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 3040,000 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 dont 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 dont 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 dont 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 19yearold 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. Lets 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. Lets 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 allamerican 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. Lets 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 peoples 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 wellstudied. 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. Lets 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. Lets 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 didnt, guess what . You get eaten. Lets 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 mid1900s 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 19502000 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. Lets 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 antisurvival mechanisms for lack of a better word. But lets 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 dont 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 email. 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 doesnt 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 dont 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 dont 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 cant 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 didnt 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 didnt 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 societys responsibility and where it all fits in. Just before the break, we have five minutes. Why dont 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 doesnt 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 onehander and he spends the next 18 months trying to get the records and reggie said he didnt 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 doesnt this initial reaction perhaps speak to what we will go into later, but the idea that it cant 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 dont 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 reggies 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 dont 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 dont need to be as conservative as the scientist tell us. The short answer is no we cannot. There are 76 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 c