Phone home – but not while you’re driving

Readers of a certain age will know that the being with the greatest need ever of making a phone call was ET, the little alien in the eponymous film of the early 1980s. Only by making telephonic connection could he remind his alien people he had been left behind on earth and needed a lift home (that’s teenagers for you… the same the universe over). And when ET finally made his phone call, did he do it while he was driving a car? No, of course he didn’t – because he was far too little to drive, of course.

Many of the rest of us, however, have cleared all the hurdles and we do drive. We do it around Tower Hamlets (at an obedient 20mph, because it’s seldom possible to drive any faster) and further afield. We also make phone calls. And since it was made illegal, we don’t do both together – even if we have some very distant friends and family we have to speak with as a matter of urgency – unless we have a hands free phone.

New research, however, suggests that a hands free phone can be as much of a distraction as a hand held phone. It’s not taking a hand off the steering wheel that’s important, apparently – it’s the mental disruption of making a phone call which transcends other distractions and turns a friendly driver into a dangerous menace.

Research carried out at the University of Sussex have established which part of his or her brain a driver uses to observe and process road conditions. The driver has to make sure they are following the correct route but also “reads” the road more generally – seeing what other traffic and pedestrians are doing and reacting appropriately to avoid collision.

The scientists had also shown that drivers use the same part of their brain when they make a phone call – to visualise the person they are speaking to and the content of the conversation. When the phone call begins, there’s less space in the brain for the driver to use on watching the road. In their experiments, the scientists showed that drivers engaged in a mock phone call took a whole second extra to respond to dangers, such as pedestrians stepping into the road. That one second less of reaction time could make all the difference.

A phone call seems to subdue the brain’s ability to concentrate on driving much more than other stimuli, such as chatting to a passenger or even listening to the radio. The driver seems to be able to tune out of chatting or listening to the radio more easily than they can interrupt a phone call. This can be compared with youngsters doing homework or revising for an exam: many of them report that they listen to music while working and this helps them concentrate. It seems that the music soaks up the spare brain space, and as it is occupied it doesn’t wander off to think of other things – leaving the main part of the brain working on the homework. On the other hand, even the sneakiest youngsters don’t claim they can work better if they are having a phone call with a friend at the same time.

At the moment, drivers are not automatically fined if they use a hands-free phone – though the police can still charge them if they believe they are being distracted by the phone call. It’s virtually impossible for police to judge if a driver is being distracted by a hands-free phone call in advance, so such allegations, and charges, would usually only surface after a car had been seen driving erratically or there had been an accident when it then comes to light after the event that the driver had been making a hands-free call before the incident.

Scientists are now calling for the Government to consider banning drivers making any phone calls, even on a hands-free kit. The move would make us all safer. After all, like ET, we all want to get home safely.

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