Read A Deadly Wandering: A Tale of Tragedy and Redemption in the Age of Attention Online
Authors: Matt Richtel
What the researchers found was that students were more likely to choose the chocolate cake if they were asked to memorize the seven-digit number. As the researchers put it, “Choice of chocolate cake was higher when processing resources were constrained.”
There is other supporting research that shows how learning, memory, and decision making get impacted by an overloaded brain. The frontal lobe, the executive functions, get so overloaded, so taxed, that there are fewer resources left to make a good decision. Put another way, says Dr. Atchley, the frontal lobe is crucial in helping people inhibit impulses, like choosing the chocolate cake, which is a very basic form of decision making.
Or, for instance, deciding whether or not to focus on the road or the phone when you’re driving. If your brain is taxed, you may not even be able to make a clearheaded decision about what is the right thing to do.
“To make a choice, you need frontal lobes active and you need enough competitors in other parts of the brain so that you can engage systems to make a decision.”
Add it all up, says Dr. Greenfield, and you get a picture of a teenager, with an immature frontal lobe, brain possibly too overloaded with information to make a good decision or just unable to resist the chime of the phone in the center console. For such a driver, says Dr. Greenfield, the act of picking up the device becomes primitive, bypassing higher-level thinking.
“His brain is flooded with anticipatory dopamine. He knows on a primitive, neurochemical level that he’s about to get a squirt,” says Dr. Greenfield. “That’s why he pushes that fucking button. He’s not conscious of it.”
YEARS EARLIER, DR. TREISMAN
spoke of the idea that our very sense of reality gets established by what we pay attention to. This is maybe the most far-reaching implication of the powerful lure of our technology: If it co-opts our attention, it could reshape our sense of reality.
It’s not nearly as far-fetched as it might sound. It’s based on a simple proposition: Our day-to-day reality is based on what we see and hear with what we experience. The thing about our electronic gadgets is that they can easily redirect our focus. They cause us to look down, switch what we’re listening to, change what we’re thinking about. When that happens, it changes our reality. Think of it this way: If a tree falls in the woods, but you miss it because you’re lost in a video game on the phone, did the tree fall?
Or consider a more pointed example. Say you’re driving down the road and your phone buzzes with a text. You look down to read it. You aren’t looking at the road and slip across the yellow divider. You hit another car. But by the time you look up again, and realize what’s happened, the moment of impact has passed. Did you cross the yellow divider? Did the other car cross over? Did you hit a slice of ice?
“If you read car accident reports, it’s very common for crash reports to read: ‘I was driving. I was paying attention, the person appeared out of nowhere. I was looking at the road, and the other car was there—like magic,’ ” says Dr. Atchley.
“There are two options—either people are lying to protect themselves, or experientially that’s what happened. It’s like someone’s inattention literally has played a magic trick on them—which is that a car appears out of nowhere.
“The eyes are open but the brain’s not processing all the information.”
“
CAN I BORROW YOUR
phone?” Dr. Atchley says.
He’s at the counter of the Hereford House steakhouse. It’s where he’s giving a lunchtime speech to the Engineers Club of Kansas City, just an hour after Maggie, the undergraduate student, tried to navigate the virtual driving machine while getting texts from Dr. Atchley’s graduate assistant.
It’s crisp and sunny in this suburb of Zona Rosa. The steakhouse, beige with red awnings, is in an outdoor mall with all the regular shops: American Eagle, Kay Jewelers, and the like. It’s a chain restaurant, serving food that has the trappings of being fancy. The open-faced prime rib sandwich ($13.95) comes with au jus gravy. Dr. Atchley feels mildly nervous. He should: He’s in the wrong steakhouse.
He was supposed to go to Zona Rosa but in a different location. “These were the Google directions,” he mutters.
Maybe, or perhaps, he concedes, he just mixed up the different locations, given everything on his mind. In any case, now he needs to borrow a phone so he can tell the people waiting for him to speak that he’s going to be late. And he needs to get directions to the other restaurant.
The woman at the counter offers her landline. But she’s having trouble coming up with quick directions to the other location, in Leawood. Dr. Atchley, clearly anxious, borrows a cell phone and taps the right location into the mobile Google search engine. It looks to be about twenty minutes away.
Reflecting on the value of the cell phone, he says, “It was a faster way to get the information.” But, he adds, “there were other options.”
As Dr. Atchley tries to find balance with technology and prevent it from overtaking him, he finds there are occasions when his boundaries don’t serve him. Recently, during a heavy snowfall, he bought a second phone so he and his wife could each have one if they needed to communicate or got stuck in a jam, rather than continuing to share one phone.
“We wanted her to have some way to call emergency services if she got stuck,” he says. “Why not have that device?”
It seems like a silly question, rhetorical, for most people. Why not have the convenience? And Dr. Atchley really feels that way, too, despite the fear of temptation.
“I’m not a Luddite,” he says. He points out all the technology in his world: the Wi-Fi connection at the underground house, the machines he uses to study the impact of technology—the brain scanners and driving simulator and computers he uses for everything from writing papers and doing research to complex tasks like doing statistical analysis. He emails with students and shares research with colleagues online. He can get lost for hours on Reddit, a tech-centric website he loves.
This new generation of neuroscientists isn’t antitechnology, despite their cautionary findings. Not Dr. Strayer, certainly not Dr. Gazzaley, or any others of his ilk. They are tied to networks, reliant on phones, eager to communicate their messages and science, use technology to develop and further it. And then there’s just everyday tasks; Dr. Atchley got lost heading to his lunch talk and a phone came in handy in finding the correct steakhouse. Once he got there, he plugged in his PowerPoint presentation so the audience could ooh and aah.
This is, quite obviously, not a question of either/or—do we either live with technology or give it up entirely?
“The question,” says Dr. Atchley, “is how do we balance this stuff?”
T
ERRYL’S JULY 6 MEMO
, and her ongoing persistence were causing a stir.
It was time for the roundtable meeting with all the lawyers in the office of the Cache County Attorney’s Office. This meant Terryl, Baird, and Daines, the county attorney. In preparation, Baird distributed copies of three statutes: the definitions of manslaughter, reckless endangerment, and negligent homicide.
Almost without discussion, the group tossed out manslaughter. They began to discuss the other options. It was clear from Terryl’s memo where she stood.
Baird was convinced otherwise. In the meeting, he made a few points: This technology is new, and it’s not fair to assume Reggie should’ve known better, at least in a way that satisfies the standard of criminal negligence.
“My mind-set was: Let’s send a message, but do it with a different charge, a lesser charge,” he says. “Let’s send a message with this one—and next time we won’t be so kind.”
There was another factor in Baird’s mind: Reggie “seemed like a decent kid.”
By now, it seemed fairly clear that Reggie had lied—he must’ve known about the texts. But Baird wasn’t that troubled by the apparent deception.
“As a prosecutor, people lie to me every day,” he says. “When people get backed into a corner, they will say things that are not always the truth. They cast themselves in false light. I understood this kid was lying to us, but I really wasn’t going to hold that against him.”
Baird considered it a positive that Reggie was serving on a mission. Baird had done a mission himself, to the Philippines. It wasn’t about the fact he and Reggie shared a common faith, he said. It was more the commitment to service; he says he’d look with equal favor upon someone in the peace corps.
“Maybe we could do reckless driving,” he suggested. And he thought: “Negligent homicide carries such a stigma. I’m looking at this nineteen-year-old kid, thinking: This is a big burden to hang around his neck.”
Besides, Baird had some empathy. Many years earlier he’d been a young man behind the wheel, momentarily distracted, with a life hanging in the balance.
BAIRD WAS SIXTEEN
. It was August. Farm country. Wide-open fields, dirt roads. Baird had recently gotten a Honda Nighthawk 650. He climbed on the motorcycle to go get a haircut, when his dad poked his head outside.
“Son, you better get your damn helmet.”
It struck Baird as odd, his dad reminding him to wear a helmet. “We were not helmet people.” This was partly familial and partly cultural in the sense that Utah is a place in which many people believe strongly in the concept of individual rights.
Baird drove down the long dirt road, tall grass on either side. He was going forty miles an hour. It was hot. He wore short waterskiing shorts and a white tank top. Not far into the ride, he saw the local mailman in front of a house. Baird waved.
“I turned my attention to in front of me,” Baird recalls.
He saw the kid, the boy right there, right in the middle of the road.
Baird could see the boy’s face. The boy just froze.
Pop! Pop!
The boy’s head hit squarely in the front headlamp.
Baird went somersaulting. Rolled a couple of times. He had so much momentum, he came up and was running. Then he heard the boy’s mother coming out into the road.
“She picked him up and she just started wailing,” Baird says. When he tells the story, he has to pause, for maybe a minute, choking back grief. He whispers, “Fudge,” a kind of expletive.
The Utah Highway Patrol came to his house shortly thereafter to interview him, but mostly to reassure him. “The trooper sat down with me and my dad and he said: ‘I’m sorry, son, there was nothing you could do.’
“It wasn’t like I looked away for a long time,” Baird states. And, besides, the boy just bolted into the road, apparently excited to retrieve the mail. “There was nothing I could do.”
Baird says he thought about his case and Reggie’s.
“I know what it’s like to be a young kid who gets into an accident,” he says. But he thought the similarities only went so far. “I don’t know that you could compare the cases.”
TERRYL WRESTLED WITH TWO
thoughts: (1) She didn’t agree with Tony, and (2) she respected him as much as any prosecutor she’d ever met. She’d come to the second realization some years earlier when they’d had a difficult back-and-forth over a tough case. Baird hadn’t brought the maximum charge, and Terryl was upset. In the end, Baird had to remind her that her aim should be justice, not the maximum penalty.
It really moved Terryl, and, since that time, she’d tried to embody his message.
He’s my favorite prosecutor,
she thought to herself.
But that didn’t mean she always agreed with him.
The ultimate decision on how to proceed fell to Daines, the county attorney, though in practice this process was more democratic than tyrannical. As the conversation wore on, it seemed like he was siding with Baird. There just wasn’t precedent here, and there were just so many resources in the office.
He drew out a middle ground.
“Terryl, if you can find a prosecutor to take it, then we’ll pursue it.”
In other words, he was leaving Terryl an opening.
“He knew what he was doing. He knew what would happen if he gave me an opportunity. He knew exactly what I was going to do.”
THERE WERE SEVEN LAWYERS
who worked for the county, not including Daines. He was elected, the rest were county employees whose job status was not reliant on elections. Among the seven others, Don Linton, the chief deputy county attorney, held relative primacy.
He’d been around for many years, working regularly with Terryl. He had a nickname for her—the “Sparkplug.”
“The other attorneys knock. Everybody else knocks,” Linton says, in contrast to Terryl’s habit of bursting into her colleagues’ offices unannounced. “She never knocks.”
Terryl saw Linton as someone who didn’t flinch in taking on unusual or tough cases; he’d had a particular interest in going after rapists and child abusers. Terryl figured Linton was her best shot.
Just a few minutes after the meeting with Baird and Daines, Terryl found Linton in a corner office opposite Daines’, facedown in some papers.
“Terryl throws open the door and says: ‘Hey, I need to talk to you.’ ”
“Okay,” Linton said, both curious and bemused.
Terryl held a rose-colored piece of paper, which she extended to Linton. Without looking closely, Linton could see bullet points, an explanation of some kind.
“Don,” she started. “I’ve got something you have to do.”
Linton gestured to one of the armchairs—
Slow down, Terryl
—and she took a seat.
“These two rocket scientists were killed,” Terryl began, as she launched into the story of the accident.
Up until then, Linton hadn’t heard a word about Reggie Shaw, hadn’t read about the case in the paper. He started to take it in, listening to the narrative and analyzing it from several sides.
From a legal perspective, his primary stance, he wondered,
What was the law here?
He couldn’t and didn’t make a snap judgment.
Instinctively, Linton also reacted to the story as a father. He and his wife had four children, two boys and two girls, the youngest being Libby, nineteen years old at the time. And Linton thought of her as a “terrible driver.” A great musician, very bright, but not a good driver, Linton believed that she sometimes tailgated, and sometimes sped. And he knew that she texted, a lot; he suspected she did so when she drove.