way that our devices were us that but it's only one of several. >> host: so you're painting a picture of someone behind the wheel getting extraordinary temptation from this device beside them. it might be a computer. it's often a smartphone. there is a person at the the end or something possibly rewarding and even the idea of peeking behind the curtain of its novelty is reporting. >> host: >> guest: before you go wanted to let me go back because if you said possibly rewarding. i think in some ways i favorite bit of science i learned in this, the one that really surprised me and helen and how they're not how powerful the devices are is you think you're -- your self 67% of what we get

is spam i would get the conditioned to ignore it because i know that it's worthless. going back to the word possibly important it turns out the very fact that most of this stuff is worthless makes it harder to resist. this goes back to skinner and the concept called intermittent reinforcement and the way that i will illustrate is to connect the audience as it did for me you have a a rack in the cage and the rat is rack is supposed to push a lever to get food but the rat doesn't know which push will bring the food so they are compelled to push all the time. it's called intermittent reinforcement. it's one of the most powerful in all of psychology and if you'll forgive the comparison of us it is exactly the same thing happening with your phone. you press and press because you don't know when the good thing

is going to come. it is a slot machine in your pocket so you add that to the social wiring and you are starting to find something superpowerful and i haven't given the full range yet. >> host: is powerful. i don't think that when people are doing it they realize quite a package of dynamite is again sitting in the car with them. i think it also seems as though it is such a part of your daily life it is defeated as a fixture so that's kind of invincibility also adds to the facts about what it's doing to us is this kind of becoming invincible. test code i like the way that you put it that words become a fixture. it's like we understand it to be part of life and maybe even to go a step further celebrate

fixture. if you look at the way that the advertising is today it may not tell you to do this in the car but it certainly celebrates being on all the time and i documented the ads coming from various places that say try to do more from the wireless companies or do two things at once where they say to the little kids of course you want to do more than one thing at a time and the kids say of course i would. so it's become invisible and celebrated and that is if we are enumerating you take the social, you take the slot machine, the cultural and still we are not done but you're adding again a pretty irresistible thing. >> host: tell us about what was news to me is the idea that

the mobile phone companies and car companies want more on your dashboard than the mobile phone companies want to have this device at hand at all times so tell us a little bit about that because there were echoes to me. i am not saying there was a conspiracy that that was really interesting. >> guest: there is another one of these just as i reported this in this book one anecdote after the next that when you're on the phone reporting and they played a huge role in the reggie case that we talked about at the beginning and he worked as a lot of scientists do he went to corporate america when he first started and he was working for

one of those companies in the early '90s they were starting to market these phones as car phones and he went to them and he said i think that we have a problem. i understand he was in a long line of people going all the way back to world war ii, sort of this very kind of fine wine connected all the way back to the beginning of neuroscience but understood the stuff that we were talking about and he went to his bosses and he said i'm not sure that you understand. this can't work. this is dangerous. and if he records the anecdote in the book, he said why would we want to know that. and to him it was self-evident because people could be enjoying the debate that he describes the situation knowing that i would be very counter to making a lot of money. i want to be careful in this conversation because the cell phone companies have actually gotten much more responsible but i do think that it's worth

noting the point that you brought up. early on, the cell phone was the car for. the reason that it was sold that way is because that is when you didn't have phone service. so if you're trying to build a phone service will build it where you don't have phone access. the early towers went up on the highways. the money was made. you remember what they used to charge it was like 50 cents a minute and the advertising, the marketing in the cell phone companies reflected this. there would be literally and add a guy standing in his cheap or sitting in his cheek with his phone to his dear and it was a glorification of this. i'm closing my eyes because i'm trying to remember. it will be in the book but it says something like wildly offensive on a number of levels but can your secretary take dictation at 55 miles per hour and it's a guy in a sports car talking on the phone.

so that's the early days. the car phone is hard to imagine that the wireless companies didn't know and in fact early on, some very courageous legislators particularly in california and utah where the story happened in the early states got fought thoughts by the wireless companies that said what people do what they want. we are not assured of the risks. parallel to the smoking industry it is a very weighted thing so i don't think -- i would infuse that it was a kind of pet irritation that is very a nursing. these days the cell phone companies have taken a mantle of no texting in particular. they put out tasks to block things and go down the list. we have campaigns and public service announcement that right

now it is also in our culture. in the auto companies there is a different, let me stop. should i keep going? >> host: we are approaching a break and i think we want to talk about solutions in both where the industry and where we fit in. i'm getting an incredible picture of individual accountability and practice of the societal 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 and parse this out in increments as you said in the book because it is a page turner here is this kid and i think that may be the issues we've been talking about there was some denial. maybe if we all had in this issue tommy about his first reaction recently and how the scene was set for what came to

be a trial of the judicial events. >> guest: peoples over to the site of the road and tells the police he doesn't know what happened in hydroplaned into this tenacious state trooper takes him into the hospital to get a blood test and he notices he is texting and the trooper tells me he is a one hander and he spends the next 18 months in a person to get the phone records and in one of the big issues he says he didn't get it, he gets a lawyer and a standoff is the fact for this first-ever historical trial and i will tell you more as we parse it out. >> host: we do have a couple of more minutes. so what happened happened over many months as you said. and i think it doesn't his initial reaction perhaps speak

to what we will go into later but the idea that it can't happen to us to? >> guest: it's all the things that you are bringing up and when we thought about the things that represents. one of the things it represents is denial. and here is a metaphor for that collective denial that it can't happen to us and the denial when we do not want to admit to the other driver i didn't into you because i was doing a status update and adding on to the drama in this case, he had let his community down the ones before. he was living with a lie in his past. 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 of northern utah he might let his family down again. >> host: i think one story that it represents is that it

could have been to any of us. i mean again after the break maybe we we both returned to some of the statistics on the scope of the problem but the research that i've seen shows particularly in the younger ages 40% i think in your book of people say that they have read text. 30% say that they've spent the text. the specifics are astonishing. we are not talking about a minority of the population. >> guest: you brought up something of why we can't deny it. because we have a bad group that says if you've done it 100 times and haven't gotten in a rack and say to your cell phone hundred% of the time i haven't gotten into a wreck therefore i won't but it's a terrible control group that has 101 or in a bridge -- reggie's case. >> host: and we are dealing

with a rainy highway. we will pause there and be back for more talk on attention and driving into distraction. >> host: we have been talking about the fantastic new book

that you've written and i would like to return to the science of attention because as many scientists have told me, attention is the human faculty. it decides where we pay attention to determines our lives and the decisions we make and don't make about the attention every day we use the fabric of our lives. to tell tell us a little bit more about the latest multitasking research. for instance some of the viewers may have heard of this fact that there are super taxers. how many are there and can you juggle and maybe we don't need to be as conservative as the scientists tell us. >> guest: the short answer is we can't really. there are anomalies everywhere. there are people that can't dunk a basketball on their tippy toes but none of us would like try to

set up a stretching machine to become that in our home. how many percentage because it is tiny. it's less than 1% if memory serves the book perfectly. there are some efforts to understand what are the mechanisms that allow us to build our attention on the networks? some of them in the books talk about whether we might use video games or other techniques to improve our visual acuity is that there is some hope of that. but may i go back to something that you mentioned earlier about attention and being the sort of building lot of how we see the world? as it goes to the limitation you put it up beautifully a second ago. i don't remember what you said that it may not actually go just to what we intend to but our

choices have even further it is a big concept and i will give you a study to back this up and it even goes to reggie. i'm going to guess that the audience has heard of this and i'm this and i'm going to oversimplify but there's a chocolate cake study. maybe you can help me remember but it goes like this. the subjects go in a row and get the choice would you like the chocolate cake for a snack or the fruit and some of these studies are asked to remember a stream of numbers and by a statistically significant margin, the ones that have to remember a member chose the chocolate cake and the ones that didn't choose the fruit and they factor these brilliant narrow scientist factors and what they

are coming up with is when we are taking into account significant information that it has to remember that affect your decision making. so now bring it back to the phone and a car and nearly sort of thinking about what is going on with your phone and anticipating the phone, talking on the phone you are beginning to end pinch a little bit of your decision-making power. to cover the broad spectrum, that is a potentially deadly thing in a car but it also can go all the way to the restaurant where you are choosing what to eat or going back to the beginning having a spouse at dinner and getting a snack food elements to the talk. >> host: something as routine as driving the car from a 16-year-old is doing it because

they don't have the judgment into their frontal lobes are not as the select. the people of but people of all ages are doing it in part because they are assuming that they can handle this. driving is so habitual that they shouldn't take these frontal lobes. isn't that what kind of assumption. when we need to slam on the break the brain isn't brain isn't able to react as quickly as we want. >> guest: make no mistake driving deaths are an epidemic we have absolved. this isn't 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 dot hoping to hurt anybody in 30 to 40,000 people a year by eating and i would bring something appear statistically. one of the issue is that for a while for while the wireless industry brought up and they don't anymore is while driving fatalities have come down in the u.s.. that is true. but to whether things are true. they come down far less than other countries and they've come down at the time that we have spent billions on wide roads, air bags, safety measures in the car so it is what the public safety advocates would say is you would be seeing much better in the safety improvements. so, to bring this full circle to your point about don't take it for granted you can drive because tens of thousands of people a year are dying. i also want to go back to something else you mentioned. can we touch on that for a second? >> host: i think that's important because the statistics

show they are the textures and reggie was the story. 19 at the time. >> guest: why he is so emblematic and a good guy we go back to that initial image of that sort of civil war, the tension and the brain between this and the directing you and if this isn't fully developed by the prefrontal cortex to which it isn't which it isn't until later answer to me@team is much, much worse at sending off the signals from down below. so, you know, you've got no chance at the lion but you might know if you are a little bit older and a little bit more in depth is ringing in front of me. i should be driving in the snow in the dark in the day. but if you're prefrontal cortex is informed it lacks the defense

is to be able to fend off the signal even more. so the group that is is too big for most of the most rest and susceptibility. >> guest: a very powerful problem in the society right now. let's talk about the sociological trends. you mentioned the messages that we are getting in the multitasking that's great and successful. you can do it anywhere and this is the picture that success, etc.. but let's talk a little bit more about the messages because it has everything to do with how we even see technology and what it gives us. >> guest: how there is an achievement associated with it. on the practical level there a practical level there is a study in the book that shows especially young people that it would be true of all of us that the value of the text falls

sharply with each minute that passes and it makes common so let's say that you are the teen or the employee or whoever driving and the tech comes in and is party at jane's house in 15 minutes and you don't look. you miss the party and you've missed critical social information and your boss says last-minute deal. so last minute there is the practical element although there are myriad ways like pulling over your car if you are so inclined. but there's also something about the fact that there are things generally speeding up. i want to talk about that because it is cultural and urological. if there is a statistic in the book and it's another one that

blew me away when i saw it people are using more and more applications each day. and i thought okay that's interesting they must be abandoning the old applications. guess what they are doing they are opening more applications 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 the attention they are attending to things for that much less time. it may be cultural and urological but i would like to put in urological assumption or maybe more of an assumption hypothesis doorway. you know the feeling when you touch your phone and hear the ring or move it around you get a little jolt of the drilling -- adrenaline? it makes you feel good.

i almost sounded facetious there but i'm not. the science shows that because through brain imaging and chemical studies, we discover that when you interact with your device, particularly during activities like video games and the internet, you get a dopamine that we alluded to earlier. but several of the scientists told me and this is a really one of the most important parts of this phenomena is that that dopamine interaction doesn't have to do with the information come of, the substance. it has to do with stimulus response. so you do something that happens after you get rewarded for it. i see this with my kids all the time with the babies it is ingrained you do something to get the response. so now you've got this device

you do something to get a response to. you get accustomed to these. you open up an application and get a response. kill and angry bird or miss an angry bird. in its absence you start to get word and then what do you do? >> host: we are talking about getting behind the wheel and putting ourselves out there. we are not putting ourselves behind the wheel right now but let's talk about solutions because these are tricky and difficult and it's disheartening to see how little effects. let's start with law enforcement and public health threats. if you see any signs of hope blacks i know you talked about a

study where they put a tremendous amount of effort and to enforcement but wanted to have lasting results? what are some of the good and the bad points? >> guest: to lay the groundwork let me give the law enforcement landscape and to start with with law enforcement calls me. 45 states outlaw texting and driving and i think that it's ten if memory serves but still go back to the huge disconnect between the attitudes and behaviors so right now 96% of the foundation serves no or say that it's very dangerous. 30 some more 40 some still send and receive. so clearly we have an issue.

the first thing i think we need to acknowledge in this conversation is that it's not an issue of attitude. that is what i think that we thought. the public safety advocates thought this was going to be an issue of attitude that i let's give attitudes to change should. forgive the vernacular but they ain't the problem. >> host: can you clarify what you mean by attitude? >> guest: we need people to know that this is a problem. >> host: education won't do with? >> guest: we are fairly well-educated and if you ask all these teams, they can be even more pronounced than adults saying i know this is an issue is that there is a disconnect between attitudes and behaviors. here's what a lot of officers tell me. they are being enforced in the public tickets are being

written. it's hard for the police to know what someone is doing. >> host: it is almost impossible. >> host: >> guest: it is tantamount to impossible. and i texting or calling pandora or using the map? that leads to law enforcement i think in canada and in the u.s. you start to see law-enforcement dress up like road workers so that they can. inside the car but that is a lot of hard work to do. so while enforcement, the ones that talk to me express frustration about that. i also think that this ecologist tell me that study these things is that it is confusing for the driver or the consumer if you will like what am i allowed to do exactly? it's not easy to draw those distinctions are out of your head. >> host: that goes to the

important question. do we know yet whether hands-free is as bad as being on the phone? i can imagine sending a text is far worse than reading a text however have we gotten this all sorted out and is there anything you want to board people without? >> guest: anything that you look away and you've are manipulating your hands is looking up so even if you are on a hands-free phone you might have to dial and before i get to that question which is probably the most that is the hard to parse even if you have a voice activated thing a bunch of research shows partly because those things don't work very well you've are in an argument with your phone so that is a problem but it also takes you away from the road when you interact with that. as for being on a hand's