A Deadly Wandering: A Tale of Tragedy and Redemption in the Age of Attention (4 page)

“Jim’s car was clipped by a Tahoe that had crossed the yellow line and sent it into oncoming traffic,” an officer told her.

“That was pretty much it,” she says. There was no further explanation. What can ever explain this kind of tragedy?

NEARBY, AT LOGAN REGIONAL
Hospital, Trooper Rindlisbacher was also having trouble making sense of the events. He was sitting in his parked car in front of the emergency room, asking Reggie questions, this time to fill out the paperwork. He was eliciting a lot of “monosyllabic” answers.

Was Reggie tired? No, he’d had a good night’s sleep.

Was he on any prescription medications? No.

Were his wipers working? Yes.

Was his defroster working? Yes.

Rindlisbacher was typing the answers into a standardized form on a laptop attached to a metal platform extending from the Crown Vic’s center console. By 2006, police cars had begun to get more and more high-tech. There was a camera on the front of his car that fed video to a VCR in the trunk. In the backseat, there was a printer. It was hooked up to the laptop, a Panasonic Toughbook, which allowed the trooper to run license plates and do paperwork.

Curiously, given how high-tech the cars had become, and the preponderance of cell phones, not a single state at that time banned texting and driving. In fact, most jurisdictions in the country had no mechanism for reporting whether a driver had been on a phone, even talking, let alone texting. In Utah, there were no laws prohibiting either activity, except among novice drivers.

Rindlisbacher said he had a final question.

“Were you talking or texting on the phone when you were driving?”

“No.”

“I don’t understand, you say you were hydroplaning.” It was a statement but meant as a probe, an effort to get Reggie to explain himself.

Yep, Reggie nodded, hydroplaning, that’s what happened.

RINDLISBACHER, THROUGH YEARS OF
experience, knew that sometimes there were accidents, but more often, there were wrecks. Things happened for a reason. On the roads, that reason was usually booze. Of the 43,500 fatalities on U.S. roadways the previous year, 17,590 had been caused by drivers with a blood alcohol level of .08 or higher.

Most of the fatal crashes involving just one car, like a guy driving into a tree, happened at night. But the multiple-vehicle wrecks tended to happen during the day, which stood to reason, given that there are more cars on the road at that time.

In Utah, as elsewhere, teen drivers caused a disproportionate number of crashes. Statewide, teen drivers caused 26.8 percent of all crashes in 2005, and they caused 31.8 percent in Cache County, where that morning’s incident had taken place. Of the six deaths that occurred in wrecks the year before in the county, one was attributable to a teen driver.

How many crashes nationally were caused by cell phones was not yet clear, but the emerging evidence was alarming. In 2003, researchers at Harvard University did a risk analysis and projected that motorists distracted by their cell phones caused 2,300 deaths each year and 330,000 injury accidents.

That research was based largely on people dialing and talking on phones, holding them to their ears.

But the opportunity for risk was growing, given the exploding power of devices. Text messages had been sent earlier than 1999, but that was a key year because a Japanese phone carrier, NTT DoCoMo, built the i-mode networking standard, which allowed for the exchange of mobile data. By 2002, according to the Computer History Museum in Silicon Valley, more than 34 million subscribers were using that network for web access, email, and other functions.

And 2006 was an important year for the mobile phone because of the growth of smartphone devices. An article in
BusinessWeek
billed 2006 “the year of the converged device.” It reported that 80 million smartphones had been sold. They were “smart” because they could do so many things beyond calling, like texting, emailing, surfing the Internet, playing games. “Some phones are now below $200, encouraging the clever phones to spread beyond corporate users and into early adopters in the consumer market,” the article pointed out.

Most people didn’t yet have a smartphone. Reggie didn’t. But a smartphone wasn’t needed to send simple texts. Those you could do with the older phones, so-called feature phones. By 2006, people in the United States were sending around 12.5 billion texts a month, which sounds like a lot, but the technology really was embryonic. Two years later, there would be 75 billion texts sent a month, with around half of them sent by people under the age of thirty-five. Like a lot of new technology, it skewed toward the young. Rindlisbacher was among those with only a passing knowledge of texting.

But he sensed something was amiss.

WHAT IRKED TROOPER RINDLISBACHER
was Reggie’s written statement.
My car pulled to the left and I met another car in the middle.

To Rindlisbacher, this made it sound like Reggie was “rubbing off some of the blame.”
We met in the middle.
To Rindlisbacher, it was like Reggie was trying to justify it, “to make it sound like it was partially the other guy’s fault.”

What Rindlisbacher didn’t know was that there were reasons why Reggie wasn’t saying much. One was that he was genuinely having trouble remembering what had happened. It had all unfolded so quickly.

The other explanation had to do with a phone call. It was placed less than an hour after the accident. Reggie’s mother, moments after she’d arrived at the scene, had dialed her oldest son, Phill.

When the call came in, Phill, coincidentally, was himself driving. He was in West Sacramento, California, a lawyer heading to his job at a firm that handled property-loss cases for State Farm insurance. Phill felt compelled to answer because he was surprised to hear from his mom at that time of day.

When she told him what had happened, Phill’s mind split in two—“big-brother mode and attorney mode,” as he put it later. He had no idea what the facts were, other than that two men had died. He was imagining the civil liability, for Reggie, and his folks.

The Shaw family was close, kin, but Phill and Reggie were separated by eleven years. The Reggie who Phill knew was a friendly little guy, a competitor on the football field and basketball court, as well as with the video game controller. His kid brother loved those video games. He also thought of Reggie as the son who tended to do whatever his mom and dad asked with no protest, the kid who cleaned up after himself.

Now he’d been involved in an accident with two fatalities.

What, their mother asked Phill, should Reggie do?

“Don’t say anything to anybody.”

When they had arrived at the hospital, Mary Jane passed along word to Reggie. “Don’t say too much,” Reggie says his mother told him. Leave it to the police to piece it together. As she puts it, she instructed him: “Let them figure things out, and we’ll go from there.”

ABOUT AN HOUR LATER
, sitting outside the emergency room, State Trooper Rindlisbacher gave up on getting answers. He escorted Reggie inside, where the young man took and passed a blood test. And it seemed there was little for the trooper to do. He could’ve written a “left of center” ticket, a moving violation that would have laid the matter to rest. Plenty of law enforcement personnel would’ve done exactly that and not been unjustified in so doing.

“Sometimes I like to follow things through and follow up,” Rindlisbacher reflects of himself, adding with a laugh, “Some of my coworkers think I’m too thorough.”

Once in a while, his tenacity invited citizen complaints. There was the time he got investigated by internal affairs after being accused by a woman of stalking her family. Rindlisbacher was exonerated. He wasn’t stalking, he says; he was trying to ferret out a liar in a set of bizarre circumstances. It had started very innocently when he pulled a guy over because a Christmas tree tied to the roof of the man’s car was falling off.

Then, coincidentally, Rindlisbacher caught the same guy speeding a few weeks later, this time driving a different car. What piqued Rindlisbacher’s interest was that both of the cars had Idaho plates, and the guy had an Idaho driver’s license. The man insisted he lived in Idaho, even though Rindlisbacher had pulled him over twice locally, in Logan. The trooper did a little background check and discovered the guy had a prior arrest for meth possession. It’s a tax-related crime in Utah to reside there over an extended period of time while claiming you live in another state.

But the guy kept claiming he lived in Idaho. It didn’t add up.

So Rindlisbacher says he decided to find out for himself. Every few weeks, he drove by the family’s residence and took pictures, to prove they lived in Utah, not Idaho. It turned out, Rindlisbacher explains, that the wife of the guy was the daughter of a police captain in Las Vegas. The captain suggested she call Rindlisbacher’s headquarters and file a complaint. She did—for stalking.

“People complain about the stupidest things. They don’t want to take responsibility for their actions,” Rindlisbacher says. It really ticks him off when they don’t. “That’s why I say: ‘Tell me the truth and there’s no problem.’ ”

Rindlisbacher was sure Reggie wasn’t being square with him. But how to get at the truth? Maybe he could talk to Reggie again. After a few days’ reflection, Rindlisbacher hoped, the young man might explain better why he’d wandered across the yellow line—and more than once.

CHAPTER 3

THE NEUROSCIENTISTS

T
HIS IS MICKEY HART’S
brain.”

Mickey Hart was the drummer for the Grateful Dead. An image of his brain appears on a twenty-four-inch computer monitor. To its right, another monitor, a sleek thirty-two-inch Mac, features a splash of windows—email, news sites, a work project.

Mickey’s brain is red on the top with blue sticking out on the bottom.

“The red is the cortex.”

Few know more about Mickey Hart’s brain, about the brain in general, than the man pointing to the monitor. His name is Adam Gazzaley. He’s a neurologist, an MD, with a PhD in neuroscience. He runs the new neuroimaging lab at the University of California at San Francisco, one of the world’s leading scientific institutes.

Dr. Gazzaley’s lab is housed inside the Sandler Neurosciences Center, a five-story, 227,000-square-foot research facility that opened in May 2012. Located minutes from downtown San Francisco, a baseball’s throw from where the San Francisco Giants play, it is a gleaming example of a new dedication to understanding the workings of the human brain. That pursuit itself is nothing novel, of course, but now, a new generation of powerful technology lets researchers see the inside of the brain, watch it work, literally, and observe when it fails to work.

Dr. Gazzaley’s lab contains around $10 million worth of equipment that the researchers speak of only by acronyms, the fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging), the EEG (electroencephalography), and the TMS (transcranial magnetic stimulation). With the machines, the scientists study blood flow in the brain, look at electrical wave patterns, and create images of ultra-thin slices of neurological tissue. The various techniques let researchers understand which brain regions control what functions, and how tissues and tasks get impacted by different activities, say, when a person tries to multitask.

Mickey Hart’s is one among many brains Dr. Gazzaley has imaged. The pair have been working on a pop science project together in which Dr. Gazzaley shows what Mickey’s brain looks like while he’s drumming, trying to elucidate not just the brain of a rock star but that of an aging one. They do presentations where Mickey drums and Adam shows off images of the percussionist’s brain taken in real time using sensors attached to Mickey’s head. Your Brain on Rhythm.

Dr. Gazzaley himself might pass for a hipster musician. He’s a youthful-looking forty-five, with short-cropped silver hair—not gray but silver—that looks like it’s been dyed to get attention, even though it’s been the same color since it prematurely aged in his early thirties. He wears a serpentine ring on his right index finger. He tends to sport black jeans that are on the tight side, and a silk shirt. His car is a BMW M3 convertible, the super-fast kind. He’s become friends not just with Mickey but also with the lead singer of Thievery Corporation, a rock band, as well as some of the tech billionaires who attend the late-night parties he holds on the first Friday of each month.

A few months earlier, Dr. Gazzaley had gone to Germany to speak at a conference. At the airport in Berlin, a woman at immigration control asked him his business. He explained that he’s a scientist.

“Really?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“You don’t look like one.”

DR. GAZZALEY TRAVELS A
lot. He’ll put on 150,000 miles a year on airplanes, give or take. He gives upward of fifty talks.

“Sometimes I ask myself: ‘Why do I constantly put myself in these stressful situations?’ ” he says. “It’s not like I have to do it.”

The toll that Dr. Gazzaley is referring to comes in large part from the challenge of juggling all of his responsibilities. The thirteen people he supervises, the constant fund-raising, the media appearances. He regularly forgets where he parked his BMW in the adjoining parking structure because he’s so busy thinking of other things when he gets out of the car and walks into work. Or he’s fiddling around on his iPhone. Once, lost in thought while brushing his teeth, he put moisturizer on his toothbrush, not toothpaste.

Dr. Gazzaley isn’t particularly absentminded. He simply feels like he’s experiencing a pressure so many people feel in their everyday lives—to keep up, push on, achieve.

“Everyone feels that burden in their own way of trying to squeeze as much out of our brains per unit time as possible.”

We’re all struggling to maximize our attention.

Attention
.

Dr. Gazzaley is one of the world’s foremost experts in the science of attention. He’s consumed with how we focus, what causes us to lose focus, get distracted. The paper that first brought Dr. Gazzaley his notoriety, published in 2005, showed the key parts of the brain circuitry involved when a person ignores something, or tries to ignore something. That science of ignoring is a key part of the attention conversation. Can we ignore what we want to, even need to, in order to survive? One experiment after another of his explores how we focus, what takes us away from what we profess to want to focus on, and whether our attention limits might even be expanded. He’s spent four years on an experiment looking at whether a particular kind of scientifically engineered video game could improve the attention span and memory of people over the age of sixty. He’s been on pins and needles lately, hoping the results of the experiment could land in
Nature
, one of the leading scientific journals in the world.