365937 people wish you weren't driving through an entire football field blind

A good friend of mine was sitting in the car, stopped in front of a red light from a construction site. Waiting for the green light. Three kids quietly seated in the back, reading their books. Quiet rain pattering the windows.

And then everything explodes.

The windshield and all windows deflagrate in a cloud of shattered glasses. The sound of splattered metal fills the air, followed by screams of terror. Taste of blood and smell of burned plastic.

Somebody drove their car at 55 mph straight into my friend's car.

The guy wasn't drunk.

He hadn't lost control.

He simply…didn't see them.

And they were stopped at a traffic light.

He was looking at something else.

He was looking at this phone.

Sending or receiving a text takes a driver’s eyes from the road for an average of 4.6 seconds. If you're driving at 55 mph you just covered the length of a football field. Without seeing what is going on. Would you drive through an entire football field blind?

I hope not.

The 362,415 people who got injured in distracted-driving-related car accidents 2021 likely wish the person who was driving hadn't.

And the 3522 people who died in that year from distracted driving would still be here if they or somebody else didn't.

But I know I did it. And chances are: you did it too. This is what we are doing to each other when we use our phones when driving (I figured out how to break this bad habit for good and I can help you be back in control in a matter of weeks, see at the end for info).

Unfortunately, we are programmed to get this one wrong. Your brain is going to trick you into believing that you're able to see what is going on when in reality you aren't. You feel confident, and like you "just can do it". When the reality is, you can't.

For those of you curious about the brain, this is the basics of how it works:

• Most people think that our perception of the world is driven by our senses, like what you see and what you hear. That is certainly how it feels.

• But when you look under the hood, the brain works the other way around: the brain predicts reality, based on past information combined with hypotheses of what is likely to happen next.

• Information coming from our senses is used only to validate the prediction, and correct it if it's too far off (yes, you can shift how your brain operates by activating mindfulness, which puts more weight on the actual perceptual experience… but that takes effort and it's not the default).

• The less high-quality sensory information you have available, the more the brain will just rely on its prediction. Obviously, if you're barely looking at the road, you have very poor sensory information available about the road, if there is any at all. So your brain will just go with what it thinks it already knows about that situation, and use memories and categories from the past to fill in the blanks. That’s likely what happened to the guy in the story. That road was a pattern already in his brain. He just didn’t know about the recent construction site, because that was new. Deprived of the necessary updated visual input, his brain must have sent to his half-distracted eyes the faulty picture of road he already knew, with no temporary traffic light, something he didn’t need to take a “second look” at.

• This process of automatic completion is completely unconscious and doesn't come with any obvious warning sign. It's not like your brain is programmed to give you a heads up: "Watch out, buddy! I'm just flying by the seats of my pants right now!". On the contrary, the brain is programmed to make you feel that it's all smooth, seamless and under control.

I hope this crushes your sense of confidence that "I can just take a look at my phone" while you're driving. That confidence was programmed in your brain to help you feel chilled while strolling through the savannah some 300,000 years ago. We haven’t had the chance to adjust to being bullets traveling through space with the power to generate an impact force of of 491 kilonewtons. You just can't take a look at your phone when you're driving, despite the odd feeling that you can.

Most of us already know this intuitively.

Polls from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration show that 90% of drivers support laws that ban texting while driving. And yet - I found this utterly fascinating - many of us do it anyways. About 50% of licensed drivers report behaviors like reading or sending text messages while driving, holding the phone while talking or interacting with cell phone apps. That's half of us.

Why the hell do we do something that we know it's so ineffective, such that we agree to pass laws that ban it?

I used to be on the wrong side of that stats. If that's you too, hear me out: It's not that you don't care. It's not that you don't know. It's not even that you are not trying. It's that you are contending with forces inside your smartphone that have been meticulously designed to overpower your caring, your knowing and your trying.

The forces of addiction, social embeddedness and convenience (to name just a few), that drive us to do again and again what we know is not good for us, are getting stronger every month. Billions are being poured into ensuring that that is the case. As these forces grow, so our abilities to contend with them need to grow. The alternative is to get hooked, depressed or crashing ourselves into somebody else's car.

We need to step up our game when contending with these forces. The casual intention of "just not using it" is no longer a match. We need more deliberate and powerful practices to get back in control.

Share with me: What is one powerful thing you are going to do to ensure you are not making ineffective use of your phone when driving?

Take care - of yourself and of us others

—

PS: My friend is fine. The kids had to work through some emotional shock but they recovered well. Thank goodness.

PSS: If you think that you're okay because you use your phone in the car without holding it in your hand, I have bad news: Research shows that hands-free phone usage is not any safer.