Read A Deadly Wandering: A Tale of Tragedy and Redemption in the Age of Attention Online
Authors: Matt Richtel
Despite this research, Dr. Gazzaley believes this is a very open-ended question, and a crucial one. He thinks an argument can be made that the brain might be trained in its ability not just to attend but even to multitask. That’s another of the key emerging areas of science: Researchers explored the underlying mechanisms of focus, they also started to look at pushing the limits of attention. In other words, can the ability to focus, once more fully understood, be expanded?
“Is there a limit to how good we can get?” Dr. Gazzaley asked one sunny afternoon in the summer of 2013, sitting in his office at UCSF. Over his desk, a row of books:
The Handbook of Aging and Cognition;
Attention and Time;
The Cognitive Neuroscience of Working Memory
. Beside them, a small kitschy bronze-colored statue of a monkey looking at a brain. In the corner of the desk, behind one of his two monitors, a Buddha statue.
On a whiteboard, hanging next to his desk, scribbles of blue and red marker reflect a brainstorming meeting he had earlier in the day with a postdoctoral student working on experiments aimed at identifying the neurological basis for how people distribute their attention. Dr. Gazzaley explained that people tend to be good at focusing and doing so narrowly—in a relatively small physical space, but when they seek to attend to a broader space, they lose detail.
The experiments use video game technology to challenge people to distribute attention, then use imaging to measure brain activity during the task. Could they teach people to distribute attention more widely?
Dr. Gazzaley wore a black shirt and pants and black leather boots with a silver zipper up the side. A white five o’clock shadow crossed his face, and he looked tired, but he smiled. He said he had some good news.
A study he’d been working on for four years could any day be accepted into
Nature
, perhaps the most prestigious journal in his field. The study explored whether specialized video games might be used to train older adults to do a better job at juggling two tasks at once, and might even help them become more focused over the long run. The study looked specifically at how older adults could be taught to improve attention using a driving simulator.
“Getting into
Nature
for me is like winning an Emmy,” he said. He hoped to know in a few days. It would be great attention for Dr. Gazzaley’s efforts, personal validation. It would also validate this emerging field of study. Indeed, even to be seriously considered by
Nature
underscored the real-world applications of this new generation of neuroscience.
The new body of work tied together the powerful new tools for looking inside the brain, with the seminal discoveries of people like Dr. Posner, with a line of science dating back to Broadbent and Treisman and their peers. Their work had focused on aviation; after all, airplane cockpits were the place where human beings were most acutely confronted with new technologies, powerful ones that taxed our neurological limitations. The cost of failure in the air was astronomical, in lives and dollars.
From this rich tradition of aviation attention science—dating back to World War II—there grew a new field. It was the application of attention science to driving. One scientist in particular, David Strayer, played a pioneering role, though he faced great opposition when he first started his work.
IN 1989, DR. STRAYER
earned a PhD in psychology from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He was developing a specialty in how people become experts and how they acquire skills, and how those skills get compromised. How do they process information? How does information overwhelm them?
The University of Illinois was one of the foremost places in the world to look at the interactions between humans and technology, an area of study known as “human factors.” The university had a reputation for spawning world-class scientists exploring how to optimize use of technology in airplanes and in the military, in the tradition of Broadbent and Dr. Treisman. The basic idea: How to make machines work best for people without becoming overwhelming.
That’s what Dr. Strayer figured he would do. In 1990, he went to work for GTE Laboratories. GTE was a telecommunications giant that did a lot of work in the consumer market, as well as for the government, including the military.
And this was wartime. In January 1991, the United States entered the first Gulf War and was going after Saddam Hussein. As in prior wars, this one presented scientists with the challenge of helping soldiers and their commanders figure out how to take advantage of technology rather than be overwhelmed by it. But the technology issues were no longer just in the cockpit, affecting only pilots, they were everywhere.
Communications tools and networks had become essential to success. Guys like Dr. Strayer were hired to figure out how to configure networks and displays so that the information was useful and life-preserving—not overwhelming and deadly.
Dr. Strayer quickly realized that this work had widespread applications. And so, while at GTE, he started noodling a nonmilitary question, one that troubled him and he couldn’t shake. It had to do with the consumer side of GTE’s business, the part that was making mobile phones and had begun marketing them for cars. (Eventually, GTE would be acquired by Verizon, one of the biggest mobile phone providers in the world.) To Dr. Strayer, the idea of using a phone in a car was troubling, at least based on now decades of science establishing the limitations faced by pilots when they taxed their brains with too many visual inputs, sounds, and physical demands.
He went to a supervisor at GTE and said, “Everything we know from aviation psychology indicates this is likely to be troublesome,” referring to the idea of a car phone. “Before we start marketing this, we should think about it.”
Shortly thereafter, he heard from his supervisor that the company leadership wasn’t particularly interested in pursuing the safety question.
“Why would we want to know this?” Dr. Strayer was told. “That will not help us sell anything.”
Drivers were, arguably, the most important early market for mobile telecommunications. In fact, the first big commercial push for mobile phones were car phones.
According to an article published in the
New York Times
, mobile phone companies, going back as far as the early 1980s, openly marketed the devices for use by drivers. One ad in 1984 asked, “Can your secretary take dictation at 55 mph?” The mobile companies concentrated their cell phone sites along highways, hoping to capture business from bored motorists. They succeeded. A longtime telecommunications analyst named Kevin Roe told the paper that 75 percent or more of wireless company revenue came from drivers well into the 1990s. “That was the business,” he was quoted as saying in the
Times
. Wireless companies “designed everything to keep people talking in their cars.”
Seeing these trends in the early 1990s, Dr. Strayer decided he was interested in getting answers—with or without his company’s participation.
He needed to be in a place where he could pursue answers. That turned out to be the University of Utah, in Salt Lake City. He got an assistant professorship and started putting together experimental protocols, trying to borrow from the masters who’d come before him—Broadbent, Treisman, and on and on—essentially adapting the experiments that had been done for pilots to car drivers and car phones.
There was nothing revelatory about such an application. It made sense. But on a societal level, the research was nothing short of profound. After all, scientists had been focused for so long on technology used by an elite class of people—not just pilots, but the soldiers and others who were privileged to have access to the supernatural devices.
But now the devices were becoming part of everyday life. Or they were poised to become so. Cockpits in cars, Dr. Strayer thought.
Perhaps it was not surprising that Dr. Strayer couldn’t find a lot of funding for his research, given how many financial interests were arrayed in the other direction. So he did his first experiment at the University of Utah by cobbling together about $30 in parts. He built a primitive driving simulator.
In the experiment, the subject (an undergrad from the university) would sit in a chair holding a joystick, which controlled a car on a computer screen. The subject was told to do simple tasks: (1) follow along a curvy road, and (2) hit a button if a red light came on. That would cause the car to brake. At the same time, Dr. Strayer asked the subjects to talk on a cell phone. Some used a handheld phone, some hands-free, with a headset. Separately, he also had the subjects “drive” while listening to the radio or a book on tape.
There was a huge difference in the “drivers’ ” results, depending on what activity they were doing. When they were talking on a phone they made twice the number of errors as when they were listening to the radio. The error rate was higher both when using a handheld and hands-free phone.
Dr. Strayer says he was struck by the results: “There’s something about the phone conversation that’s really kind of unique.”
In 2001, he presented his findings at an annual meeting of the Psychonomic Society; it was the very first study to show the effects of talking on a cell phone. The findings were very well received. Dr. Strayer had made an important connection between the past research in the attention/distraction field and the challenges faced by multitasking drivers.
“We made a link between this and fifty years of research on attention and aviation,” he says. “The attentional limits we saw with pilots apply to drivers of cars. It was an important first step.”
At the time, though, Dr. Strayer thought it might be a last step, too—a final statement. He didn’t realize the pace at which mobile phones would be adopted, and the extent to which they’d be used in all walks of life, all the time. Plus, he said he couldn’t find anyone to adequately fund the research; there was so much cultural momentum driving adoption and so many powerful business interests that no one really wanted to find out—or was interested in paying to find out—that the magical new technology had some side effects.
And he was just beginning to understand something that would become much clearer as his research grew: The devices took a driver’s
mind
off the road, even when hands were on the wheel and eyes were looking ahead.
“If you asked at the time, I’d have said it’s mainly a visual and manual demand. But it’s a visual, manual, cognitive problem.”
IN LOTS OF SCIENCE
fields, the researchers get to know one another’s work and often collaborate. That has happened in recent years around the field of attention, particularly the study of attention and its relationship to technology. There were more scientists going into related fields, and more money. A new subspecialty was emerging as scientists grappled with the onslaught of new devices. Within this new ecosystem, Dr. Gazzaley and Dr. Strayer crossed paths.
The two had been invited to participate in a small one-day meeting at the campus of Stanford University in Palo Alto. The host was Clifford Nass, a sociologist who had been a math prodigy as a child in New Jersey and whose plan was to become a computer scientist. But Nass’s life was changed by a fatal accident that took place in Utah, when his brother, traveling across country, was killed by a drunk driver. The event devastated Nass and his family and ultimately had him reevaluating his life choices. He wound up studying sociology at Princeton and then becoming a professor at Stanford.
In February 2011, he invited Strayer and Gazzaley to join him, along with Anthony Wagner, a Stanford psychologist; Gary Small, a psychiatrist at UCLA; and Daphne Bavelier, a cognitive scientist at the University of Rochester. Each of them was gaining notoriety for understanding how heavy technology use—multitasking—impacted the brain. Nass wrote to the group: “My goal in inviting you is simply to bring together the people who are doing the most exciting research in multitasking.”
Dr. Strayer and Dr. Gazzaley hit it off, even though they seem cut from entirely different cloth, both figuratively, with respect to personality, and literally, in terms of their sartorial choices. Dr. Gazzaley favors sleek shades of black, and Dr. Strayer is more of a Levi’s and T-shirt kind of guy. They decided to try to collaborate. Dr. Strayer would bring to the table his research into the behavior of drivers. Dr. Gazzaley, a neurologist, would bring his understanding of neural networks, and the technology that looked at the inner-workings of the brain.
“His techniques are bleeding edge,” Dr. Strayer says of Dr. Gazzaley. “We were able to take our leading-edge research in driver distraction and pair it with cutting-edge neuroscience.”
Dr. Strayer wanted the emerging field of research to also answer another question: Why, given it was becoming clear that the brain faced limitations, were people continuing to multitask, particularly in challenging, even dangerous, situations? When he first started his work on distracted driving, he just assumed people would stop the behavior when they realized how dangerous it could be. But when phone use by drivers continued, even grew, he was forced to reach another conclusion, one that vexed him. People didn’t stop using the technology, because they couldn’t.
“I assumed people would come to their senses,” he says. “It was naive on my part. Still to this day, I’m surprised by how addictive and how alluring the technology is.”
The stage was set to incorporate the decades of past research, and to marry behavioral science with neuroimaging, to answer a new question: Why does interactive media do such an extraordinary job of capturing our attention?
L
ATE IN THE FALL
, Jackie Furfaro drove her daughter Stephanie to gymnastics practice at Air-Bound, the gym on Main Street in Logan. It was just weeks after the accident, but Stephanie insisted on continuing to practice. Jackie thought it best to try to live life, persevere, not look back.