By Matthew L Baum
I recently saw someone walk into a signpost (amazingly, one that signalled ‘caution pedestrians’); by the angle and magnitude that his body rebounded, I estimated that this probably really hurt. What I had witnessed was a danger of walking under the influence of a smart phone. Because this man lacked the ability to tweet and simultaneously attend to and process the peripheral visual information that would enable him to avoid posts, the sidewalk was a dangerous place. If only there existed some way to enhance this cognitive ability, the sidewalks would be safer for multi-taskers (though less entertaining for bystanders).
In a public event on neurogaming held last Friday as part of the annual meeting of the International Society for Neuroethics, Adam Gazzaley from UCSF described a method that may lead to just the type of cognitive enhancement this man needed. In a recent paper published in nature, his team showed that sustained training at a game called NeuroRacer can effectively enhance the ability of elderly individuals to attend to and process peripheral visual information. While this game has a way to go before it can improve pedestrian safety, it does raise interesting questions about the future of our regulations surrounding distracted driving, e.g., driving while texting. In many jurisdictions, we prohibit texting while driving, and a California court recently ruled to extend these regulations to prohibit certain instances of driving under the influence of smart phones (i.e. smart driving).
But if individuals were to train on a descendant of NeuroRacer and improve their ability to visually multitask, should we give them a permit to text while driving?
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