Does this mean I shouldn't watch squirrel pr0n and bb people while driving
the car anymore?
http://sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/31426/title/Shifting_priorities_at_the_wh...
Multitasking while driving may exceed brain's capacity
A special corner of hell is reserved for drivers who weave from one lane to
another at a crawl while blithely chatting on their cell phones. Even a
simple form of multitasking — driving while listening to someone else talk
— disrupts the ability to navigate a car safely, a new study finds.
An intriguing neural response underlies vehicular mishaps associated with
such distractions, say neuroscientist Marcel Just of Carnegie Mellon
University in Pittsburgh and his colleagues. Attending to what someone says
galvanizes language-related brain areas while simultaneously reducing
activity in spatial regions that coordinate driving behavior.
This finding suggests that people who combine relatively automatic tasks,
such as speech comprehension and car driving, exceed a biological limit on
the amount of systematic brain activity they can accommodate at one time,
the researchers propose. As a result, the less-ingrained skill — in this
case, driving, which is learned long after a person grasps a native
language — takes a neural hit.
