Our Cars, Our Bodies, Our Minds

In this episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert and Joe consider the cognitive effects of driving. How does it alter our perceptions of self? How might driving prevent cognitive decline? What are the benefits of automotive ergonomics and how do we avoid the risks of road rage is aggressive?

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
My welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production
of I Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hey, are you
welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind? My name is
Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. And hey, it's still October.
That's right. Uh, you know this episode we need to

(00:21):
go and stay at the front. Uh. This episode is
sponsored by Lexus. Lexus asked to say make cars. They
make cars. They asked us to do an episode that
revolves around automobiles and deals with automobiles, and we said sure.
But also, since it is October, since it is our
our month Halloween celebration, we have to kick things off
by discussing something at least a little Halloween. We're gonna

(00:44):
have to talk about Stephen King's Christine. Right, it got
your brain winding on those cars without driver movies. Yeah, yeah,
some of you may best remember Christine from from the book.
I remember reading the book back and I think junior high.
And then then of course there's John Carpenter's nineteen eighty
three film adaptation. This is one of the only classic
Carpenter era films I have not seen. It's been a well,

(01:06):
it's been a while since i've seen it, but it's
a it's a pretty pretty great concept. The film, as
the book, concerns a murderous red and white n Plymouth
fury and the vehicle is possessed by a by a
malicious will and a jealousy with which it protects the
character Arnie Cunningham. So this is like I've heard it
described before. It's basically like there's this teen boy, he

(01:29):
gets this car, the car is sort of possessed and
it becomes like a murderous jealous lover. Yeah, that's kind
of the shorthand for it. But I also think that
that King and Carpenter, at least on some level, you know,
they're they're playing with a few other elements. They're playing
certainly with nostalgia, because it's a very nostalgic vehicle that
ends up possessing the kid. You know, there's certainly, I

(01:53):
mean certainly when I think back on it, I think
on the fact that it seems to deal a lot
with like really toxic idea is of masculinity, and you know,
because just filled with awful men in their cars, in
their vehicles, but but also this idea that a car
could change us, or that a car becomes the the

(02:14):
means by which we we chase change because at the
center of it, there is this character that undergoes the
transformation through his use of the automobile. And of course
it's it's Stephen King, it's John Carpenter. So it ends
up it has the supernatural flare to it. But I
think at heart one of the reasons that the people
did the story is like they get this idea of

(02:35):
the car as being something that can have an effect
on human behavior and human identity and uh, and can
be something we chase after for those reasons. Yeah, And
that goes multiple ways. So there's the one hand where
we're chasing it, where it's like new car, new me.
You know, people want to sort of like maybe upgrade
or change their personal image or change their view of

(02:56):
themselves by getting a new car. Uh. And then there's
the way, of course that maybe in a more unconscious
and subterranean way, just driving changes the way we interact
with the world. Yeah. Absolutely, And on top of that,
there's also the personification aspect of it. You know, Christine
is the car and yet she, however you want to identify,

(03:18):
we end up personifying it in the show. And this
is a trend that can that is used elsewhere and storytelling.
It was used in a nineteen four story named Killdozer
that was later made into a film I believe you
have with the love Bug, and then later on you
had the likes of Mega Weapon from Warrior of the
Lost World. So there's the Green Goblin tractor trailer rigg

(03:41):
and King's own nineteen eight six self directed adaptation of
his ninety short story Trucks the legendary Maximum Overdrive. That
one's a mess, but but already I think we get
just by looking at our fiction about vehicles, we get
this idea that our relationship with him is kind of complicated,
Like they are these things that we kind of see

(04:02):
as non human entities and yet uh and and yet
we personify them, and then we also merge with them,
and we allow them to to change how we perceive
ourselves and how we perceive others. Cars are very much
one of one of the early steps towards cyborgi ism.
I mean, we totally incorporate the car into the sense

(04:23):
of self, and I think that there's really interesting evidence
for that too from psychological research. But like the horse
drawn carriage is essentially a relationship between human and horse,
with the carriage as uh, you can see it, I
guess as a facilitator or just this necessary prop But
then the horseless carriage is all about the human and

(04:46):
the machine. Yeah. I don't know if I can think
of another technology that fills both of these roles quite
the way that the cars do that are both sort
of a a slightly personified external in to t t like
the way that you know, people interact with robots as
if they're living creatures. People sort of interact with cars
as if they're living creatures, but then also incorporated into

(05:10):
the self, like the car, and as an extension of
the brain and the body. Yeah, like I feel like
to a certain extent, we see some of these things
happening with people who own and operate boats, especially smaller boats,
because certainly boats can be used as a symbol. They
can you know, et cetera. They can you know, fall
falls in a number of these categories. But at the

(05:30):
same time, a boat doesn't. It tends not to enclose
inclose one the way an automobile is. And of course
the automobile, especially in the United States, is this thing
that is uh, it's almost expected of everyone that what
you should have access to it, where, of course, a
boat is going to be more of a thing in
coastal regions or areas with access to two larger bodies

(05:52):
of water. Maybe if people regularly drove submarines, submersibles, little
personal submersibles. Yeah, trying to think of other technologies we
have such an intimate relationship with as we do with
our cars. If you're a car owner and you drive regularly,
I mean you would have your electronic devices, like your
computer or your smartphone, but I don't really see those

(06:13):
being personified really. They become more just sort of a
medium space like through which you enter that cyber world.
You don't have a name for your phone? No? No,
oh yes, I call it Satan. But do you have
a name for your car? Uh? No, I don't wait,
do you have a name for your phone? No? But

(06:34):
I call my wife's phone phony. So if if if
the phone, if you can't the phone cannot be found,
well I'll be like, well where's phony, let's find phony. Um,
But my car does not have a have a name.
I though the one I had in high school did
have a name. It was it was what a Christine?
No knows that it was a green cheavy malbo uh
and it was its name was the Green Machine. That
was just what it had always been called before I

(06:56):
became the owner of it. So is it named after
a Kias song? Know that I later, when I discovered
that Kaya song, which is a cool, cool track, I
I was reminded of my time with the Green Machine
the vehicle. But no there, I don't think there's any
direct relationship there. But we'll get back to this idea
of you know, naming your car and our association with
cars in terms of personification in a bit. But first

(07:19):
let's I say, I think we should probably turn our
minds to just the most obvious relationship, the relationship between
the car and the human brain. Sure, Now, one line
of research here shouldn't really be a surprise at all.
I think it is that research indicates that our state
of mind affects how we drive. Kind of duh h.
I mean, that's obvious, and one the most obvious way,

(07:41):
I think is the thing we've all had drilled into
us by this point, yet some people still do not
pay attention to, which is that there are multiple states
of mind you can get into in which you should
not drive at all, you know, driving drunk, driving fatigued,
to driving distracted. Uh, don't do these things. They kill people. Okay.
And even if you think that you're at normal, you know,

(08:01):
driving ability, like, we're not very good at judging our
own ability to drive at any given time. Uh. So
that's the more obvious one. One that's still probably kind
of obvious, but less obvious maybe is that emotional states
affect how we drive. I was looking at one study
from the journal Accident Analysis and Prevention fromen by roytal

(08:23):
at All called Emotional States of Drivers and the impact
on Speed, acceleration and Traffic Violations a Simulator study, And
basically they measured performance responses in a driving simulation to
different scenarios that were designed to get you to feel
certain emotions like anxiety, fear, anger, and contempt. Uh. And
the results were the following. Anger is bad. You don't

(08:46):
want to be angry while you drive, they say. Quote.
Results indicate that anger leads to stronger acceleration and higher
speeds even for two kilometers beyond the emotional siting events.
So something makes you mad, you don't just m passed
it and then go back to baseline. You zoom passed
it and you kind of stay in a heightened state
of angry speeding around for a while. The authors found

(09:09):
that both anxiety and contempt created similar effects to anger,
but the effects were somewhat weaker. Uh so still stronger acceleration,
higher speeds. Uh. They found that fright was the only
emotion that actually improved driving performance by some measures. Interesting. Yeah,
they said that fright quote correlated with stronger breaking momentum

(09:30):
and lower speeds directly after the critical event. So I
think the obvious solution is to go in the Christine direction,
Like you need to get your car haunted, You take
it to the neighborhood which get it jammed with curses
and screaming ghosts, and then you'll be a safer driver. Interesting.
I mean, so certainly there's there's plenty of media and
they're staying in news coverage, you know, of the dangers

(09:51):
of driving. But it does make you wonder if like
there's such if there is a strong connection between fear
and driving safer, there needs to be stuff like on
the dashboard that inspires fear. Uh uh yeah, So I'm
kidding about that, obviously, I don't now there might be
measures by which driving afraid it makes you actually worse
at driving. It was just on the measures that they

(10:13):
looked at in this study, so like when people were scared,
they lowered their speed, of course, and lower speeds correlate
to fewer accidents and that kind of thing. So good
on that measure, but not necessarily good to be afraid
while driving on every measure. We don't know what all
those measures would be, but so well, the specific details
there might be instructive. We also all know that that
mind states we bring to the road affect how we

(10:35):
operate a vehicle. On the other hand, I think it's
really interesting to think about the psychology of driving in
the opposite direction, not how the mind state we bring
to the car affects how we drive, but how driving
affects our minds overall. Yeah, one of the big things
that that that really struck me and looking at all
this was just how how cognitively demanding driving really is.

(11:00):
Even though it's something that you know so many especially
if you've been doing it for a while, if you're
if you're learning to drive, it can it can feel
rightfully overwhelming, Like I remember that feeling and thinking like
how am I going to do this? And you know
the other the adults in my lives were saying things like, oh, well,
everybody does it. It can't be that hard. You'll get it.
You know, everybody drives. But but it is a cognitively

(11:20):
demanding task. I was looking at a a paper titled
mind over Machine, and in it, Hubert drive us at
All described learning to drive a car is something that
is quote so designed that almost all novices can eventually
reach the level we call expert, which which I think
is interesting. So we're dealing with something that, again, is

(11:40):
is a cognitively demanding activity, and yet we have it
refined in such a way, and maybe the task itself
lends itself in such a way that most humans who
undertake it can reach a very high level of mastery. Now,
certainly they're gonna still be plenty of people who are
better than you at driving. They're probably gonna be people
that are at worst. But on average, we have this,

(12:03):
we have this world in which we have wrapped it
in highways and roads and we give and people have
these vehicles that are just inherently dangerous by being you know,
fast moving in pieces of steel and glass and so forth.
And for the most part, it goes pretty well. Uh yeah,
it's kind of amazing how much it goes well. I mean,

(12:25):
this goes against obviously our our normal framing and negativity
bias and stuff when we think about traffic, which is
you get out on the road and you think, oh,
everybody out there is just the worst at driving, is
just awful. But now, I mean, on one hand, that
can be true. But at the same time, you could
just say it's amazing how well it mostly goes Yeah, yeah,

(12:45):
I think so, which again can be hard to hard
to stomach if you're stuck in traffic or if there's
a particularly crazy, you know, driver weaving in and out
of traffic. But but but still it's worth stopping to
to realize. But a lot of this, I think gets
down to the fact that that we are highly evolved
tool users, and the automobile vehicle is essentially a complex tool.

(13:06):
When we you say, a hammer, we extend our body
schema through it. Our brain updates its notion of where
our body ends and the world begins. It incorporates the
hammer into our conception of the body, and we then
wield it as an extension of ourselves to you know,
a large extent and a car also affects this, you know,
like we become the car and it changes our perception

(13:28):
then of the world beyond us. Yeah, and this is
something really interesting to consider. Now I've talked on the
show before without any specific evidence. I remember just talking
about a general intuition that our perception of space and
relationship to other objects seems different when we're in a
car versus when we're just walking around on the street.
We actually found a study this time that talks directly

(13:51):
about this phenomenon. So this, uh, the study here is
by Moeller at All. It's called what a Car Does
to Your Perception Distance of Value suations differ from within
an outside of a car from the Psychonomic Bulletin and Review.
And so the authors start off here by talking about
how research already exists to show that the use of

(14:12):
like handheld tools you use the idea of a hammer,
maybe an ax or like a like a grabber claw,
you know, those those funneled things to get something down
off top of the refrigerator, that they extend our perception
of near space. They sort of alter our view of
how near and far away things are within there when
they're within like rough reach of this tool and other

(14:34):
research suggests that our ideas of near and far are
frequently altered by our potential to act within a given space.
So like, whether you're currently using a tool that allows
you to quickly access some kind of activity or change
something within a certain space, it changes your view of

(14:54):
how close or far that space is from you. Now.
On the issue of a vehicle versus two, the vehicle
as a tool, the authors also point out quote one
marked difference between handheld tools and vehicles is that the
latter are mainly used for transportation and not to manipulate
the environment. Never Nevertheless, for a long time, authors have
repeatedly suggested that vehicles might be defined as tools as well. However,

(15:18):
they do know that there has been less research, however,
on vehicle tools and human cognition. Yeah, and so what
this study set out to do was just see how
sitting in a vehicle or having recently used a vehicle
changes your perception of space according to these guidelines. So
basically what they did is they had people sit at

(15:38):
a starting line, you know, like you stand behind the line,
judge various distances out in front of you, between like
four and twenty meters, and they would vary the conditions,
whether you'd be a pedestrian just sitting there in a
chair on foot, or sitting in a car, or sitting
in a kind of car simulator that was basically not
a car, but it was like a black wooden frame

(16:01):
that would block out the same parts of your view
that would normally be obscured if you were sitting in
a car. Right. So that's a good control condition, right,
it's sort of it counteracts the idea that your perception
would be altered just by what the car normally blocks
you from seeing. Yeah, they end up concluding the cars
quote modulate the perception of far distances because they modulate

(16:21):
the driver's perception like a tool typically does, and change
the perceived action potential. And you know, I can, I can.
I think you can relate to this in in my
day to day life. Uh. If I if I've driven
the car to, say a large shopping complex where you
have a large parking area and then stores around the
edges of that parking area, and so let's say the

(16:43):
grocery stores on one side and the bookstores on the
far other side, and I have to pick something up
from both the bookstore and the grocery store. I'm a
drive to the grocery store, uh, to do my main shopping,
and then I'll go on driving. I'll think in my mind, well, okay,
I'll get out, I'll do the grocery store a run,
and then I'll just walk over to the bookstore and
then back to the back to the car. Right, And

(17:04):
that makes perfect sense. But then I get out of
the car. I may I go inside, I walk around,
I do the grocery shopping. I'm bringing the food back
to my vehicle. And then I realized, this is a
big parking lot. Maybe this this this is actually maybe
a walk I'm not willing to take. I'm going to
get back in the car and I'm going to drive
across the parking lot to the bookstore. Uh. And I
think that that could possibly could make the argument that

(17:27):
that kind of decision making is based in the fact
that when I'm in the car, it really doesn't seem
like that big of a distance, but when I'm out
of the car, I can more accurately judge the distance
across the parking lot. Well, this is not covered in
the study we looked at, or in any study that
I could find, but it also makes me wonder about
not just estimations of distances, but judgments about the trasversibility

(17:48):
of spaces. Um, so does being in a car make
you see a particular landscape as more or less traversible
in general? Not just distance, but like you know, there
there are certain part king lots that you could drive across,
but you don't really like want to walk across them
if they're like you know, big lanes going across the
middle of them where there are a lot of cars

(18:08):
moving or something, right, I mean it could also affect, uh,
you know, how you perceive, say the walkability of your neighborhood,
or what kind of a walking commute you might have
to the nearest train or bus station, that sort of thing. Yeah, totally.
Now a couple of other things from the discussion section
of this paper. So one thing they say is that specifically,
like how much did drivers underestimate distances when compared to pedestrians?

(18:34):
They say, quote, drivers underestimated even the shortest distance, which
I think would have been four meters, by approximately forty
per cent, And this underestimation did not increase anymore for
increasing distances. So that's kind of interesting. It's like they're
rough underestimation percentage stayed about the same as the distances
got farther, right. Um, And we want to say again,

(18:55):
this was not due to drivers having part of their
vision blocked by the body of the car, which is
a thing, because they compared it to pedestrians just sitting
there with like a black frame blocking the same parts
of their vision and there was still a difference. It
was the idea that I'm in a car. It was
what seemed to be acting on people to make this

(19:16):
misjudgment of distance. But another variation they looked at was
didn't movement before the experiment alter anything? Uh. They found
that if you walk for ten minutes before you make
the judgment of distance, this did not influence distance estimation,
so walking around doesn't change anything. But if you drive
the car for ten minutes, this led to even larger

(19:38):
underestimations of distances. Uh. So they conclude in the end
quote the moment you sit in your car, your distance
perception of the environment seems to adapt to your new
action potential, again underlining how strongly related action and perception
representations in the cognitive system are. And this makes me

(19:58):
just want to see more re search along these lines
about the ways our perception of not just space, but
also again like objects in the landscape and stuff are
altered by being inside a car. Like here's an example,
how much different would you estimate the mass of an
object in front of you if you're in a car

(20:19):
versus not in a car. I wonder if being in
a car makes other things around you look smaller and
less significant and less weighty. Perhaps I don't know, but
I mean I ask that because I mean I wonder if,
like being in a car also sort of upgrades your
body schema to think more like I am not a
small primate, I am a rhinoceros. Yeah, I mean there is.

(20:41):
I feel like there is this sense of of power
that comes into play when you're in the vehicle. I mean,
the vehicle is a is a powerful object that can
travel a greater speeds than than a human can travel otherwise,
And you're also cut off from your environment to a
certain extent. I mean, yeah, there's really nothing between you
and the rounding world besides you know, some steel and

(21:03):
some glass, and you know, uh, you know, locking mechanism.
But but still, it's easy to be in a vehicle
and feel very much detached from say, the neighborhood you're
driving through, or the or or you know, the the
events on the side of the road that you're driving past. Um.
I think it does contribute to the sense of detachment. Yeah.

(21:25):
I sometimes feel this way. Now. On one hand, I
do enjoy driving through like beautiful landscapes that I you know, Uh,
it's the thing I like. I like, you know, driving
in the mountains or something. But also there is a
kind of sense where looking through the windshield of a
car moving through an environment is almost kind of like

(21:46):
an upgraded form of watching a movie of the environment.
And I notice, you know, when I get to a
really beautiful place, if there's an ability, I do want
to stop the car and get out just to look,
even just to look at something that I could see
you through the windows of the car. Why do I
want to get out of the car? I want to
manipulate my experience somehow by removing myself from the movie screen. Uh.

(22:10):
Does that make sense? Yeah? Absolutely? Uh. I think we
can also all relate to the things that we don't
see when we drive. UM. The main example that comes
to mind of this is if there's a if I
typically drive a certain way and then uh, and then
I return on that same route, but I'm in the
passenger seat instead, and then I'll see something like, oh,
I've driven I've driven by this house so many times.

(22:32):
I never see that house, I guess because I'm more
concerned with you know, the turn, I'm about to make it, etcetera.
But but that can that can be rather illuminating as well,
to realize, oh that I've I've just never really seen
this one particular landmark. Uh, in my driving, like my
my perception is not as you know, as all encompassing

(22:53):
as I might think. I'm not. I'm not seeing out
of all of these windshields at once. That's a really
good point. Some of the movie screen in effect, I guess,
would be not just from being in the car, but
specifically from being the driver of the car. All right,
on that note, we're going to take a quick break,
but when we come back, we will personify our cars
a little bit. All right, we're back. All right. So

(23:16):
you had a car when what you were in high school,
you said high school, named the Green Machine. Was it
in any way inspired by the Green Goblin from Maximum Overdrive? No,
I imagine I'd seen Maximum Overdrive by that point. But no,
it didn't really have anything to do with that. But yes,
we will come back to the green goblin here in

(23:36):
a minute. When we when we look at our cars,
though we we sometimes do personify them. I mean I don't,
I don't. I don't think I do this a lot consciously.
Like I don't name cars. Some people do. But when
you look at a car, you still may anthropomorphize it
to some extent, even if it's not like an overt
thing in your mind. I would say there are two
main reasons for this. One is that it moves, and

(23:59):
any technology you that moves is especially prone to being anthropomorphized.
The other is that it has headlights, and headlights are
oriented like eyes, and then it has a grill which
looks like a mouth. Yea, so it I'm not just
joking about that. I think the headlights make a big difference. Yeah, yeah,
I think so. I mean we tend to anthropomorphize things anyway.

(24:19):
You know. It's it's difficult to not think of something
as a certain type of entity. If we draw a
smiley face on it, right, just a really abstract face,
and the car in its typical design has this abstract
face built into it, and uh, and and there have
been studies that look at this, Uh I was looking

(24:40):
at is this car looking at you? How anthropomorphism predicts
fusiform face area activation when seeing cars by Coon, Brick, Mueller,
and uh gallinat and this is from plos one. And
they observe the tendency and subjects to activate their fusiform
face area the f f A while looking at car fronts.

(25:02):
And the f A is a part of the brain
that is commonly activated, of course when you are recognizing
other human faces, right, and so they stay quote. The
results point to an important role of f A in
the phenomenon of ascribing human attributes to non living objects. Interestingly,
brain regions that have been associated with thinking about beliefs
and mental states of others, the t p A, t PJ,

(25:25):
the mPFC UM do not seem to be related to
anthropomorphism of car fronts. So I would assume to activate
these other regions we need something more overt, perhaps like
we need that green goblin face from the front of
the semi truck and maximum overdive overdrive UM. But I
wonder to what extend these factors. This, this factors into

(25:48):
some of our tendencies to assume the worst of other cars,
because if we're anthropomorphizing the vehicle, but we're not doing
so to the extent that we're we're thinking about the
car's beliefs or it's mind state, you know, we're kind
of seeing it as this mindless animal, and so it
would make sense then that we assume the worst of it,
like what is this car beast doing cutting me off?

(26:10):
What is this other car beast doing with its bright sign?
You know, because because we were not thinking about the
you know, the the the actual emotional state of the
Volkswagen buck Well, this leads me to another question that
I don't think. I didn't find any research about this,
but it makes me think, are people more likely to

(26:31):
think about drivers in the daytime and other cars in
the nighttime because in the daytime you can actually like
see the outline of the driver inside the vehicle. Yeah,
I was wondering about that as well. I have to
think back on my most recent encounter with a driver
that irritated me, which was of course this morning, just
just in dealing with the parking tech, and the car

(26:54):
was driving in a way that I disapproved off it
was not not obeying the mater stand it's no. I mean,
I'm very much a rule follower. I believe you should.
You should when you're navigating, say a car parking complex,
you should. You should not just drive willy nilly across
the parking places. You should follow the course. And this
this individual was not well. I mean, even if you're

(27:16):
a rebel, you should be a rule follower in traffic
situations because that prevents injuries, right, But have been in
these cases, I often feel this um, this need to
see the individual, you know. And I mean, on one hand,
I guess I could excuse that and say, well, maybe
I'm trying to do the appropriate thing and make a
human contact with this person that has irritated me. But
then also I'm kind of like, I just want to

(27:37):
judge them more. I want to see what kind of
person drives like this. And in this case, and in
the daylight, the individual also had sunglasses on, so I
wasn't able to really see. I wasn't able to make
eye contact with them and see their eyes. So there
was still this something, you know, a layer between me
and them. And and certainly I d I mean a
sunny day, you drive with sunglasses, that's what I do.
So of course, so I think we'd have to factor

(27:58):
that in. But certainly at night you're going to have
plenty of vehicles where you you certainly are not seeing
any sense of the human inside them. And therefore, if
you are inclined to view the vehicle is this metal beast. Uh,
You're you're gonna have more license to do so. Oh.
The second part of me wondering if people see cars
more as cars in the nighttime is because the headlights

(28:20):
are lit up, the eyes are glowing. Yeah. Now, I
want to come back at this point to just driving
and the functionality of our brains. So, yes, it's intuitive
enough that most of us become quote unquote experts and
uh and yes, way too many of us multitask when
we drive, and usually do so without anything terrible happening. Uh,

(28:41):
you know, but we and oftentimes we're engaging in downright
dangerous activities. You know, people are still texting while driving,
or even if you're not doing things that that are
you know, that are so explicitly uh you know, advised
against or or even you know they're even laws against,
you'll still see people doing other kind of wacky things
while driving, like reading a book while driving a car,

(29:03):
or you know, putting on their makeup, or or eating
eating food that is inadvisable to eat while while driving,
because it's one thing in my mind to have like
a sandwich, but if you actually have to use uh,
you know, fork and knife, then that's probably a meal
you should stop the car for. I think it's probably
just better not to eat while you're drivingly, yeah, probably so.

(29:24):
And you know, also, on the other hand, even without
thinking of this, well, a lot of us will drive,
maybe most of us will drive while some sort of
audio is playing. You're gonna listen to music, or you're
gonna listen to the news, or or you're gonna listen
to a podcast. You may be listening to us right
now as you drive. Uh. And even if you're just
listening to like, non lyrical music, you are probably putting

(29:45):
yourself into a state where you can you can daydream
or you know, or certainly think about the day before
the day after. But we shouldn't assume that any of
this means that driving a vehicle is cognitively simple, that
we have just you know, x sess cognitive space for
all of our sandwich eating and makeup putting on activities,
not only is driving a cognitively demanding task, it's one

(30:08):
of the more cognitively complex tasks that we engage in
on a regular basis. Uh. This according to ah chow
at All in Trajectories of Cognitive Decline by Driving Mobility
Evidence from the Health and Retirement Study, and this is
this was published in Geriatric Psychiatry in and they pointed

(30:30):
out that there's there's not only correlation between cognitive decline
and driving cessation in old age, which of course can
further limit social and physical fitness in an individual, but
that quote, it may also be the case that driving
a cessation itself is a risk factor for accelerated cognitive
decline over time. This suggests the relationship between driving cessation

(30:53):
and cognitive functioning maybe bi directional. Yeah, that's interesting. So
one direction of course is pretty clear there, right It
Driving cessation certainly correlates with declines in cognitive functioning, and
the clear reason is that over time you're less able
to drive, so you stop doing it. But the the
authors think here it's also possible that driving cessation itself

(31:14):
contributes to decline in cognitive functioning. But either way, the
authors believe that older adults without independent driving mobility could
be viewed as a group who would benefit from quote
targeted interventions that promote social, psychological and cognitive engagement, which
I think just means like giving them mentally stimulating things
to do, which could help the brains stay healthy longer. Now,

(31:36):
on the other hand, I found at least one study
that suggested perhaps long commutes could be a risk factor
for declines in cognitive performance in older adults. Uh. This
was in the American Journal of Epidemiology by bach Rania
at All from seventeen and it's called Associations between Sedentary

(31:56):
Behaviors in Cognitive function, cross Sectional and Perspective Findings from
the UK Biobank. So this study looked at an assessment
of data from adults who had data stored in the
UK Biobank. That's like a big research tool that's got
a bunch of data already ready to go in it.
And it tracked performance on cognitive tests for UK adults

(32:16):
across a mean period of five point three years, and
then they cross referenced any changes in mental performance over
that time with lifestyle behaviors such as watching TV, driving,
and non occupational use of a computer. So using a
computer but not for your job, and they found within
their sample that increases in time spent driving and watching

(32:39):
TV we're both associated with decreases in cognitive performance over time,
but computer use was not. In fact, computer use time
was positively associated with cognitive performance, and this has been
written up in some press outlets. I think it's generally
interpreted as evidence that sedentary activities in general, including watching
TV and drive riving, can lead to declines in cognition

(33:02):
in time over time and older adults. But at the
same time, I think this is specifically about the sedentary activities.
It's one where I saw some like press headlines I
think going over the top and interpreting it with lines
like driving makes you stupid or the shocking threat to
your mental health that you do every day. Uh. I
don't go overboard with interpreting this is just it's just

(33:24):
one study not replicated yet as far as I'm aware,
and it's not uniquely about driving. It's apparently multiple kinds
of seated, low movement activities. Yeah, it's easy to forget
that that driving is a sedentary activity because it can
sure feel exhausting. If you've you've done a long drive,
you know, at the end of a of a lengthy

(33:45):
drive you may feel you know, physically tired, uh, emotionally
mentally drained uh and it and yet at the same
time you have to realize that you barely moved for
that you know, four hours or more of drive time. Yeah.
Uh yeah, it is weird how exhausting it can be
like that. But it does also make me wonder if

(34:05):
these results are correct. It makes me wonder what's going
on with the computer and like and also how does
this square with other research? Because well, one thing before
I get to that is do the cognitive effects of
driving differ depending on what kind of driving you do
and how much of it you do? That that's one question,
because I would certainly imagine that that, say, driving on

(34:29):
an open road or navigating tricky terrain is probably cognitively different,
different than just like sitting in traffic on a you know,
long congested commute. Well perhaps, but then again, like a
congested commute, there's still a lot of things you're paying
attention to, I guess. So yeah, well, anyway, so I
want to get to the other things. So back on
the other hand, going against what we were just saying,

(34:50):
I found another study that saw some noticeable differences in
brain morphology between drivers and non drivers, suggesting the possibility
that driving sort of exercises specific parts of the brain,
leading to growth in brain tissue. For example, there's plenty
of evidence that music training, like learning to play a
new musical instrument, changes the structure of the auditory and

(35:13):
motor cortices. It leads to, you know, more gray matter.
Was that funny? No, No, I'm just I'm realizing that
you're you're about to talk to us about the knowledge.
Oh I love the knowledge. Well we'll get there in
a second. But yeah, So the music thing that this is,
uh an example of structural plasticity in the human brain.
Does that extend to driving? Does driving perhaps also stimulate

(35:36):
the growth of more volume of gray matter in certain
parts of the brain. Apparently at least at some level,
at least according to the study we're about to look at.
So this was published in seventeen in Nature Scientific Reports
by Sakai at all and a quick note that this study,
like a lot of studies about driving, was funded by Toyota, Central,
R and D Laboratories. Of course, there's you know, the

(35:58):
standard disclaimer that funders had no role in study. Design
outcomes their decision to publish, but you should always be
aware of potential conflicts of interest. So the study began
by the authors noting previous findings on the relationship between
driving tasks and brain structure, including a two thousand study
by McGuire at all that found that London taxi drivers

(36:20):
had more gray matter volume in the posterior hippocampus when
compared to non taxi drivers, and the amount of gray
matter volume was correlated positively with how long they had
been working as a taxi driver in London, and when
they combined this with follow up research, this was interpreted
as a sort of neuroplastic adaptation to the daily necessity

(36:42):
of constant, detailed spatial representations in the brain. So it
seems like it wasn't just that London London taxi drivers
chose their job because they're naturally good at mentally representing
spaces like mental maps of city streets, but that they
got better at mentally representing spaces cause they had to
do it so much. And here's obviously where you'd get

(37:03):
into the idea of the knowledge, uh did now you
were recently in London, did you get to ride in
a cab and get to to think about this. Yeah,
I think I was seeing some some smartphone navigation. I
was there recently. Is that maybe totally changing there? Yeah?
I was. I'm wondering to what extent that would change
things because I I went to London years must have

(37:24):
been a decade or more, maybe like thirteen years ago
I went. I went there and horse at the time,
you didn't really see that kind of navigation taking place.
And I distinctly remember writing in a taxi cab and
kind of like staring at the taxi driver's skull and
wondering if this was the knowledge, you know, if I
was looking at like the swelling of the knowledge in
the brain. Well, we didn't actually explain it briefly, Robert,

(37:47):
what the knowledge? What's the deal with the knowledge? But
the knowledge is that in order to navigate the streets
of London as a as a cab driver, you have
to you have to load it with all that information
about all the streets you're going to travel like. You
can't just you can't be busting out a map. You
can't depend on or at least you couldn't used to
depend on ways or Google maps to to like the

(38:09):
way for you, you had to have it inside. It
reminded me a lot of jeez, what what Mark Twain
story was it where he's talking about navigating the Mississippi
and just how well, uh train one needed to be
in every detail of the of the river. Oh, I
don't know. Um, I'm sure listeners will remind me. But

(38:33):
but it's that level of of of detail like you
you would have to have. And so the idea is
that that you know, assimilating all of that those details
had a marked effect on the brain. Well yeah, I
mean it appears that it does, and specifically, exercising it
over time, like facing your brain with these cognitive challenges
day after day appears to stimulate the growth of extra

(38:54):
volume of of tissue in certain parts of the brain
that are the brain depends on for these tasks specifically.
The authors also point to research showing the professional auto
racing drivers show greater gray matter volume in several brain
regions when compared to non experienced drivers. And I don't
know specifically what types of tasks the gray matter in

(39:18):
this research is related to, but if I had to guess,
I would say it's probably stuff like quick reflexes, peripheral vision, perception,
management of speed and that kind of stuff. And does
that match up with your viewing of the Fast and
Furious movies. I tell you, my viewing of the Fast
and Furious movies has made my brain so powerful I
cannot comprehend. I have surpassed the limits of human imagination

(39:42):
and creativity. And now most of my brain exists in
another dimension full of cars and chains and sparks, and
it's beautiful. But anyway, so back to the study at hand.
That that was just all the stuff. They begin you know,
by saying here, here's the research history this study. Uh,
in particular look to non a driving specialists like the
cyborg navigators of London or the speed demon Uh, you know,

(40:05):
racing drivers, but just regular old drivers. So are there
any brain changes here between regular drivers and non drivers?
The authors believe they found evidence of it. They collected
brain images from seventy three healthy young adults, thirty six
drivers and thirty seven non drivers, and they found, quote,
compared with non drivers, drivers showed significantly greater gray matter

(40:27):
volume in the left cerebellar hemisphere, which has been associated
with cognitive rather than motor functioning. That's interesting, So cognitive
management of of information rather than just like controlling the body. Uh.
And they say, in contrast, they found no brain areas
with significantly greater gray matter volume in non drivers when
compared with drivers, So no no evidence that being a

(40:49):
non driver also gives you any particular relevant boost uh.
And the authors think that the regions showing specific growth
for drivers versus non drivers maybe critical for driving a car,
but not frequently used during other daily activities. So there's that.
But then also I think we should remember not to

(41:09):
trust too much in the idea of like brain stimulation
and plasticity as this kind of blanket panacea for the brain,
or or or total warding off of all cognitive decline,
because while there is good evidence for adult neu and
plasticity and some activities can increase specific cognitive competencies, I
think there's also a lot of dispute still going on

(41:32):
about many of the claims in this area. And one
example I would give is the idea of so called
brain training games, which you know, they've been offered sort
of as general prescriptions to improve cognitive performance and mental health,
and the evidence that they can do that is highly disputed. Um, Like,
there were a group of studies and reviews since sixteen

(41:54):
that have strongly questioned the claims of brain training game
companies uh which promised general cognitive benefits from their games.
One example was a study by Simon's at All in
sixteen in Psychological Science in the Public Interest. It was
just do brain training programs work? So they look at
a bunch of different studies on the subject, and they

(42:14):
examine the strength of them individually, and they say, overall, quote,
based on this examination, we find extensive evidence that brain
training interventions improve performance on the trained tasks, less evidence
that such interventions improve performance on closely related tasks, and
little evidence that training enhances performance on distantly related tasks

(42:36):
or that training improves everyday cognitive performance. So it seems
like the stuff that we have really good evidence for
is that you get better at doing specifically whatever you're
doing in the game. So if the if the game
is about say moving you know, color blocks around, you're
gonna get better at moving color blocks around, and we
should be cautious about taking that skill and then you know,

(42:58):
overlaying it with or you know, are more important skills
in life. Right, Sure, but this does make me think,
I mean that maybe you can. Again, this is not
fully known, but my guess at this point is that
if you want to prolonged cognitive performance over life, it
seems like maybe a good thing to do would be,
of course, first focus on the forms of fitness that

(43:21):
contribute to brain health overall, which is like getting good sleep,
good diet and exercise and all that. But beyond that,
maybe to construct a kind of total ecology of mentally
challenging and stimulating experiences, like a challenging and stimulating world,
rather than just a single type of task repeated. Does
that make sense? Yeah, absolutely, I mean it. You know,

(43:42):
we all want you know that the sort of simple trick, right,
the simple life hack. You know you you you want
that the one pill that will that will help your
life and improve your your living, or you want that
one exercise you can do that that one basically that
one switch that you can pull that will change things.

(44:04):
And yeah, the reality is often well, I know, it's
multiple switches, multiple things that you should you should do,
and maybe multiple things you should also curb or cut out. Yeah. Now,
on the other hand, I want to say that I
don't think it has been completely disproven that doing certain
types of tasks like maybe certain puzzles or games or
maybe driving or anything like that could contribute to areas

(44:28):
that are not specifically the task involved. I think it's
just not proven yet. So you know, you could hold
out that maybe there are sort of like distant relationship
improvements that you could see within the brain. I just
think the evidence isn't there. Now. Another area of our
of our experience with the automobile, our life with the automobile,
that I wanted to talk about is the idea of

(44:49):
car as symbol. Oh yeah, and I think a lot
of this should be pretty obvious. You know, automobile marketers, uh,
you know, push this a lot, and it's kind of
the real I think, the real meat that King and
Carpenter were chewing on in Christine. The car becomes a
symbol for a time, for a culture, for the individual,
even if you're not a car person. And you know,

(45:12):
I'm not really a huge car person, but but I
even I admit, like if I'm watching a period piece
motion picture, the television show, like the cars have to
be right, and when you see that the cars are right, uh,
you know, it really puts you in that time frame.
And and so so the you know, they become a
symbol for a particular time in particular culture, and then

(45:34):
very often a particular individual. And then likewise, any car
as you see is going is often marketing to you
based along these lines like drive this car, be this person,
be this type of person. It's like the next jacket,
right that the order of like identity, definition and coolness.
It goes like jacket and then it goes car. I

(45:56):
was I was reading something about all this, uh is
titled I Prime Are on Automobile Semiotics by Hefner at
All and it was from the U. C. Davis Institute
of Transportation Studies in two thousand six, and they point
out that for starters, cars and trucks are often status symbols.
It's you know, it's obvious with luxury vehicles, but it
also applies to various other categories. Uh. You know, basically

(46:18):
it comes down what does this vehicle say about who
you are and where you fit in society? Um? And
you know it's worth thinking about with you know, with
your own vehicle. You know, whether you're driving uh you know,
electric vehicle, hybrid vehicle, Uh, you know an enormous uh
you know sports utility vehicle. Uh you should at least,
you know, entertain the question, and then as symbols they

(46:41):
can often there they can be used in the process
of self expression of individual identity as well as the
self creation of individual identity. However, the authors do know that,
you know, individuals are still going to you know, place
differing emphasis on the symbolic power of the vehicle. Quote. Thus,
the individual who claim aims his automobileia is just a
way to get around maybe telling the truth. I mean,

(47:05):
I think I'm in that camp. Yeah, not to disparage
people who love their cars. I mean, I know a
lot of people who get a lot of pleasure out
of their car experiences. Right, But then at the same time,
like being the staying saying that you're not the type
of person who cares about their car is still a
statement about yourself and your identity and your values. So
you know, it's in a way it's impossible to uh

(47:28):
to completely disengage from the semiotic of power of the car.
And then also I assume that you know that's ultimately
where bumper stickers come into play, where you're like the cars,
the car has nothing to do with my self expression.
I may say that, but then I still have like
a bumper stickers in my car that are are there
in part to, uh, to communicate this to other people.

(47:49):
But but again it's it's difficult to to really disengage
from this entirely. And that's that's something that the authors
stay too. They write, However, none of us can opt
out of symbolic communication. We are surrounded by some systems,
and the goods we purchase are part of these systems. Therefore,
our vehicles say something about us, whether or not we
intend for them to serve as signifiers. Sure, yeah, yeah,

(48:11):
I mean I think I don't know, I don't want
that to be the case for me, but I guess
this is probably true. Yeah, and you know, it's easy,
I think, for us to also turn to the more um,
you know, obvious examples of this. You know, we think
about an individual driving a luxury vehicle, or we think
about uh, you know, an individual driving a particularly outrageous vehicle,
like some of them. When you see somebody driving an

(48:33):
art car around town, something that looks like it should
be a burning man, the red bull car, Well we're
on corporate vehicle. But I was thinking things like a
car with a bunch of Barbie dolls stuck to it,
or coins attached to it, or some sort of country
Western vehicle. You know, I can get down with that. Oh,
there's a good car. There's a good car that we
sometimes drive past on the way back from work that's

(48:53):
got like a big wizard on the back of it.
And I've seen that one as well, a van with
like a epic wizard holding a big world ball in
his hand. Oh man, I'm a big, big fan of
van murals. They're rare, a rare site these days. But
that was an idea. You know, this is certainly a
situation where for a while vans were big and you

(49:14):
often had that big panel, featureless panel on the side
of the van, and that is a great place for
self expression. That was that was where you put your
wizard in your your your very barbarian scenes science science
fiction scenario going down. This is radigas the van. Yeah, alright,
on that note, we're going to take one more break.
But when we come back, we're going to continue our

(49:35):
look at at our cars and we're gonna get into
the relationship that our cars have with our bodies and
with our behavior. Alright, we're back now. You know something
we have we always have to consider when we think
about the fusion between humans and our tools, are you know,
just to what do how is that communication taking place? Um?

(49:58):
You know, we want to use a machine, but we
don't want to have to become more machine like to
use it. We want the machine to become more accommodating
to us. Uh. And part of that is intuitive design,
but also ergonomics is a big part of it as well.
So if you've ever climbed inside an older automobile, like
I'm thinking something from the you know, the sixties or

(50:20):
the perhaps early seventies, uh, you can probably attest to
the fact that they were they were often less cockpit
like in their environment, and it was more like a
small couch crammed inside of a vehicle body. You know.
The first car I ever drove was like, it was
a big old Cadillac that bench seats, Yeah, big bench seats,
and then a dash that seemed like a mile wide right. Um.

(50:43):
And today you're far more more likely to find highly
customizable seats, easily adjustable mirrors, and a fair amount even
I mean increasing amount of effort put into minimizing the
stretching and reaching needed to drive the vehicle. And adjust
the you know, the heating and a air or the radio,
the you know, the music or what you know, whatever

(51:03):
else you're going to be tinkering with. Uh, you know
so many different like hands free options as well. And
all of this is about making the machine more accommodating
to the human form, into the human body and human
limitations without asking us to become more machine. Like yeah, well,
I think it's aiding in that hybridization. It's you want
to be a car centaur head, you know that this

(51:25):
is the way, like it sort of opens up the
stump on the horse body for you to climb into.
If that metaphor makes anything, Yeah, no, I think so.
You know, this is to say that the repetitive driving
injuries are still not a thing. You know, still see
back pain, next iffness, side ache, and eye strain. All
of these are an issue. And you also see a
strain associated with different you know, technological add ons that

(51:48):
end up coming. Like the main one that comes to
my mind is when you have a laptop computer in
a vehicle. You'll see this often with like service vehicles,
so you'll see this with police officers. Yeah, and like
that adds a new level of repeated movement inside of
the car that the car may you know, it was
probably not designed to accommodate, so that can can open
the door for potentially, you know, other strains, other bodily

(52:10):
strains that can take place. But but car companies today
they even use tools like virtual reality to plan out
and ergonomic design well before they create a prototype to
actually start sticking people inside of Yeah, that makes sense
to me. And so at this point, I want to
come back though, to us something we've touched on already
a little bit. I want to come back to the
human car hybrid and how the car may change how

(52:34):
we actually behave Because they talked about how it changes
our perception, it changes um changes how we think about
other cars, the drivers. But then how does that actually
factor into behavior itself? And I think we can all
think of examples in our lives where we think and
feel differently while driving. You were talking earlier about how
much you enjoy driving, you know, let's say out in

(52:56):
the countryside mountains. Yeah, and we I think that can
feel very liberating, even if you're not like a someone
who would typically say, oh I love driving. You make
think to a time where you were, you know, cranking
a favorite tune. Uh you know, you know white winding
through the mountains or whatever, and you you you can
look back. I didn't realize, Well, that was very enjoyable.

(53:16):
I felt I felt alive, I felt free. I felt
like some sort of a seventies rock song incarnate right right,
or it makes you think about the scenes in the
movies where characters were always teenagers are driving down the
road and all the windows are down and they're just
going whoo. Have you ever driven down the road and
just everybody gone woo? It doesn't happen in real life,

(53:37):
even if you're having a good time. Yeah, I don't
think I've gone woo and are necessarily but but I
certainly hear the music side of it. Um and in
some studies have shown that certain songs can make us
drive faster. I can definitely. I can definitely remember times
where I was driving too fast and it was it
was it was all leads up one's fall specifically immigrant song,

(53:57):
immigrant song, not a good not a good slow driving song.
Another area that I think too, when I think of
of behavior while driving, is this that weird sense of
heard mentality that can take hold on highways. UM, where
we you know, we we gauge the appropriate speed, what
is the what is the pack doing? And then we
also have to deal with the stalking predator like highway

(54:20):
patrol cars that are out there as well. I always
every time I drive, I think about that. How I'm
I feel like I am putting myself in the mindset
of a fish, and I'm and I have to think
about the sharks that are out there. Uh and uh
and and so I think about that, like every time
I let a really fast driver, you know, go go
buy me, you know, out of the way, let them go,

(54:42):
let them attract the sharks. You stay with the school. Yeah,
I'm gonna stay back here with the school. Uh. And
I'm going to follow the school rules. Well, I'm sure
that traffic patterns showed the same kinds of uh emergent
behaviors from the group individual motions that you would see
in the flocking of birds or the movement of tools
of fish. Despite however much it might seem to the contrary,

(55:03):
I think there is often kind of an emergent intelligence
that comes out of a group of cars, like say,
trying to get around and obstruction in the road or something. Yeah.
And then also in in nature, we see of course,
the the way that that a species will communicate to
other members of their species that there are predators in
their vicinity. And then also we see uh, inter species

(55:26):
communication about this as well. Um. And what do we
see out on on on our highways. Used to if
there was there was a you know, a traffic stop
up ahead or a speed trap, is someone mind, you know,
flash their lights at you. Now we have more bus
technological means of doing this through programs like ways. Oh yeah,
where you see you see a police of vehicle, you

(55:47):
you tag them. And I certainly don't mean to disparage
police officers or you know, highway patrolmen or anything like that.
It's like cutting down on speeding is actually a public good. Yes, absolutely, um,
but but I mean that when we when I view them,
I can't help. And part of this is seeing the
car and not thinking about the person, you know, uh,
or in fact, seeing the uniform and not thinking about
the person. You just see them as a potential threat

(56:08):
on some level, like this is a person that could
that I could get I could get in trouble, they
could give me a speeding ticket. And if you're driving
on a highway. You probably are technically speeding, if you're
keeping if you're if you're again keeping up with the pack, right, Yeah,
I mean that is often the case on our freeways.
But yeah, I mean when people are trying to get somewhere,
they're not usually thinking about the public good. They're just
thinking about you know, they're kind of in self mode

(56:30):
and they're like, I gotta get there, right. But then
there's another area of behavior that that obviously comes up,
and that's road rage. I've I've read a little bit
of about this before, and I was looking over the
information again. There was a two thousand tin paper that
I'd rather like titled road Rage, What's Driving It? By

(56:51):
Randy and Lori Sandsum, And they have a nice compact
definition of road rage, because the definition of road rage
becomes important when you're teasing it apart. They say road
rage may be described as a constellation of thoughts, emotions,
and behaviors that occur in response to a perceived unjustified
provocation while driving. Road Rage may also be defined as

(57:12):
those driving behaviors that endanger or potentially endanger others that
uh and are accompanied by intentional acts of aggression. Towards others,
negative emotions while driving, and risk taking. So again, I
think it's important to think of it again as a
constellation of thoughts and emotions because road rage, as it
is often or certainly for a while, the way it

(57:32):
was utilized in the in the media, well, it was
alway and almost had this supernatural context. It was almost
like lookanthropy, you know, someone was overcome by road rage,
like the machine leached into your body and turned you
into a monster, as if there is one single cause
or even one single uh you know, uh symptom of
of of this thing we're talking about. Well, I feel

(57:54):
like it was also used in sort of like shifting
contexts where it originally immerged. Didn't It originally emerge with
reference to like really violent acts like shootings in in
l A due to traffic, where people got really angry
into violent outbursts. But then it would also just be
used to refer to people like getting mad and giving
rude gestures and stuff. Yeah. Yeah. The phrase itself was

(58:17):
coined in the late nineteen eighties by newscasters at KTLA
and Los Angeles following a series of freeway shootings. Um,
but it was it wasn't ntil that it was really
picked up by and by various headlines stealing scare stories,
but one if the Again, it is often used to
encompa as a number of behaviors, but the most classic
is people becoming angry due to being cut off in traffic. Uh.

(58:41):
You hear about this all the time. They take this
as a as a direct affront to their their identity,
to their person, to their goals. And then but with
what is essentially happening in the brain. Well, first, the
stress hormone cortisol rushes through your blood stream and ups
your blood pressure. Next, adrenaline kicks into kicks into heighten
your aggression. And that's the thing too. You know, essentially

(59:02):
you go into a fight or flight scenario, but you
you can't really fly away, you can't really run away
due to the flow of traffic. So it's gonna argue
that you tend to go towards more the fight mindset,
thus the aggression. Um. And then also um, you know,
your your serotonin is dropping, dopamines increasing, so your emotional

(59:24):
intelligence is decreasing, and your body is is posed for
some sort of altercation to take place. Okay, but of
course your body is also in a car and your
aggressors behind it. The progressor's body is in a car.
And uh and this also, you know, contributes to this
weird scenario that you're in. So, according to the the authors,
if you just ask around, up to one third of

(59:44):
the population has perpetrated something that they think of as
road rage or could be defined as road rage. Now, again,
to dissociate from the original context, this wouldn't necessarily mean
any kind of violence, right. Uh. Meanwhile, only two percent
or less events it's actually result in serious vehicle damage
or personal harm. And then also when it comes down

(01:00:05):
to who are the actual primary perpetrators of road rage,
it tends to be young males. That's not super surprising.
And and they point out that there you know, obviously
they're psychological factors that come into play here and contribute
to a general tendency to displace anger and blame others.
And this is pre existing. This is not caused by uh,
you know, automobile induced cognition, though I think you can

(01:00:28):
make a lot of cases for if you have underlying
psychological factors or certainly if there's a bona fide psychiatric disorder,
especially a drug or alcohol addiction, anxiety, depression, and anti
social personality disorders. All of these things could content potentially
be aggravated by uh automobile cognition. But then also, you know,

(01:00:48):
there are plenty of people that have argued against just
the idea of road rage in general, saying that this
is essentially, you know, an out of control headline situation. Yeah,
that's what I was wondering. I mean, is road rage
actually a unique driving related phenomenon or is it just
instances of people getting angry and acting mean as would

(01:01:09):
happen in any other context, but here it happens in cars. Yeah.
For instance, there was article and The Atlantic titled road
Rate versus Reality by Michael Flamento, and and he argued
against studies and polls that were supporting the notion of
road rage. He argued that road rage was, you know,
it's an excessively broad term that applied to a variety

(01:01:29):
of violent situations while also allowing us to ignore behaviors
that actually caused accidents, such as drivers running red lights
and the you know, ultimately, it's just a more sensational
thing to for your headline, for your explanation of events,
and also for sort of judging other people too. As
you're out driving, right, it's easier to just say, oh,
that person is just road raging back there, uh, and

(01:01:52):
then you can just sort of dismiss any further deeper
consideration of, you know, what their day is like. But
but when you you look at some of these studies
and these uh, these different surveys about road rage behavior,
it is really interesting. I was looking at a two
thousand and sixteen study by Triple A Foundation for Traffic Safety, UH,

(01:02:13):
and they found that eighty percent of drivers expressed uh
sufficient anger, aggression or road rage behind the wheel at
least in the past year. And so, yeah, some of
these stats are crazy. So for for example, uh, purposefully tailgating,
so that would that they would be driving way too
close to the car in front of you, perhaps trying
to signal to them that they should move into another

(01:02:36):
lane and let you go past. Yeah, I mean I
hate that one. When you're maybe you're on the two
lane highway, one lane going each way, and you know,
and somebody is just right up on you. I think
they want you to go faster, right, and it's it's
a dangerous situation. Cars are not supposed to be that
close to each other because that can end and it
can cause the cars to crash together. Um And and

(01:02:58):
yet yes, you often see it, especially in that scenario
where somebody wants the car to get over into another
lane and let them pass um almost using it as
a kind of like aggressive communication system. It makes one
wonder if there was like a better there's a specific
light one could use for that, and maybe that would
be a safer scenario. But in terms of statistics, so

(01:03:22):
the idea would be a hundred four million drivers are
doing this, or there's another one that's perhaps more relatable,
yelling at other driverscent or ninety five million drivers. Now
does that include yelling so that they can hear you
are just yelling within your own vehicle. I think it's
about yelling within your own vehicle, because that's another aspect
of all of this, and often kind of a critique

(01:03:44):
of road rage is that we feel enclosed, We feel
at least semi masked. There is a you know, certainly
other people can see us, but they can't hear us.
So I can say anything I want and you don't know.
Maybe I'm just I'm just singing. Maybe I maybe I'm
a conference call. I'm not calling you a bunch of
dirty names. Hanking to show annoyance or anger, obviously, that's

(01:04:07):
a big one. At times, it feels like that we
have a culture have decided that it's what the horn
is for, uh, and not for alerting other people to
our our our our presence. On the other hand, I
feel like, so I don't hank to show people anger,
but sometimes I forget the horn is there, and there
are cases where I'm like, wow, I should have honked

(01:04:28):
to like get somebody's attention, but I just like forgot
that my car could do that. I also feel like
sometimes there's a cultural difference because if you travel to
other parts of the world and and you encounter cultures
where hawking is say something you do every time you
go around a corner, I know, like a one way road,
because it's essential to communicate to other cars that you

(01:04:48):
were there, or hanking is more of a way of
communicating of of saying hi to people. You know. I
guess you still have that that here, but I don't know.
I feel like I bad if I hank at somebody
like who is just walking on the sidewalk. It feels
a little bit intrusive. Oh you mean to say hi,
not like they need to get off the sidewalk so

(01:05:10):
you can drive on right right exactly. But some of
these other activities they were looking at, like making angry
gestures or sixty seven million drivers trying to block another
vehicle from changing lanes or nine million drivers. Don't do that, folks, Yeah,
Like I say that that fish wants to be eaten
by a shark. Let that fish go forward, Let that

(01:05:32):
fish find the shark. That's the way I always look
at it. Uh, cutting off another vehicle on purpose, twelve
four million drivers getting out of the vehicle to confront
another driver that one's thankfully down at four percent seven
point six million drivers. How often does that lead to
something good? Yeah? Never, at the very least it's going

(01:05:52):
to leave, I would assume to embarrassment when you realize
I just got out of my car to yell at somebody,
and now I should get back in because I look
at at best like an idiot and at worst like
a like a violent aggressor who you know, who should
the authority should be called on? And then finally bumping
or ramming another vehicle on purpose three five point seven

(01:06:13):
million drivers. So wait, then, where do you come down.
Do you think is road rage just like one particular
context of normal types of interpersonal rage or is it
a specific and unique thing. I I tend to follow
the idea here that I mean, we're dealing You can't
say that we come and become a completely different person
when we drive. But I feel like the data shows

(01:06:35):
that driving changes the way we interact with the world
and how it changes the way we think about ourselves,
and that is going to lend its way to an
altered sort of behavior. So you might not be the
type of person who would ever shoot the middle finger
to another person, say, you know, in a grocery store,
but on the way to the grocery store, perhaps you would.

(01:06:56):
You might not never. You might never yell something ugly
at some on the street, but in the car it
makes sense because perhaps they can't hear you. Well, this
is another way that again, it changes our perception of space.
I mean, I was thinking about would I ever yell
at a person, would ever like, roll down a window
in the car and yell at somebody? Know? But what

(01:07:17):
I like yell within my own car about something that
somebody else did. Yeah, I've done that, and it makes
me think, like well, yelling with within my own car
is almost like having a thought inside my head, you know.
So it's like the car's interior space, the enclosure aspect
of that has almost come to be like like what

(01:07:38):
happens in there doesn't happen to the outside world unless you,
you know, really attempt to show it to the outside world, Like,
you know, it's a private space. You tend to suit
to assume people are not looking in your car actively
at you. Uh so, yeah, I almost feel like, well,
I can just like yell like, oh why did you do?
You know? I I can yell at somebody who did
something stupid on the road in my car. They're not

(01:08:00):
going to hear it, and it's almost like it didn't
even happen out loud. Yeah. So, road rage, I think
is one of the more studied and written about and
comment and commentated on, you know, aspects of the scenario.
But there are there are other activities that I think
are also illuminating, Like, for instance, if you're already asking
yourself like do I yell in my car? And is
it okay? And would I yell about outside my car?

(01:08:22):
Another example that is often brought up is picking one's nose. Okay,
So you might not be the type of person to
to do a lot of like nose related self, you know,
hygiene and personal care while you were, say, standing in
line at the grocery store or wherever. But when you're
in the car, you might very well do so. And
we probably you see people do this all the time.

(01:08:42):
And I think a lot of that has to do
with this this idea that when you're in the car,
you were masked. You were you know, secluded from everyone else,
but of course you were not. Not really people see
you picking your nose, or they can they can see
you doing, you know, whatever it is you're doing. Another
activity that comes to mind is staring at people. Like
there's a certain amount of like, you know, we all
have to observe people and sights in our vicinity, but

(01:09:05):
when we're driving a car, I wonder if we're more
inclined to stare at particularly pedestrians, you know, we're we're
more inclined to to to gaze at them longer than
would be socially acceptable if we were out on the
sidewalk with them. Right again, because you feel maybe like
you are invisible, you're behind a barrier, you're in a
deer blind almost It's like, you know, you can see them,

(01:09:26):
but they can't see you. Yeah, so you know that
those are just a couple of I think of ideas
where we might see cognition within the car, uh it
being a slightly different thing than cognition on the sidewalk
by that, and perhaps there are some other examples that
come to mind out there among our listeners. I know,
we have a lot of listeners who drive cars. A

(01:09:48):
lot of them may be driving a car right now.
And uh, you know, I would also love to hear
about her from people in different cultures. You know, what
is what is it like, uh, you know, driving say
in the United States versus dry having in uh oh,
I don't know, you know India or or even the UK,
or you know, in any any part of the world.
I'm interested about the difference not only driving culture, but

(01:10:10):
sort of what our cognition might be like in those
different environments. Well. Having recently driven on the roads in
the UK, where of course the lanes are reversed, you know,
driving on the left side of the road, I remember
wondering if there's any kind of brain hemisphere. I am
a hand dominance weirdness going on. That's like reversed when
you're driving on different sides of the road. Interesting. I

(01:10:33):
did adapt to driving on the left, but it also
it felt different in a way that didn't That wasn't
just unfamiliarity. It felt different in a way that it
was like it was inherently different. I don't know if
that makes any sense. No, no, no, I think I
give what you you're talking about. I've I've never driven
on reversed lanes like that before. Um, I've just ridden

(01:10:54):
in them. But even that could be I almost I
think I almost died at one point in Jamaica. Uh
be not because I was driving a car, but I
got out of a car and kind of had this
sort of background notion of which way traffic travels, and
so I like just sort of stepped out into into
the road, and unfilly, nobody was there to run me over.
But you know, little things like that, you know certainly

(01:11:16):
can play, you know, be a big factor when the
lanes are reversed. So anyway, we'd love to hear from
anyone out there who has thoughts about about their relationship
with their cars, how the car and how the car
changes the way you think or behave, or even its
effects on your physical body. Uh. In the meantime, if
you want to check out other episodes of Stuff to
Blow your Mind, head on over to stuff to Blow
your Mind dot com. That's where you will find them.

(01:11:38):
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And if you're into this whole question of, you know,
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because Invention is a journey through human techno history. Like

(01:11:58):
each episode is in it inevitably going to get into
questions of how did this invention? How did this technology
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If you're not subscribed to Invention yet, get on over
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(01:12:18):
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