Projo Offbeat Blog

Cellphones aren't the problem. It's the people who use the cellphones.

Or, more specifically, it's people who insist on talking to us, whether it's by cellphone or not, while we're trying to drive.

The physical act of juggling the cellphone and the steering wheel isn't necessarily what drives drivers to distraction, according to a new "brain-imaging" study.

Here's how Sharon Begley reports it in a blog for Newsweek.com: "If polite requests have not made your significant other, kids or other passengers shut up when you're behind the wheel, maybe this will.

"Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University had 29 volunteers use a trackball or mouse to drive along a (virtual) winding road at 43 miles per hour in a simulator while having their brain scanned. As they report in a study scheduled for publication in the journal Brain Research, listening and concentrating on spoken questions reduced by 37 percent the amount of activity in a brain circuit that you tap for driving. Result: drivers weaved out of their lane in the simulator, just like drunks."

That's right. Thinking while driving, or at least thinking about something other than driving, is dangerous.

It's OK to listen to the radio, because that doesn't require much thinking. Besides, we can tune it out. The trouble comes when, say, a suspicious spouse starts asking how we paid for that new set of golf clubs or a persistent child wants to know if dad smoked marijuana as a teenager.

To make roads safer, lawmakers could ban cellphones, but the roads would be a lot safer -- and cars more peaceful -- if they also banned passengers.

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