Working in Movement

It always bothers me to see drivers chatting away on their cell phones, even though I've been known to do it myself. Ini fact, even multi tasking in general kinda makes me nervous, but especially on the highway. Howard Rheingold's comments don't do anything to soothe my anxiety.

Impairments of judgment, perception and reaction time caused by driving and dialing are approximately equal to the impairments caused by drinking the legal limit of alcohol, researchers say. The problem seems to lie not in user interface design but in limitations of human perception and cognition: we can only multitask to a certain degree while hurtling down the highway before we make a bloody mess.

For a more philosophical look at the limits of attention, see The Coordination of Being - Conducting.

... You cannot give your body a physical instruction that it will maintain, as if it is something separate from you, while you go on paying attention to something else or experiencing myriad thoughts and feelings. In other words, you only have one attention.

In a note to the above paragraph, LearningMethod's David Gorman elaborates:

"It often happens that we innocently try to do two things at once, for example, a violinist needs to be paying attention to the actual music she wants to play yet also tries to attend to controlling her fingering on the strings, or an archer knows he should be paying attention to the target but tries to also pay attention to controlling his breathing. They are both caught in one of the most common fallacies — that we have more than one attention and hence can pay attention to more than one thing at once. This illusion arises because what people are doing when they think they are paying attention to several things at once is instead to be quickly switching back and forth, but so subtly that they usually do not realize.

Guess it's a good thing that you can only talk on one cell phone at a time.