Diogo Machado

January 30, 2013

Reading 3A

Summary #1

Multitasking In the Car: Just Like Drunken Driving

In the NPR article “Multitasking in the Car: Just Like Drunken Driving"(2008), Jon Hamilton focuses on the discussion that driving and chatting on the cellphone is a terrible idea. First of all, the author emphasizes that if someone are chatting on his cellphone while he is driving, his performance is going to be as poor as if he is legally drunk, since this attitude can distracted someone to the point where he devote less brain power to focusing on the road. Second, Jon Hamilton shows that when we get more experience on driving, these changes give us the ability of multitasking, which is do something else while drive. So, for support the idea that chatting and driving is really terrible, they did a series of experiments with the professional pianist, Jacob Frasch; because as a driver, a professional pianist can do a complex task while play his instrument. Therefore, they asked Jacob to play a song while talk about his childhood, and play while read a magazine article, and also like a driver navigating an unfamiliar route, they asked him to answer math problems while he was playing. So, Jacob hit a few wrong notes while was doing the tests, and the experiment’s results proved that even someone is really multitasking in the car, probably he would cause some accident while are chatting on the cellphone. In fact, driver inattention is involved in about 80% of crashes, according to a 2006 study. In short, the article acclaimed to driving and chatting is not safe.

Hamilton, Jon (2008, October 16). Multitasking In the Car: Just Like Drunken Driving. NPR News. Retrieved from http://www.npr.org/templates/story.php?storyId=95702512