Using mobile phone while driving

Tweet

Driving while listening to someone speak can drain a third of the brain's activity. Scientists at the Carnegie Millon University in the US have found that just listening to sentences degrades the driving process, with a 37 percent decrease in activity in an area of brain that is crucial for driving. Drivers need to keep not only their hands on the wheel but also have to keep their brains on the road.The scientists used magnetic resonance imaging(MRI)scans to assess the brain activity of volunteers who used a driving simulator to steer a car along a virtual winding road at different speeds. They steered their cars undisturbed first,but then listened to a set of factual sentences and marked them true or false.The scans called functional MRI,help identify the most active regions of the brain during specific tasks and have become an important tool to decipher brain functions. Studies by other researchers conducted over the past decade have shown that simulated driving performance is disrupted by conversations,even whey they involve hands free devices. But the Carnegie experiments are the first to show that driving while listening led to a 37 percent drop in activity in the brain's parietal lobe, a region that displays a crucial role while driving. The study found that drivers who were listening to the sentences moved out of lanes more often or hit a simulated guard rail on the side or deviated from the center of the road. The implication is that engaging in a demanding conversation could jeopardise the judgement and reaction time if an unusual driving situation arise.The taks of understanding sentences and driving are processed by different networks of cells within the brain.Yet the study found that attempting both at the same time caused a degradation of driving,brought about by the processing of sentences. The new findings suggest that other tasks requiring speech processing by the brain,such as conversing with a passenger or listening to a talk on the radio may also degrade driving performance. Based on the above facts do you justify the usage of mobile phones while driving???????