"Gord Beaman" wrote in message
...
Kerryn Offord wrote:



" wrote:

"RT" wrote:


John Smith wrote in message
ink.net...
Most people can't drive a car and talk on the cell phone at the same
time.

But it's accepted that they can drive and talk to the pax (including
in the
back seat) at the same time.

Why do I have a problem with this?

I don't think that I do, it's not the same thing somehow,
something to do with the attention required to decipher the
intelligence from the much lower fidelity telephone earpiece and
listening to a (probably familiar) human voice a couple of feet
away unhampered by electronics.

Both talking on a cell phone (hands free is almost as bad as hand held)
and talking to passengers are distractors....


I agree, it's not the lack of that hand that's holding the
handset that's the big handicap it's that part of the driver's
brain that's busied out by the attention that he's paying to the
talker on the phone.

They make a big time about "hands free" being so much
safer..piffle on that I say.

Cigarette in the left hand and a thumb hooked through the wheel, while the
right hand holds the phone?

The thing about talking to a passenger is that they are also in the
car... they can (and often do) look at the road conditions and think a
bit before talking, they also offer warnings if they see something that
the driver doesn't... meanwhile, someone on the other end of the phone..
they have no idea what is going on in the car...

(A fellow PhD student wants to examine this very thing....)

I think he should, it's a ripe subject and could have far
reaching good effects. The human mind is a damned complicated
affair and the interaction of thought patterns and coincidental
physical actions and decision making in relation to those actions
is extremely complicated...when you think about it it's amazing
that the human animal is capable of such inter-related
thoughts/actions.

It is those incomming calls that kill.