Brain-straining combination can dangerously distract drivers

Left-hand turns require 'huge' brain power, study shows Brain-straining combination can dangerously distract drivers By Sharon Kirkey, Postmedia News February 28, 2013 Story Photos ( 1 ) Left-hand turns require 'huge' brain power, study shows Canadian researchers have shown for the first time that making left-hand turns at busy intersections - where the worst real-world crashes occur - requires far more brain power than right turns or other manoeuvres.

The team, in a feat of engineering that took more than a year and a half, fitted an fMRI with a virtual-reality driving simulator complete with a fully functional steering wheel, brake and accelerator pedals. The study was inspired by neurological patients - people who have suffered brain injury from strokes, brain tumours, trauma and other conditions that make them vulnerable to being declared "medically unfit" to drive.

"If you take their licence away, it's probably one of the most devastating things to happen to them, next to the medical condition itself, and, in some cases, even more so," said principal researcher Dr. Tom Schweizer, a neuroscientist and director of the neuroscience research program at St. Michael's Hospital in Toronto.

"You see some of these tumour patients: Even before they ask if the tumour is going to come back after surgery, they ask, 'when can I get my driver's licence back?' "

Yet little is known about the fundamental, underlying brain networks behind human driving behaviour, namely, what areas of the brain are responsible for driving?

The study was restricted to right-handers. "We wanted to keep it as homogeneous as possible." Still, Schweizer doesn't expect the results would be dramatically different in left-handed drivers. "I think the general activation maps we saw would be the same." Next the researchers tested the effects of distraction. Volunteers simulated making a left-hand turn at a busy intersection while answering a series of true or false questions, such as does a triangle have four sides? The idea was to mimic what happens when someone is talking on a hands-free device, Schweizer said. Answering true-false questions "forces you to listen, to process and then come up with a response, like you would in a conversation."

What gave was the visual posterior cortex, the area of the brain that serves visual processing. It shut down by about 50 per cent. Blood moved from the part of the brain that controls sight, to the part of the brain, the prefrontal cortex, that controls decision-making. Essentially the brain sacrificed one area to recruit enough resources for the other. "It's potentially quite dangerous," Schweizer said.

"Hands-free does not mean brains-free," he added. In some new vehicles, "it's almost like a mobile office, where things are reading emails; there's a GPS. Everything in the car is potentially another source of distracting information. "If you're actively listening, you're going to have to take some (brain) resources away from the primary task of driving." The work is published in the journal Frontiers in Human Neuroscience. Schweizer's team plans to run the study in patients with stroke and other conditions. The hope is develop more objective criteria for determining fitness to drive.

That has to be the stupidest thing I've heard today. Left turns require brain power? All you're doing is rotating a wheel. Who did they use for this study? A bunch of patients from the local retard center?

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Simple solution, Move to a country that drive on the right side (by that I mean the left side) of the road, problem solved