of nov novality. >> you said possibly there. what honed in on how powerful the devices are is you would

think to yourself, matt, maggie or whomever, if i know a lot of this stuff is spam, and it is. 67% of what we get is spam at least in e-mail. i would get conditioned to ignore it because i happen -- i know -- it is worthless. it turns out the fact most is worthless makes it harded to resist the phone. this goes back to bf skinner and a concept called immediate reinforcement and the way i will illustrate it is that you have a rat in a cage and the rat is supposed to push a lever to get food but the rat doesn't know which push brings the food so the rat is compelled to push all the time, all the time. it is called intermittent

reinfor reinforcement and it is the sam thing happening if your phone. you press and press and press because you don't know when the good things are coming. it is a variable slot machine in your pocket. you add that to the social wiring you are finding something super powerful and i have not given the full range of lure yet. >> it is really powerful. i don't think when people are doing it they realize what a package of dynamite is sitting in the car with them. it is part of our daily life and seen as a fixture or tool and that invisibility also adds to the fact that you know, what it is doing to us, and you know, it is kind of becoming invisible. >> i like the way you put it

where it has become a fixture. it is like we understand it to be part of life and maybe even to go a step further celebrated. if you look at the way the advertising is today it may not tell you to do it in the car but it celebrates being on all of the time. you would say it is a fixture and become invisible and celebrated. if we are enumerating you take the social, the slot machine and the cultural and we are not done but you are emassing a pretty r

resistable thing. >> watt was news to me was the idea the mobile phone companies and the car companies -- they want more on your dashboard. the mobile phone companies want you to have this device at hand at all times. so >> there is another anadote in

this. they went into corporate america, working for one of the cellphone companies in the early '90s and they were marketing the phones as car phones and we went to them and said i think we have a problem. this line connected all the way back to the beginning of neuro science and understand what we were talking about and went to his bosses and said i am not sure you can understand. this assistant -- can't work. and they said why would we want to know that? and he said like to him it was self evidence because people can be in trouble and knowing that

would be encounter to making a lot of money. i think it is worth noting the point you brought up. the cellphone was the car phone. that is how it was sold. the reason it was is because that is where you didn't have phone service. the early cell towers went up, maggie, on the highways and the money was made there. it was 50 cent as minute back then, right? and the advertising and market reflected this. there could be literally an ad with a guy standing in his jeep or sitting in his jeep, phone it his ear, speeding down the road and it was a glorification of this. i am closing my eyes trying to remember this. it will be in the book.

but it said something like can your secretary take dictation at 55 miles per hour and it is guy in the sports car talking on the phone. that is the early days. it is hard to imagine that the wireless companies didn't know and in fact, early on, very occ curageious legislatures, particular in utah, they got caught by the wireless companies saying let people do what they want. it was provarication that was unnerving. the cellphone companies have taken the mantle of no texting

in particular. at&t and verizon have campaigns to go against it. but it is engrained in the culture. should i keep going? >> i think we are approaching a break and want to talk about solutions and where both the industry and where we fit in. i am getting an incredible picture of, you know, individual accountable and perhaps society's responsibility and where it all fits in. just before the break, we have five minutes. why don't you bring us back to the story. we will parcel this fantastic story out in increments because it is a real page turner. here is this kid and you know, i think, maybe these are the, you

know, what issues we were talking about, there were denial we had about the issue. tell me about his first reaction just briefly and you know, how the scene was set for what came to be a trial or a judicial eve event. >> he pulled over and told the police he doesn't know what happened. he is taken to the hospital to get a blood test and noticed the guy is telling me. and the trooper says this guy is a one-hander and he spends the next 18 months trying to get the records and reggie said he didn't do it. he gets a lawyer. and a standoff is set for this first ever, historic trial. and then i will tell you more as we parse it out. >> we have a couple more

minutes. what happens happened over many months as you said. i think doesn't this initial reaction perhaps speak to what we will go into later, but the idea that it can't happen to us. all of the things you are bringing up and you talked about what it represents. it represents denial and the denial we do when we don't want to admit to the other driver, i dinged into you because i was doing a status update. reggie let the community down once before and was living with a lie in the past.

i think one thing the story represents is that it could happen to any of us. again, after the break maybe we will return to some of the statistics on the scope of the problem but the research i have seen shows that in younger ages, you know, 40%, i think in your book of people said they have read text and 30% had sent texts. the statistics are astonishing. we are not talking about the minority of the population. >> you bring up why it will not happen to us and that is because we have a bad control group. if you had did it a hundred times and not gotten in a record you say hundred percent of the time i have not gotten in a wreck therefore i will not get in a wreck.

but that is a terrible control group because 101 or in reggie's case two guys are dead. >> on the go? after wards is available on the xm radio. click on the podcast uldh you would like to download and listen to after wards while you travel. >> we have been talking about the deadly wandering.

>> where we pay attention determines our life and the decisions we don't make about our attention weaves the fabric of our lives. tell me about the multi tasking research. for instance, some of the viewers may have heard of the fact there are super taskers. how many are there? can we really juggle and maybe we don't need to be as conservative as the scientist tell us. >> the short answer is no we cannot. there are 7-6 people who can dunk a basketball on their tippy knows so there are anomlies everywhere. but none of us would setup a stretching machine to become that. i think it is less than 1% of

people are super taskers. i do mention in the book, though, there are some efforts underway to understand what the mechanisms are that allow us to build our attention networks. some of the neuro scientist talk about whether we might use video games or other techniques to improve our visual. can i go back to the building blocks of how we see the world. back to multitasking limpitations and you put it beautifully. it may not go to what we attend to but our choices and even further and it is a big concept but even free will in a way.

i will give you a story to back it up. there is a study and i will guess some of your audience has heard of it. but it is a chocolate cake study. you remember this? maybe you can help me remember exactly. i think it goes like this. study subjects go in a room and get a choice chocolate cake for snack or the fruit? some of the study subjects are asked to remember a string of number before going in and the ones who had to remember the number chose chocolate cake and the ones that didn't chose the fruit. and these neuro scientist factor in for causes and what they are coming up with is when your brain is not even overloaded but

taking into account significant information it has to remember it affects your decision making. bring it back to the phone in the car, merely sort of like thinking about what is going on with your phone, anticipating the phone, talking on the phone -- you are beginning to impenge a little of your decision making pattern and that is a potentially deadly thing in a car but it can go all the way to the restaurant where you chose what to eat or how you interact with your spouse at dinner. >> even something as automatic or routine to driving a car and 16 year olds are doing it because their frontal lobe isn't as developed but people of all ages are doing it in part because they are assuming that,

you know, they can handle this. they can -- driving is such a habit that it should not take those frontal lobes. isn't that one kind of assumption? >> yeah. >> and you are saying when we are tired or face that situation where we need to slam on the brakes the brain isn't able to react as quickly as dwi we want. >> driving deaths are an epidemic we have not solved. this isn't a situation where people are being overtly negligent like drinking into a coma. these are people driving to destinations they want to reach with good hearts and not wanting to hurt anyone and 40,000 people a year are dying. for a while the wireless

industry brought this up but not anymore. and that is driving fatalities some come down in the united states. that is true. but two other things are true. they have come down far less than other countries and when we spent billions on wider roads, airbags, lots of safety measures in the car, so the public safety advocates will say you will see much better safety improvements so bringing this full circle to your point about not taking it for granted you can drive because tens of thousands of people a year are dying. i want to go back to something else you mentioned the young brain. can we touch on that? cephal >> i think is -- it is important

because young teens are the highest texters. >> and this goes between this pinging you and this directing you and if this isn't fully developed, the prefontal cortex, which it isn't until later and certainly not at 19 t is much worse at sending off the signals from down below. i should be driving in the snow and in the dark and in the day. but if you prefronting cortex sunday formally fund it lacks the defenses to vend off that signal. so the group doing it most is the group at the most risk.

>> which is a powerful problem in society right now. talk about the wider social trends. you mentioned the messages we are getting and multitasking is great and this is the picture of success. let's talk more about the messages because it has everything to do with how we see technology. what technology gives us. >> what it brings and how it defines us. on a practical level there is a study in the book that shows especially young people and it would be true of all of us that the value of a text falls sharply with literally each minute that passes. it makes common sense.

let's say you are the teen driving. the text comes in and says party at james' house in 15 minutes. you missed the party and critical social information. you missed your boss saying last minute deal can you call blank. so there is the practical element although there are ways around it like pulling over. but there is also something about the fact that things are just generally speeding up. i want to talk a little bit about that. i think it is cultural and neuro logical. it is hard to disentangle them. there was a statistic in the book that blew me away. people are using more and more

apps each day. and i thought they must be abandoning the old ones. but nope, they are opening more apps for shorter periods of time. spending less time on any given thing or another way in the context of attention they are attending to things for that much less time. it maybe cultural or neurological but if you will permit i would like to throw a hypothesis your way. do you have the feeling when you hear your phone it gives you a jolt of adrenaline? >> it makes you feel good. >> and the neuro science shows this through brain imaging and

neuro chemical study we discover when you interact with your device particular during video games or internet you get a dope mean squirt we told you about earlier. one of the most importants of the phenomenon is the squirt to the pleasure center of your brain doesn't have to do with t the information, the substance. it merely has to do with this response. you get rewarded for it. with babies this is engrained in us. you do something to get a response. you have a device where you do something and get a response. you get used to the response.

in the absence of it, maggie, you feel bored. >> right. we are talking about getting behind the wheel and putting ourselves chimpanzee there. let's talk about solutions. because these are tricky, difficult, and it is disheartening personal and professionally and to see how little effects -- let's start with law enforcement and public health risk. do you see signs of hope -- i know there was a study in syracuse where they put a lot of effort into this.

watt are the good and bad points to education and law enforcement? >> to lay the groundwork let me give the landscape. 45 states outlawed text and driving and ten require hands-free. go back to the stat we had earlier. huge disconnect between attitudes and behaviors. 96% let's say, aaa foundation says it is very dangerous. and 30-some texting and 40-some send and receive. so cleary we have an issue: the first thing we need to acknowledge is this isn't an

issue of attitude. the public safety advocates thought it would be an issue of attitude. let's get attitudes to change. attitudes are not the problem. >> what do you mean? could you clarify by attitudes? >> meaning we need to know this is an issue and a problem. >> education won't do it? >> it hasn't so far because we are fairy well-educated. if you ask the teens, they can be more pronounced than adults saying i know this is an issue. there is a disconnect between attitudes and behavior. here is what a lot of law enforcement officers say the laws are being enforced but it is hard for the police to know what someone is doing. >> it is almost impossible. >> it is a tan amount to impossible.

what am i doing right now? dialing? texting? calling pandora? using the map? interesting law enforcement things i see in canada you see the law enforcement dressing up like construction workers to peer in cars but that is a lot of work. the law enforcement that talk to me express frustration. it is confusing for the driver or consumer, if you will, like what am i allowed to do? it isn't easy to draw the distinc distinct

distinction in your head. >> is hands-free being as bad as being on the phone? sending a text seems like it would be worse than reading a text. is this sorted out? anything to warn about? >> anything where you look away or are manipulating your hands the numbers go up. on a hands-free phone you might have to dial still. and before getting to the hands-free question which is the one that is most hard to parse. even if you have a voice activated a bunch of research shows because they don't work well so you are in an argument with your phone but it takes you aw away from the road. most believe it is cognitive

distraction and that means you are not fully phoenfocused on t road and your visual cortex is thinking about the person or situation you are talking to. when that comes into play is when you have to make a split-second decision going fast. some traffic advocates disagree with that. and there is not a big argument but a low level discussion is going on. the auto industry advocates for hands-free being okay. and it is also true in the same breath they have a financial interest in it being okay because they are selling lots of gadgets for cars that rely on the systems. they are trying to get people

into show room and that is a selling point. >> it is a more enticing car when you have more ability to do more things in the car obviously. the jury is still a little but out scientist feel that hands-free is dangerous. >> for most scientist the jury isn't out. but i think you will get an argument from a small handful in the scientific community. >> we have time for just a few more, you know, points and questions. but i think, you know, the viewers would want to hear where you see the hope lying. we cannot change it all. we are in this incredible universe of technology with these messages being driven home including the fact it is dangerous but also the fact it is alluring and we talked about the primitive brain. tell us three things you think will work and that you see as

hopeful. >> your poor audience knows if asked for three i will give you nine. but i will give you three. take time away from your device. broadly speaking. to an ex tent you don't realize and maggie i didn't but the amount we are on is impending the ability to make a hot of decisions. some is personal responsibility. the two others are tried and true from drunk driving, seatbelt, one is public education and the other is tough laws and tough enforcement but i want to hit home on both. ...

i want to be careful not to be too prescriptive but on the tough loss side, i think what i am hearing from public safety advocates is unless the laws are tougher and unless people really feel afraid that they are in jeopardy, they are not going to see a reconciliation between

attitude and behavior. they won't come together until they feel like it is a slap on the wrist. what that translates to get a 90 journalist i don't want to be too prescriptive but there are some solutions in the book and i think it just leaders coupled with safety advocates are starting to talk about some tough penalties. >> host: that's important and helpful. tell us in the last few minutes about where delete code your personal experience. how did you come to write the book and did it come out of a series? how did it change your behavior in the technology in the thick of it in so valley with changes in your life have you made, how has it changed your thinking about attention and distraction in our society? >> guest: it changed manifestly. i think about it to your point about how it actually forms my worldview. i have two little kids now and i

watched my behavior in the years before i had then and i would watch this device. i am a journalist so i'm always thinking about what's happening and something was going on so part of it was wanting to understand and part of it was meeting with g. but i mentioned my kids may i tell you a quick story about my son he's 2-years-old now he's six. he barely knew any words and he walks by his grandparents house, my wife's folks and his foot kicks a little much how plastic phone and it causes him to ring so he picks it up and he puts it to his year and i don't know that he knows all these words but he said i will call you back from a landline. [laughter] i burst out laughing. it was one of these moments i

realized i have a kid that is going to drive that is mimicking my behavior and seeing my behavior with devices how i raised myself and my kids was a big part of it simply coupled with having to run into an irresistible story. >> host: it can even be a piece of the research. as you dig through the research and talk to people was there anything that you say surprised you the most about this issue especially if it changed your behavior at all, and i want to push that a little bit further. did you use to text and drive?

>> guest: i don't remember when i first got my fill and capable of texting but i suspect not. i said no bleeping way in i doing that, so i don't think i did that i did talk on the phone and i stopped giving that answer the phone goes in the middle and it doesn't get answered. it actually was not -- i'm picturing something in my mind that i could describe. it wasn't the science. you've done some great journalism and i'm sure you know this experience. what surprised me the most was the outpouring from the characters in this book in the candor and honesty and sharing and i want to say for a moment in particular