In Traffic I spend a fair amount of time talking about the “myth of multitasking,” and my basic riff on talking on a phone (doesn’t matter if it’s hands-free or not) and driving is that you’ll be doing one or the other — and perhaps both — less well. By how much depends on the driving and it depends on the conversation.

NPR took a novel approach to demonstrate the mechanics of distraction: Rather than looking at a driver, they asked a professional musician to play piano while being asked to do other things.

To wit:

“For over an hour, we tasked Frasch with playing a range of pieces, some he knew and some he had to sight-read. While he was playing, we asked him to multitask. Sometimes the additional work was simple. For instance, Frasch has no trouble talking about his childhood while playing a Bach minuet. But when the challenges took more brain power, it was tougher for Frasch to answer questions and play the piano at the same time.”

Is it just me or was he actually not even that smooth on this part?

It gets worse:

“So we took it up another notch. We gave Frasch a piece of music he’d never seen before, a fast-tempo number. While he was sight-reading, like a driver navigating an unfamiliar route through a big city, we asked him to do a math problem:

A multitasking driver might have hit something else. Just says the pianist, who was already working hard to follow the music, simply couldn’t handle something else that required real thinking.”

As one of the commenters notes, this guy is a professional, someone who’s practiced for countless hours. Imagine by contrast the “average” driver and the sheer range of novel events that can happen on the road.

(thanks to Peter Warnock)

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 16th, 2008 at 9:05 am and is filed under Drivers, Traffic Psychology, Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.