a and his latest book, "a deadly wandering: a tale of tragedy and redemption in the age of attention" in its the new york times reporter tells the story of a tragic car accident due to texting from impact through the court proceeding. it combines the disturbing real-life story with a thorough examination of the distractions of technology and their impact on society. the program is about one hour. >> host: hello. i'm here today hosting "after words" with matt rectal, and congratulations on your new and very powerful book, a deadly wondering. i think it's a story about a crash and yet so much more. it's a story as you write about,

about tragedy and redemption. i would say you could call it the canary in a coal mine case of how we live with our technology both in constructive and constructive ways. i think we have a lot to talk about. and i wanted to welcome you. >> guest: where was that when i needed an elevator pitch? that was great. >> host: i wanted to welcome you at also start off by asking, the word deadly is in the title. how deadly? before we go into the story, how deadly is this trend? i we talk about historically, especially vis-à-vis to driving which everyone has heard about. >> guest: first of all, i like your canary in a coal mine reference. the reason i like it a relative to the question you just asked is the canary is that the if you are texting while you're 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, you know, being counterproductive at work. so that's kind of the extreme example. out how deadly, specific your question or drunk driving i think now is about 10,000 a year in the u.s. it's the biggest number that we can measure of the 30, 40,000 deaths we have a year. it's come down sharply, the likes of kansas leitner and mad and strong also brought it down sharply. one 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 baths calls by phone use by drivers. and just let me pause and say, this has been like an eight minute seconds, and say shall i

tell you why it's complicated? so the estimates like from the national safety council would put at about, if memory serves, about 125 million of 5.6 precious, million crashes, india is going to phone use. but those are estimates. the reason we don't know is because it's very hard to track for police agencies. it's 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 that the official numbers are so far off, there's a number from about 2011, which is the latest data we have, of death going to phone use. and tennessee remarks 93 cases, and the state of new york

remarks 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 and everything we see on the roadways say it's a big and growing problem. >> host: tell me a little bit about the story. because we are dealing with a very, very important problem. it does seem to be on the rise, even if we're not quite sure of the scope of the problem. tell me about the story, the accident briefly. because it's a very gripping model or example of what can happen to all of us. >> guest: wind i thought about writing about all the science, i'm sure we'll talk about at some point, i thought what interests me when i read anything is story, character, narrative, emotion, conflict. and i could not have invented and could not have imagined the story that i discovered in reporting this out. it starts with a young man, 19,

september 22, 2006. and he is driving to work at 6:30 a.m. it happens to be last summer, but already there's freezing rain and it is dark and he is going 55 miles an hour, which is the speed limit, but he is swerving periodically across the yellow divider. this is noticed by the guy driving behind him who happens to be a horse shoe maker who's got two tons of for shoes and horseshoe making equipment, a missile at highway speed. the last time reggie shaw, the young man who i mentioned earlier, swerved across the yellow divider, he clipped a saturn carrying, again, you can't make this stuff up, too, not only find feminine, but no kidding, rocket scientist. the real thing, holding boosters for the next space shuttle.

eclipse the. they spent across the road. they are hit by the ferrier broadside in the two men and a saturn are killed instantly. >> host: that's quite a tragedy. >> guest: quite a tragedy. >> host: but, of course, as 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 you came to write this book, you can tell us about that, but one of the most amazing issues related to this is why do people do this? you know, we can talk about do they know the risks? in 2006, there were arguments to and from. i guess we can assume now that many people have an inkling of the danger. so let's start to talk a little bit about why we do such a

self-destructive thing as -- >> guest: texting, right. just to square the circle, in case it's not explicit, reggie was texting. he denied it. you stop down the road 100 yards unscathed. he said he hydroplaned. there's a fierce law enforcement hunt, essentially assure luck homes lie, 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, maybe at the crash, the first ever criminal trial. but you asked the question, well, just, he's texting something innocuous like good morning to you woman he barely even is dating. issues getting to know. what would compel a young band 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 a decidedly good guy, kind of the all-american guy. what would compel someone who knows the difference from right and wrong to 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. may be the best way to start, maggie, is to give you an image of going back on let's say, a a million years or 1000 years. richard a caveman or a cavewoman and that person is tempting to a fire. and he or she gets a tap on the shoulder. i would just ask you what do you think, you, would you be able to avoid turning around? if someone taps on your shoulder and you attending a fire engine who it was, do you think you could ignore the tap? >> host: no, not at all. >> guest: leading question, i'm sorry, your honor. but, of course, you couldn't.

you don't know if it's a threat. you don't know if it's opportunity is it food? is it someone with a spear? that's the first thing i would put in people's minds, and of going to get into the neuroscience of this in a minute, but essentially when you're driving in the car and the phone rings, the first thing to think about is that it's a proverbial tap on the shoulder, maggie, and it is from anyone anywhere in the world and you got no idea, is that opportunity? is that threat? is that my boss? is that my spouse? is that my potential mate? you know, it's unknown, answer this technology has given us kind of like a warp speed version of the tap on the shoulder. now, maybe i should pause here and talk before go to the next kind of level of the lower about the neuroscience of that moment. >> host: tells all a bit about the limits of our tension which

has been well studied for more than a century. we are very limited animals when it comes to our potential capabilities, right chance to exactly. so what's happening in that moment, and it will kind of go indirectly to answer 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. the call of executive control. that's the thing that makes us most human. the thing responsible for art, architecture, civilization. but when the tap comes for the roar of the law and it sends a signal up from here, much more primitive survival mechanism. let's say in the case of the line it says, whom, login, run. and this part, the part that is doing this kind of high level task must listen to the lower part of the brain. because if they didn't, guess what? you get eaten. so now let's go back in time to

start to understand that these, we begin to understand the limitations of our brains. we cannot ignore, first of all, that reptiles found. if you can, you, you would essentially have to have eyes in the back of your head -- reptile sound. go back to probably the mid-1900s right after world war ii, scientists in britain were really wrestling with a question. why was it that their pilots in airplanes fighting the battle over britain, why was it their radar operators could have trouble with screens and pics? could have trouble with what you're 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 inside your

brain that i've just described. if something came from here, it interrupted the ability to focus even if the focus was on something very important. but secondly what they discovered and it's even more basic point, was something called the cocktail party effect. and this happened right in the aftermath of world war ii, these kind of initial narrow scientists whose stories i took in the book were gathered in britain and they're trying to figure out, what, how much information can we possibly handle. i mention the cave person image. let me ask you this, come up with you and the audience to think of another image. you're at a cocktail party and you're talking to the first 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've tried this a number of

times, is that you can really only do one thing. i can focus on maggie. you deserve my attention. you are listening to me, or i can switch my brain. i can switch the track and listen to that person. but at that point i can no longer listen to you. it is simply physically impossible. mackey, we've known this since like 1948 cents all these tests were done. with one tiny, tiny exception which is i can listen to you and just maybe i can pick up my name or the change in gender behind me. so that is not new size. that goes back to, you know, 1950. over the years between 1950-2000, the neuroscientists began to refine these models. how limited what we can do. what they begin to discover is that our network of attention in our brain. they discover they can literally watch inside the brain blood

flow and discover when you are attending to one thing and you shift your attention, you can say that the load shifts. you can't do both things. you can't juggle both things. it is often said there is a myth of multitasking, and again, that understand at least by neuroscientists goes all the way back to 1948. >> host: so we are talking about again, a creature with limited attentional capacity. we are destined to jump to what's novel and expected -- unexpected in our environment. and attention is something that if you're paying attention to something, you're going to be blind, if you're paying attention to, say, your cell phone call, you're literally blind to visual signals into your brain when a child jumps into the street. so add to this, you know, let's talk a little bit about the

allure of the technology. you wrote about the social connection that technology so often represents and i thought that was really fascinated. >> guest: yeah. i mean, there's three or four levels of this. what is the social connection. the social wired is a very, very deep in us and it is again a survival mechanism. in fact, as we go through this conversation i think what i will begin to describe it is that the power of these devices comes because they are in effect survival mechanisms that are becoming so powerful that they can be counterproductive and even deadly. so anti-survival mechanisms for want of a better word. but on the social point let's go back to the fire and algae. one of the valleys of being social is that we learn from each other. so if, maggie, if you learned that fire burns you back millennia ago, but you're unable to communicate that to me, then

i have to burn my hand in order to not get killed, right? because i get burned, i get an infection, i'm dead. language itself, but telling world, written in anything else is so deeply wired on a social level because it helps us survive. it tells us, you know, go into the bomb shelter. i mean, go down the list of ways. communication and the idea that communication could be urgent is deeply wired into us. and not just that. it's not just the receipt of information that is so powerful, but as a document in this book, the sharing of information, harvard researchers have shown, gives you a dopamine rush, hopes, scores your reward centers in your brain. 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. i will posner and say that is one way in which our devices lure as but it is only one of several. >> host: so you're painting a picture of someone behind the wheel giving extraordinary temptation from that device beside them. it might be a computer. it's often a smart phone now. there's a person at the other end, something possibly rewarding and even the idea of taking behind the curtain of a novelty as rewarding. >> guest: before you go on to that let me pause because you said a really important work. he sai of possibly rewarding. i think maybe even some ways my favorite bit of science that i learned in this, the one that really surprised me and honed in on just how powerful these devices are is, that you would think to yourself, well, matt, maggie, or whomever, if i know

that a lot of this stuff is spam, and it is, 67% of what we get is spam, at least an e-mail, and i would get conditioned to ignore it because i know it's worthless. going back to your word possibly important, it turns out that the very fact that most of this stuff is worthless makes it even harder to resist the phone. this goes back to the of skinner -- b.f. skinner and a concept called reinforcement to the way i would illustrate is that it will probably connect your audience as it did for me 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 bush will bring the food. so 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 words in all of psychology and if you forget the

comparison of us to rodents, it is exactly the same thing happening with your phone. depressant press and press because you don't know when the good thing will come. as many scientists call it, it's a veritable slot machine in your pocket. so you had that piece to the social wiring. you're starting to find something for for powerful and having given you the full range of the lure yet. >> host: it is really powerful, yes. i don't think when people are doing it they quite realize quite what it package of dynamite is again sitting in the car with them. i think it also seems as though it's such a part of our daily life. it's a fixture, a tool. so that kind of perceptual invisibility also adds to the fact that what it's doing to us is kind of becoming invisible. >> guest: i like the way you put it as it's become a fixture.

i mean, it's like we understand it to be part of life, and maybe even to go step further, a celebrated fixture. 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 to i sort of document the ads coming from various places that say tried to do more, tried to do more faster from, second wireless companies, or do choose to things at once, this ad from one company to little kids and they say of course you would want to do more than one thing at a time. the kids say, of course i would. so it's a fixture. it's become invisible. it's become celebrated. if we're sort of enumerating you take the social, you take the slot machine, you take the cultural, and still we're not done but you're adding up again you are a massing of pretty irresistible thing. >> host: to push the point a

little further, tell us about, i don't know if simplicity is too strong a word, but what was news to me is the idea that the mobile phone company and the car companies, you can still see this today, the car companies want more on your dashboard. mobile phone companies want you to have this device at hand at all times. so tell us a little bit about that. because there were echoes to me of smoking. i'm not saying there's a conspiracy but that was really, really very interesting. >> guest: well look, there's another one of these images as a reporter this book one anecdote after the next when you're on the phone reporting, and you've experienced is where you go, you've got the phone and you say you've got to be kidding me. one of the neuroscientists in this book to play the huge role in the reggie shaw case that we talked to at the beginning, is

named david street but he worked as a lot of neuroscientists do, he sort of went into corporate america when he first started and he was working for one of the cell phone companies in the early '90s. and they're starting to market these phones. as car phones. he went to them and he said, i think we've got a problem. i understand he was in this long line of people going although it back to world war ii, sort of this very kind of find line connected all the way back to the beginning of neuroscience for the understood this to we were talking about, and he went to his bosses and he said, i'm not sure you understand. this can't work. this is dangerous. and as he records the anecdote in the book, they said to them, why would we want to know that? and he said, like to him it was self-evident, because people could be in trouble. the way he described the situation knowing that would be very counter to making a lot of

money. now, i want to be really careful in this conversation because the cell phone companies have actually gotten much more responsible but if you think it's worth noting the point you brought up. early on the cell phone was the car phone. that's how it was sold. the reason it was sold that way is because that was where you didn't have phone service. if you're trying to build a business you will build it where you can't have phone access. the early cell towers, maggie, went up on the highways. the money was made. you remember what they used to charge. it was like 50 cents a minute, right? the advertising, marketing from the cell phone companies reflected this. they would be a guy, literally and add with a guy standing in his jeep, you know, or sitting in his jeep, phone to his ear speeding down the road, and it was a glorification of this. i think there was one, i'm closing my eyes because i can't remember, it will be in the book

but it said something like while the offensive on a number of levels but can your secretary take the division at 55 miles an hour? it's a guy in a sports car talking on the phone. so that's the early days. the car phone, 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, early states got caught by the wireless companies who said, let people do what they want. we are not sure of the risks. parallel to the smoking industry is a very weighty probative thing i don't think, you know, i wouldn't use that exactly but it was a kind of prevarication that is very unnerving. now, these days the cell phone companies have really taken the mantle of no texting in particular. they have put out apps to block

things, at&t, verizon, go down the list. they have campaigns. they have public service announcements, but right now it's in sconce their culture. the auto companies pashtun let me path, full shop. shall i keep going? >> host: i think we are approaching a break and i think we want to talk about solutions and where both the industry and where we fit in. i'm getting a picture, an incredible picture of individual accountability and perhaps societal responsibility here, and where it all fits in. just before the break, we have five minutes. why did you bring us back to the story? we will parse the fantasticks are out in increments as you did in the book because it's a real page turner. here is this kid, and i think maybe vis-à-vis the issues we're talking about, there was some

denial. maybe as we all have had about this issue. tell me a little bit about his first reaction, just briefly, and how the scene was set for what came to be a trial, or a judicial it at. >> guest: just briefly, he pulls over to the site of the road and tells the police he did not what happened. maybe he hydroplaned, and this tenacious state trooper taken to the hospital to get a blood test, and notices that he's texting. and the trooper tells me, and ends the first chapter, this guy is a one hander. he spends the next 18 months in this hot pursuit trying to get the phone records. reggie, apropos of what he just said, one of the big issues, he says he didn't do it. he gets a lawyer, and a standoff is set for this worst ever historic trial period and then i'll tell you more as we parse it out. >> host: we do have a couple more minutes, so what happened,

happened over many months as you said, and i think doesn't this initial reaction perhaps speak to what will go into later, but the idea that it can happen to a can't happen to us? >> guest: all the things you're bringing up come in fact i thought initially when we first started talking, all the things it represents, one of the things it represents is denial. he is a metaphor for our collective denial, it can't happen to us, and the denial we do and we don't want to admit to the other driver oh, yeah, i deemed india because i was doing a status update. and adding to the drama in this case, reggie has let his community down once before. he was living with a lie in his past, and he had come clean about it and he was feeling a sense of humiliation. he couldn't stand the idea that in this small community in northern utah, he might let his

family down against. >> host: and i think one thing the story represents is, you know, that it could happen to any of us. i mean, 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, ma particularly and younger ages, but 40% i think in your book, of people said they had read text. 30% said they had sent text. these statistics are astonishing. we are not talking about a minority of the population, right? >> guest: you brought up something about partly why we can deny it, it won't happen to us, because with a bad control group as they say in science but if you don't 100 times and not gotten in a wreck, can you say to yourself, 100% of the time i haven't got an indirect. therefore, therefore, i won't get in a wreck. it's a terrible control group

because 101, or in reggie's case, who knows, 31, you guys are dead. >> host: we are doing with a one time slot machine on a rainy highway. we will pause right there we be back in a minute for more talk on attention and driving and distraction. ..

of decisions we make and don't make every day we use in the fabrics of our lives. tell me more about the latest multitasking research for instance, some of the viewers may have heard the fact there are super taxpayers. how many are there? can you juggle and maybe we don't need to be as conservative as the scientists tell us. >> guest: i think there are anomalies everywhere. there are people that can dunk a basketball on their tiptoes but none of us would like try to set up a stretching machine to become that in our home. what percentage are declining i think it is less than 1%. if my memory serves from the book. i am not a super task or were i

would've remembered that. but i did mention in the book that there are some efforts underway to understand what are the mechanisms that allow us to build our attention in the networks into some of the new scientists in the book talk about whether we might actually use of video games or other techniques to improve our visual acuity so there is some hope of that but may i go back to something you mentioned earlier about attention and being the sort of building block about how we see the world as it goes to the multitasking and/or limitations you put it so beautifully a second ago and i don't remember exactly what you said that it may not actually just go to what we attend to, but our choices and even further, and it's a big concept but even free well anyway and i will give you the study to back this up and it even goes to how

much control we have in this moment. there is a study i'm going to guess some of your audience heard of and i'm going to oversimplify but it's a chocolate cake study. remember this one. maybe you can help me remember but i think it goes like this. sounds dodgy subjects go in the room and get the choice would you like to chocolate cake for a snack or fruit and some of the study subjects were asked before going into remember a string of numbers and by the statistically significant margin the ones that had to remember the number choose the chocolate cake and the ones who didn't choose the fruit and they factor for these all different causes and what they are coming up with is that when you were brain isn't even overloaded with information but taking into account significant information that it has to

remember it affects your decision-making. so bringing it back to the car, thinking about what is going on with your phone and anticipating the phone, talking on the phone you are beginning to end page a pinch a little bit of your decision-making power and to cover the broad spectrum committed as a potentially deadly thing in a car but it actually can double-click to the restaurant where you are choosing what to eat or how you want to interact with your going back to the beginning spouse with dinner. getting a snack food elements to this talk. >> host: something as driving a car, 16 they don't have the judgment and their frontal lobes are not as developed. but, you know people of all ages are doing it and in part because they are assuming that they can

handle this and driving is so habitual but it shouldn't take those frontal lobes. isn't that one kind of assumption? and you are saying that when we are tired or when we do face this situation where we need to spy on the very debate could -- slam on the brakes it doesn't react as quickly as we want. >> guest: me to no mistake, driving deaths are an epidemic that we haven't 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. these are people driving to the destinations they want to reach with good hearts not hoping to hurt anybody and 30 to 40,000 people a year die he and i would bring something up your statistically. one of the issues that for a while they brought up and they

don't anymore driving fatalities have come down in the u.s.. that is true but two other things are also true. they come down far less than other countries and they come down in the company do a good time that we've spelled debate could spend more on the safety measures in the car so what the advocates would say is that you would be seeing much better safety improvement. so to bring this full circle to your plate, don't take it for granted you can drive because tens of thousands of people in here are dieting. i also want to go back to something else you mentioned. can we touch on that for a second? >> host: that is important because they are texting and reggie was 19 at the time. >> guest: she is so emblematic

we go back to that initial image of the sort of civil war the tension and the brain between this directing you and this isn't fully developed the frontal cortex which it isn't until much later and until 19 is much much worse defending of the signals from down below. so you have no chance of the lion comes. but you might know if you are a little bit older and you are a little bit more adept that it's raining in front of me. i have a fully formed pre- frontal cortex i should be driving in the snow in the dark in the day. but it lacks the defenses to be able to fend off the signal even more. so at the most risk and susceptibility. >> host: which is a very

powerful, very, very powerful problem in society right now. let's talk again about the associate logical trends. you mentioned the messages that we are getting and the multitasking is great and successful that you can do it anywhere and this is the picture of success, et cetera. but you know, let's talk a little bit more about those messages because it has everything to do with how we even see technology. >> guest: how it defines us and how it is associated with it. on a very kind of practical level there is a study in the book that shows that especially young people but it would be true of all of us that the value of the text falls sharply literally with each minute that passes. it makes common sense. let's say that you are the team or the employee or whoever

driving and the text says party at jane's house in 15 minutes and you don't look. you missed the party, critical social information. it's your boss saying last minute deal can you call. so first there is a practical element although there are myriad ways around that like pulling over if you're so inclined. but there is also something about the fact that things are just generally speaking up. i want to talk about that a think it is both culturally and their logical. and i'm not sure who it is hard to disentangle them. there's a statistic in the book that kind of blew me away when i saw it as but people are using more and more and more apps each day and i got okay that's interesting they must be

abandoning the old applications. no. guess what they are doing? beer opening more for shorter periods of time so they are spending less time on every given thing, or to put it another way in the context of attention, they are attending to things for that much less time. that may be cultural or their logical but if you permit, i would like to throw a narrow logical assumption or assumption hypothesis doorway. if you move it out and get a little jolt of adrenaline. >> host: it makes you feel good. >> guest: i almost sounded facetious there but i'm not. it makes you feel good. the narrow science shows because the brain imaging and botanical

study we discovered that when you interact with your device particularly during certain activities committee that a dopamine that we eluded to earlier. with several of the scientists told me -- and this is a really i think one of the most important parts of this phenomenon is that dopamine interaction and worked the closer center of your brain -- pushers entered your brain doesn't have to do with the substance but it has to do with the stimulus response. so on this really primitive level, you do something and something happens and you get rewarded for it. i see this with my little kids all the time. with bbs it is ingrained in us you do something to get a response. so, now you have a device where you do something and get a response, you get accustomed to these. you will be application and get a response care debate. kill or miss an angry word and

get a response. in its absence you start to feel bored. and then what do you do. >> host: so basically we are talking about getting behind the wheel and putting ourselves there. [laughter] we are not opening the car door and putting ourselves behind the wheel right now but let's talk about solutions because these are tricky and difficult and it is disheartening. personally and i think professionally and in the society to see the little effects. let's start with law enforcement and public health threats. do you see any signs of hope clicks i know? i know you talked about a study in syracuse where they put a tremendous amount of effort into enforcement, but would it have lasting results? what are some of the good and bad points to the education and

law enforcement? >> guest: around the margins we are seeing some stuff but to lay the groundwork for this, but he gets the law enforcement landscape and maybe start with what law-enforcement calls me. 45 states i think it is 45 a-alpha will texting outlaw texting and driving and if memory serves that hands-free require hands-free. but still, go back to what we said earlier. huge disconnect between attitudes and behaviors. right now 96% would say the aaa foundation for the highway safety says no or say that it's very dangerous. 30 some are 40 some still send and receive so clearly we have an issue. the first thing i think we need to acknowledge and the conversation is it's not an issue of attitude. that is what i think we thought.

the public safety advocates fought this was great to be an issue with attitude. attitudes forgive the vernacular it isn't the problem. >> host: can you say what you mean by attitude? >> guest: we need to know this as an issue that it is a problem. >> host: education won't do it. >> guest: if you ask any of these teams, they can be even more pronounced than adults saying i know this is an issue so there's a disconnect between the attitude and behavior. but we go to the law enforcement side. the texting laws while they are being enforced and a lot of tickets are being written, it is very hard for the police to know what someone is doing. i think it is tantamount to impossible because what am i

doing right now? in my texting or calling were using the map? that leads to problems. interesting law-enforcement i think in canada and in the u.s. you start to see law-enforcement dress up like road workers so they can peer inside the car but it's a lot of hard work to do. so the ones that talk to me express frustration about that. i also think what the psychologist told me is that it's interesting for the driver into the consumer and the consumer what am i allowed to do exactly? it's not easy to draw those distinctions in your head. >> host: that raises an important question, too. do we know whether hands-free is as bad as being on the phone and whether texting -- i can imagine sending a text is worse than reading of the text however have

we got this sorted out and is there anything you want to warn people about? >> guest: anything where you look away or you are manipulating your hands those numbers go up so even if you are on a hands-free phone use to light have to violate and before i get to the question which is the one that is the most hard to parse even if you have a voice activated thing a bunch of research shows partly because they don't work well your in an argument with your phone so that a problem, they problem, but it also takes you away from the road when you interact with that. as to being on a hands-free device, most of the scientists believe it is a cognitive distraction. most of the public safety experts believe it is a cognitive distraction and what that means is you are not fully

focus on the road and in fact to the point where the visual part text is somewhat superimposed by thinking about imagining the person you're talking about and the situation you're 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's not a big argument that there is a low-level discussion going on. i will tell you the auto industry that he didn't talk about earlier advocates for hands-free being okay and it's also true in the same breath that they have financial interest in it being okay because they are selling lots of gadgets for cars that will rely on those systems and one step further right now they are trying to get people into the showroom and that is one of the

selling points. >> host: is more enticing when you have the ability to do more things in the car obviously. so the jury is still out and give scientists really feel that hands-free is dangerous. >> guest: for most >> guest: for most scientists the jury is in doubt that you would get an argument from a small handful in the scientific community. >> host: we have time for just a few more pointed questions. i think that the viewers want to hear where you see the hope. we are in this incredible universe of technology with messages being driven home including the fact that it's dangerous but also the fact that it is a luring and we are talking about the primitive brain. tell us three things that you think will work into the ucs

hopeful. >> guest: door audience knows if you ask for three i. will give you nine. concretely one is personal and i get into this in the book. we mentioned the chocolate cake study. take some time away from your device can and not just when you're driving but broadly speaking because to the extent that you don't realize your audience, and i didn't realize, so i speak from experience the amount that we are on all the time is impinging our ability to make a lot of decisions it might make a decision beyond the wheel. so personal responsibility. the two others are tried and true crime drunken-driving, seat belts, loss of public education committee and one is the tough law and enforcement. but i want to hit home on both of them. when it comes to public education, reggie shaw turned out to be a hero. what a redemption. i don't want to give the book a

way -- >> 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 he deserves to feel he's redeemed himself by dave never seen and it's a story with reading. but on the wall side, public education, people out speaking, lots of victims families -- >> host: cannot have an impact? >> guest: it can have a big impact and they would also have an impact on the legislature. i want to be careful not to be prescriptive but on the tough law side, i think that what i'm hearing from public safety advocates is that unless the walls are tougher and unless people really feel afraid that they are in jeopardy we aren't going to see the reconciliation between attitude and behavior. they won't come together until people feel like it is more a

slap on the wrist. what that translates to again given i'm a "new york times" journalist and i don't want to be prescriptive but there are some solutions in the book and i think legislators coupled with public safety advocates are starting to talk about tougher penalties. >> host: that's important in hopeful. it was a little bit in the last few minutes about your personal experience. how did you come to write about? how did it change your behavior in the thick of it in silicon valley with changes in your life have you made? how has it changed your thinking about attention and distraction in our society? >> guest: my thinking has changed manifestly. i think about it so broadly about how it actually forms my worldview. i have two little kids now and i watched my behavior in the years

before i had done and i would watch this device and i just i'm a journalist, so i'm always thinking about what's happening and i couldn't -- something was going on. so part of it was wanting to understand and part of it was meeting reggie that i mentioned my kids, can i tell a quick story about my son? he's 2-years-old and now he's six. he barely knew any words and he walks by his grandparents house, my wife's folks and his foot kicks this plastic phone and he picks it up and he puts it to his gear and i don't even know that he knows all these words but he says i will call you back from a land line. [laughter] i just burst out laughing it was one of these moments i realized i have a kid that's going to

drive indicated that his mimicking my behavior and seeing my behavior with devices. i want to know from myself a big part of it simply coupled with having run to an irresistible story with reggie shaw. >> host: was there anything in particular and it can even be a piece of the research. and i know that as a journalist or surprised all the time as you dig through the research that was there anything that surprised you the most about this issue especially if you changed your behavior at all and i want to push that further. did you used to text and drive? >> guest: i've been asked that before. and the reason i say i don't remember is because i don't remember when i got my first

phone capable of texting but i suspect not because i don't think that i could text by the time i was already reporting on the subject and by then i was like no way. you know, am i doing that. so i don't think i did. but i did talk i did talk on the phone and i stopped doing that. the phone goes in the middle and it goes off and it doesn't get answered. but i do want to go to what surprised me the most because it was not -- i'm just picturing something in my mind that i will describe. it wasn't the science. you've done some great journalism and i'm sure that you know this experience experience what surprised me the most was the outpouring from the characters in this book, the deep candor and honesty and sharing and i want to say for a moment in particular from the widows this on some level is

built on grief. what the prosecutors and victims advocates open up to me stories in their own minds of abuse, domestic abuse, sexual abuse. those were not ancillary to this. they were not irrelevant because they went to the question of attention. what do you pay attention to? what in your life in your history dictates dictate how you attend to the world and in this case in 2006 the story was on the research defeat the razor's edge into the places they came from so i think what surprised me the most and i feel truly honored to have been a vessel for it was the outpouring of the candor, emotion and energy from

people. i just think that it was once-in-a-lifetime. mcgrady got to understand this issue we need to look carefully at it skeptically at all the different layers. again and again technology throughout history hasn't been a manner of just what the inventors say or how you use it in a that moment or what it was when it was first in your pocket. it's a very dicey changeable shape shifting power of our lives. what would you hope, and we have a few more minutes -- how do you hope that we evil in our attitudes towards technology? >> guest: i love the question and the idea of taking a vertical book. i think there is an nlg in the book that hits it home for me

and i hope that we will answer it. in the end i tried to add up what this means that scientists gave me an allergy and said we would compare technology today to the industrialization of food and just to back out what they meant by that, when we industrialized food a lot of amazing things happen like less expensive food for giving calories to more people come a survival mechanism. but when it got in the extreme it also gave the vending machine you walk down the hall and hit the button and get a bag of chips that has all the sugar and fat that you ever needed is a case person but when you need is a cave person you had to walk halfway through the jungle come a told that there, fight off the bat and by the time you were eating it desperately needed it. now it's going to make you obese and diabetic. so that's this survival thing turns into a problem. the same thing is true today

with our devices. they are incredible. make no mistake accused that phrase more than once today. amazing. the utility is incredible we shouldn't lose sight of the fact. it's ten up to the food and we needed to survive everyday. but just like the vending machine, it is -- it has the potential to short-circuit us by providing the eu's like going rights right to the nerve centers with primitive social rewards that can hijack us. so i hope that we become critical if that's critical of the story way that we've become critical of food. we have a metaphor that has been used before, it's a diet. and i think that's what i thought about talk about in the book. find a diet. disconnect enough to find the diet. but it really does take a concerted effort because the concerted effort because we are

just at the beginning of understanding what is fat and sugar and salt. >> host: you left us with so much to think about and so much to be skeptical about and so many ways in which we can think about this issue in new ways. so thank you very much for writing this book. >> guest: it was a pleasure. thank you. >> that was after words in which authors of the latest nonfiction books are interviewed by journalists, public policy makers and others familiar with other material. after words errs every weekend at 10 p.m. on saturday, 12 and 9 p.m. on sunday and 12 a.m. on the day. you can also watch online. go to booktv.org and click on after words on the series and the topics list on the upper right side of the page.

booktv asked bookstores and libraries around the country about the nonfiction books they are most excited about being published. here's a look at the titles published in austin texas. starting is rebel recounting the military life of confederate general stonewall jackson. ..

>> the next three hours later chance to talk with author and supreme court expert joan biskupic. the reuters legal affairs editor will talk about the politics of sport nominations and decisions. and the justices whose lives she has explored. the former law correspondent for "congressional quarterly," "usa today" and the "washington post" has written three biographies including "sandra day o'connor" under 2014 released on justice sotomayor, "breaking in." >> host: in your most recent book "breaking in: the rise of sonia sotomayor and the politics of justice," you quote somebody saying i knew she would be