100th Anniversity of the Panama Canal

a man a plan a canal panama i'm kate mcintyre and today on k pr presents the one hundred anniversary of the panama canal we'll travel to kansas city for a special exhibit on this engineering milestone also on today's program we all know that texting or talking on a cell phone while you're driving is dangerous so why do we do it we'll talk with pulitzer prize winning reporter matt raquel and university of kansas psychology professor paul actually about the limitations of the human brain and what happens when inattention meets the road but first the lender home library in kansas city is marking the one hundred anniversary of the panama canal if you're not familiar with it the library specializes in science engineering and technology and is located right in the heart of the un casey campus they got a special exhibit on the panama canal as well as a host of lectures coming up including a talk this week by two time pulitzer prize winning historian david mccullough back in nineteen seventy

seven mccullough wrote what is considered the definitive work on the panama canal the path between the seas for which he won the national book award he'll be speaking october second and you know the temple on the plaza in kansas city earlier this month i had a chance to visit the linda hall library to walk through the exhibit and talk with library director lisa brauer the canal has had such a transformative effect on global trance from the moment it opened up through the president certainly continue into the future and ironically just as the hundredth anniversary of the canal is somewhat overshadowed by this centennial of the first world war when the canal opened news of that was overshadowed by the outbreak of war in europe but as one of the preeminent science engineering technology libraries in the world we felt we had an opportunity to tell a story on that olympic construction history of the canal but the social history and the transportation history that attached to it

from a very unique perspective we have the papers of an engineer named avi nichols who was an american civil engineer who had the distinction of her writing on the canal construction site from the moment the americans entered the project until it connotes completion and during those fourteen years he accumulated a collection that consisted knowing his own diaries and notebooks but letters office memoranda photographs blueprints construction drawings newspaper clippings just a whole panoply of objects that tells the history of the canal from a first person perspective and you have all that material here at the library already we did and quite honestly we got the collection i'd like to say by accident you know we did not go out to acquire the papers of ab nicholls ah baby nichols died in the nineteen thirties hand one of his three daughters

took possession of his papers and for whatever reason she decided that the best place to locate those papers would be in the engineering societies library which is alive or if it was maintained by the night in engineering foundation and it was located in new york city so she gave his papers to the engineering side his library where they essentially sat on a shelf from nineteen thirty seven to nineteen ninety five because the engineering society's ladder is concerned mostly with accumulating engineering specifications and standards and building codes and many walls and not the personal papers of an engineer so the collection just sat there and in nineteen ninety five united engineering foundation decided to close its library in new york city and led the whole library got i would say probably nineteen ninety five percent of the contents ironically the new york public library which is located four blocks away got the other part which was out of scope for linda hall i say ironically because nineteen ninety

five i was the head of her books and manuscripts at the mere public library dealing with this acquisition but from the other side of the fence with no knowledge that sunday they were people at all ever so long you know goes around comes around the small world it really is a small world so i had some knowledge of the engineering society cyber but i had no knowledge that there's this collection of personal papers and until i got here and staff started talking about nickels collection of cycles collection mash as a fighter somebody to tell me what it was and they tell me of course i'm a trained artist and i thought holy cow we have a golden opportunity here unfortunately they told me about it in enough time before the centennial that we can get the collection rehabilitated because it was a very serious shape it with that had been badly degraded just from neglect so we wrote a grant to get money from his to the museum and library services to restore the collection and a collection was restored as pristine now is actually beautiful and that enabled us

to exhibit portions of it and to make it available for research and has been really very happy chain of events for us as well as our ability to tell a very important story you mentioned that the panama canal is not just a story of the canal it's really about the transformation in this region of the country it has social ramifications transportation what aspects of the panama canal story do you find most interesting certainly from the standpoint of getting from one side of the earth to the other you know the ability to transit through the canal saves about a thousand miles and over a month worth of travel time around south america and to the pacific war going on or to the atlantic and you know from a shear efficiency standpoint it's sort of it's one of those moments you knock on before the canal was actually don't know for centuries ever since columbus

x force that they're looking for a way to get from one hemisphere to the other without having to go around south america so you know it's just a beautiful thing when something like that happens and because i'm not an engineer it i can not appreciate necessarily be the finer points of the construction industry but from a very human perspective when you think about the volume of material that had to be moved to make way for this passageway and when you think about the cost in terms of human life and that's a very moving story beyond that though when you think about the social history and medical history art who knows how long it might have taken medical science to figure out in conquered yellow fever and malaria if not for having to defeat those diseases during the canals construction see now that is a very important moment in medical history from a social our perspective the americans who went down to the canals and replicated or try to

replicate almost every aspect of american life for good and for bad in the canal zone and while that is not often a very pleasant story to tell it's an important story on and for us it's a privilege to be able to bring some of that to light and i had a number of conversations with people that when a one night i never knew that you don't actually have to set foot in the loophole i really get your first taste of how the panama canal where or a lock and dam system works from about what the french oh yeah when we built a log on the front lawn well when we were putting plans in place to do the exhibition i know who got the idea for cement actually been one of her trustees you can assemble one to build model awful lot and one thing led to another and i said you know we could probably do with some from one but none of us had any idea how to do it so that we rely so we exist across the street from an engineering school so we went

across the street and talked to deem kevin chen and innovate your pc school of engineering to take now on our frontline you know malaria know yellen is that like seriously you know basically two bath tub to move one water from one side to the other well anyway we don't have to better from one and kevin delegated the actual construction project to one of his professors and faculty who them are engaged a few of his graduate students and some students from shawnee mission east high school who pretty good up there were students in the theater department to actually build them the classic albums around that make it look like the clipper cut on you know without them it just would've looked like to a long acetate chambers of water moving water from one side to the other but now that it looks like the clip are cut but we do have a non working model of the canal inside the leopard so if you can muster the courage can inside the library can see a tabletop model of the canal

deliberate isn't just hosting this exhibit on the panama canal you're also hosting for radio speakers cutting edge can you tell me about some of them you know oh of course october seconds david mccullough he will be speaking at the temple on the plaza down i believe as of this date we have a waiting list for tickets he's very popular in kansas city and one we opened to get reservations on july one i think within fifteen minutes three hundred tickets are gone christie is the author of sort of the definitive yet was on the canal path between the seas and which he wrote in nineteen seventy six but it's still very pregnant i believe it's been reissued with a new introduction or nie forward by mccullough also he's our headliner but we also have own someone who's going to be speaking on the umpire diversity in the canal zone on someone else is going to be speaking about the geology in the paleo or fate in the canal zone

and then dr erika chavez who was on our advisory committees retired epidemiologist at kansas university medical center we'll be given the last lecture on defeating disease in the canal zone and obviously he was the present during the canals construction but as a doctor he was a pediatric neurologist an epidemiologist he worked in the canal zone for many years so he has firsthand experience in dealing with these diseases and just that to give a quick rundown some of those diseases and chronicled by david mccullough in his butt malaria yellow fever or typhoid fever or smallpox dysentery barry barry sun stroke it did the list just goes on and on it's surprising anyone survived it really is a lot of people died and chill out people died not only the engineers than the the actual construction workers but the more senior people administrators in and years and now are perched bring the families down and it was thought that the tight family unit would keep a happier work force and a

lot of wives and children took ill and died so there's a lot of collateral damage not just the people who are digging a trench you but this exhibit and your array of speakers coming in to talk about various aspects of the panama canal will something that you've been most interested to learn about this project well i think that the response in the public's been very gratifying it's been very strong and very consistent you know i think are our greatest barometer is the attendance at a lecture series and various definitely an interest among the public to know more i was a bit worried going into this one because we were basically going all in for years' worth of programming and then also knowing that we would be up against the world were once centennial and the centennial of union station which has yet to happen i thought i was a bit concerned that you know there's just so much programming the population of the metro

area of will tolerate much was diverting a whole year to one topic but the response has been very consistent and very engaged so that has been it's been a very pleasant surprise you know it says that all my fingers crossed that this will pan out that has so it's been very gratifying but congratulations and a great exhibit thank you that's lisa brauer sees the director of the linda hall library of science engineering and technology in kansas city the library is hosting a special exhibit on the one hundred anniversary of the panama canal i had a chance to walk through that exhibit with one of its curators eric warrant the canal was not originally a panama canal the first plants were to build a canal through nicaragua and the first attempt to build the panama canal wasn't by americans it was originally french projects the french first attempted to build a colony at navy's ferdinand baylor steps is pictured there and the builder of the suez canal attempted to build a

canal in panama won proved to be unsuccessful well on a desk like over twenty thousand vascular disease equipment problems and in financial problems ultimately ended their attempt and they sold their equipment and the right to build the canal to the us that's how we took over a fun short short version of how we really took over knew what was different about the french attempt and the us what he has ultimately bill was the french tried to build a sea level canal like the suez canal and the us ended up building a la canal there are three locks on the atlantic interest to the canal and three am pacific entrance to the compound and that's the model of the atlantic we have the model of scale model forgot to lock on the atlantic entrance the ocean would be here like got to me on the other hand the locks raise or lower ships from sea level to eighty five feet above sea level to got to lake got to lead a series of three three step lock

and each lock chambers under ten feet wide a thousand feet in length and as this model demonstrates an actor lee depicts the size of ships increased over the twentieth century from when the canal opened in nineteen fourteen and today there are many ships are too big to fit through the current panama canal marks and the ones that do fit through a lot of them specially the container ships cargo ships just barely fit the others there is less than a foot clearance on either side of the ship when it goes through a locked chamber well i'll wiggle room no not at all around fresh air an open country of panama law is currently building a third set of locks that will be wider and longer to accommodate these larger ships that scheduled open in twenty fifteen you know canals have been built had been built before walks have been built before but nothing to this

scale had ever been attempted before and his locks were built these lock gates were built for the bottom up they would put the lower girder on the bottom and just build up towards the top and they were sixty five feet wide each leaf day places to five feet wide seven feet deep man the high vary from forty seven to eighty seven feet or eighty two feet depending on the location the taller was around the pacific and where the tide varied so much that they needed delegates i like this and cause you to see all of the workers didn't just maybe provide they they provide a nice scale to leave the enormity of the gates and that and the project is c workers inside to it there's a worker whose messages get a sense of what an engineering feat this was it was the biggest engineering feat a new survey of the twentieth century we're sitting in front of a really dramatic

photograph from the building of the panama canal it's a railroad track and there's a railroad car that is just fallen right off of that the roe or trackers in disarray at what's happening here less from a landslide at so that's a steam shovel move that was on the rails from being transported by rail and this is in cleveland claybrook patty andrews was a nine mile stretch through the continental divide to build the canal the engineers had to dig a channel through the continental divide and they ended up but what open in nineteen fourteen was a three hundred foot wide nine mile channel through calais brown but this is where they had a lot of problems with landslides and this minnesota we're looking at you talk about weather the rail in the equipment's dismantled and debris is everywhere and as a result of a landslide it's very

unstable land yes very much so it could see you any other photograph or the land there's just pure refuses completely blocked channel you know that was just a continuing problem they have they would be so frustrating to workers to spent years digging out you know part of the clay brown cut an end go home one night and then you know from oregon comeback next morning in an article that were commuted him dig it out again and they have to be very frustrating and disappointing then and be dangerous to have a lot of gas and you lose the dangerous place to war ii a landslide were big reason why it took so long to build an endless lies continued you how year after the canal opened in october nineteen fifteen there was a landslide in claiborne to close the canal for several months and

they're been over sixty slides says the canal's open the most recent one that close the canal was in nineteen eighty six that close the canal for a few hours so i'm landslides have continued to be a problem although today they've they've cut the sloped back so much in the area surrounding look labor channel i don't believe there's been a landslide since eighty six that has close the canal and they've widened the channel from three hundred feet to six hundred feet i guess that's one of the tradeoffs when they were talking and they were trying to minimize how much they needed a tie and yet by minimizing and making it as small canal you increase the chances that it would just awful day ended but right and you see this other photo that you know some of the administration believes and housing boom custody ads and they all have that we've always was marked with the letter d pencil them on the flotilla have to

be mowed eventually i would or work their houses a city in the distant precariously on the edge of a cliff when this year putting this exhibit together what do you hope people get out of the theater that we hope that you know people in understanding of just the engineering achievement that was accomplished with bill in the canal you know that everyone will cause everyone's grown up knowing about the panama canal it's been a political issue in the news and maria mccann and know what as a political issue but there you know there was a an enormous it was an enormous engineering achievement that hasn't really been duplicated you i'm a big project apollo going to the moon you know i was an engineering project as well but it's certainly one of the greatest engineering achievement this country has ever produced and we wanted to tell the story we bring the story to life we're fortunate to have baby nichols panama collection

to it as a centerpiece to tell that story some new original material that had never been displayed before the public so we reveal william we had a unique story to tell or unique perspective to tell the story and thank you for walking through it or you're welcome eric ward is one of the curators of the panama canal exhibit at the lindo hall library you can find out more about the library this exhibit and some of the special events they've got planned at their website linda hall dot org i'm kate mcintyre you're listening to play pierre presents on kansas public radio my next guest has a different perspective on the panama canal brian allen of topeka i grew up in the panama canal zone in the nineteen sixties and nineteen seventies where his father worked on the canal he's just published a book called my paradise lost misadventures to manhood in the panama canal zone my bed learned of a construction project

in panama that he could get on us in the canals already dug but the cut through the isthmus that the biggest hills and mountains that they had to cut through that we're constantly meeting revision are constantly needing to be widened and what they had to do is they're trying to tame the landslide it's because that the first cut was relatively steep in the ground as unstable and they get so much rain that they were having caused a landslide so in nineteen fifty four dead heard of this and took me and my brother and my mom down to panama and he worked on a widening the cut on and on a very famous part of the canal called contractor scales one of the steepest hills they had to cut three and he in that construction crew removed

more than a million tons of earth and rock to try and pain that but even then it's an ongoing thing the dredging of the landslides are of course won three year job they refer back to the title of your book paradise lost although you're paradise wouldn't really be lost in til the nineteen seventies you could argue that that process started in january of nineteen sixty four to talk to me about what happened at your school specifically in january of nineteen sixty four will the nationalists in panama of course are looking out for their country in invade easily recognize the canal is the economic engine of the whole area and besides having patriotic fever the panamanians who wanted a greater presence in the canal and even to have control in

to find out mollify those arguments president kennedy signed an order that the panamanian flag would be flown alongside the american flag and the canal so the trouble was implementing that policy will we had one flagpole and for the schools and for the post office and follow the police department and so the governor thought well if i can't fly both flags i'll fly any and he ordered the united states flag taken down what he didn't recognize was just how patriotic we were we weren't americans displaced but we still embraced our heritage in america common in i think few americans are as patriotic as americans that are living in and foreign country an enduring of a military dictatorship so we really appreciated you are our american

rules and laws and justice and nose against following the panama flag was just don't take down the american flag so that a high school kids raised the american flag in defiance of it well the officials came and they took the flag down so the high school kids went back and raised the flag again sinead up the pole cut the cables tapered off greece to poland v bac bank and sat vigil on it well the news of this got back to the panamanians students who were equally patriotic and loyal to their country and they came to the bellboy high school to protest and both sides do it i don't think they saw how much they had in common but both sides being at odds for some scuffling their young men some pushing and the panamanian flag that they brought well this was great

fodder for the national post in the mood rabble rouser shall you say started to press a riot and the army i had to be called out on media council inside the us army had to be called out to protect his own and there were about twenty two deaths during the riot and several buildings were burned it eventually did settle down a bit but yeah the flag that the flag riots and sixty four were the first domino that kind of said you know the end this coming change frank you read an excerpt from my paradise lost well i can read the introduction to craig i can't go home again ever i grew up in coke solo canal zone republic of panama safe peaceful and prosperous was beautiful

historical and the community had an international sense of purpose the company credo explained our existence the land divided the world united there's a practical utopia was no rich no por no unemployment and the lowest death rate in the world yet my hometown was politically nullified by treaty and raised by bulldozer the coconut mango trees have been cut down in the commons plowed under it has been care reform and it's unrecognizable by satellite and the dead has been pulled from the great hall is unique in the middle of a foreign country were fiercely americans were us citizens federal employees and players in the defense of democracy yet or governor was appointed and there is no free enterprise everything was owned by the company in and had her loyalty nobody died of old

age because to live there you had to work their retirement was akin to exile it was american brand socialism and its best teddy roosevelt's packs americana put them on the map in the us in the center of it surrounded by dictatorship wanted to cancel us sovereignty as it had stated in the treaty in perpetuity my family and my neighbors and the generations that preceded us bill raymond administered the panama canal now panama jones in my home town was once compared to a country club with a colonial air and words of joni mitchell they paved paradise and put a parking lot that's brian allan of topeka reading from his book my paradise lost misadventures to manhood in the panama canal zone kansas public radio has a copy of my paradise lost to give away if you'd like a chance to win this but go to our

website to a pr that kay youth that edu and click on a ticket giveaway that's the point i'm kate mcintyre you're listening to haiti our prisons on kansas public radio we all know that texting or talking on a cell phone while you're driving is dangerous so why do we do it we've all seen cars wandering out of their lane while a driver is texting away why is

it so hard to leave that phone alone for the rest of today's program we'll talk to matt rick tell he won a pulitzer prize for a series of articles he wrote on distracted driving his new book just released this week is a deadly wandering he joins us from the studios of debut area new in washington dc welcome mat literally a deadly wandering opens with the story of reggie shaw its two thousand six reggie is nineteen years old living in utah tell us about reggie reggie is in two thousand six reggie is more or less an all explain than a minute the all american kid he's and he's a good guy he's got a quiet where he's a basketball player he's just out of high school and spent a year in college and then gone on his mission his lds in the northern most counties of utah but he's come back under a little bit of a cloud from the mission he hasn't been able to finish it on and maybe we can go to that later but in short he

is an all american kid with a little bit of a checker going on and then one fateful day happens tell me about that day this is september twenty two two thousand six we've just passed the anniversary at six thirty in the morning and reggie become is heading to his painting job which entails going across this fertile valley through kind of a mountain pass at fifty five miles an hour or it is dark and in spite of the fact that it's the last day of summer it is already got freezing rain and behind him is is a horse shoemaker toting a trailer with two tons of horseshoes of horseshoe making a quick that's ok we're talking about a missile at highway speeds and that they're horseshoe maker notices that reggie is occasionally swerving across the aisle a divider an unswerving back into his lane coming the other direction that morning heading to work or two i know it's a cliche but there are two genuine rocket scientist keith o'dell engine for four oh they're building the next booster for the space shuttle

and the next time reggie wanders and the last time reggie wanders across the aisle a divider eclipse the saturday during these two men they spin out of control across the road broadsided by the help or shoemaker the certified farrier very violent impact and both rocket scientists essentially dead man and stan the state trooper of that investigated this accident said i want to pull your book here he knew that sometimes there were accidents but often there were wrecks yeah i'm so glad you i'm so glad you picked out that that phrase it's something that's becoming a very potent topic these days for you know thirty five to forty thousand people die your thirty to forty thousand people die year we call them accents but no more often than not and the people who are the the officers know this it's not an accident somebody did something somebody looked away

somebody's lost attention somebody wasn't you know as often is more than anything else drunk i don't think those are fairly called accidents and certainly trooper rendell's barker who's the next character in this book a tenacious almost to a fault state trooper doesn't believe reggie when reggie says he hired her point he doesn't think this is an accident he thinks something else is going on but it's difficult to find out what that is it's difficult to find out what that is but but this state trooper who's just back from iraq is taking reggie to the hospital and he gets a little bit of evidence he's taking reggie to the hospital not as reggie's injured but because you've got to get the blood test you've got to get the you know to find out of its drugs are or alcohol and as he's taking them he see taking regular hospital he notices reggie reach into his pocket and pull out his phone and begin to text with one hand and an n this trooper says to me it's it's quite a dramatic moment in the sort of in the gumshoe investigation of this

story says it's the moment i realize that reggie was a one hander and he starts to think reggie is texting and driving let's jump ahead a little bit in the story clearly reggie is texting and driving how his story how that story captured your attention and why you wanted to pursue this farther yeah i met reggie in the course of doing the the series of stories for the new york times on distracted driving and he's stuck with me he stuck with me because as the story unfolds you'll see he becomes an incredible an incredible character someone who who lies and prevaricate and denies that he was texting and then goes on to have a revelation and then goes on to change the world but not just that kay the characters around him are truly extraordinary their extraordinary for two reasons one because they're just ordinary people but they found themselves in mashed in this great

really symbolic drama of what is going on in the country right now they were people who hunted reggie like the trooper and a victim's advocate there were family members of reggie's who stood behind him and said if you can't prove he was texting there were prosecutors who were trying to figure out what the legal precedent was this was a razor's edge moment and all of these characters began to unburden themselves and open themselves up to me about their personal revelations and i realize this was setting the science aside which is its own incredible thing this was quite a human drama and i couldn't let go of it it's interesting you mention this as a human dry and then as characters i had actually when i started reading this book i was maybe a little bit put off their when she was portrayed so sympathetically i think i i think i tried to reflect what i saw i don't think i brought that much of a you know we always control the camera lenses the writer but as a

protagonist he is a very complicated character taking us back to the very beginning of the book the reason he wasn't on his first mission where he had to come home early is because he had lied about having premarital sex with his girlfriend in order to get on his mission and then felt duty bound to tell all the mission president or the the missionary training center that he'd lied and so he came home in shame this is a very complicated character who far from having to be stitched into the every man is the every man ichiro each of us have complexities each of us tried to do the right thing and sometimes we fail i mean i'm over generalizing and he fit squarely into this and as he walks into this texting and driving situation he really is khan of the vision as one teacher in a school set of who you want your daughter to meet and at the same time as these kind of checkers that make him very human

let's bring the science into this and i got here in the studio with me dr paul actually who teaches in the psychology department of the university of kansas welcome paul talk to me about the science texting and driving and why is said that it's difficult to text or kerry on a telephone conversation while you're driving a car you know i think one thing we do have to understand its not just about texting which is kind of the unholy trinity of distraction because both your eyes are off the road your hands are off the wheel in many cases and your brain start on that the task at hand but there are a lot of other things that are just as bad or dark worst that we should really be incurring than that includes using a phone while you're driving year the problem and it with a distraction is were often unaware that you know i tell people that when the most amazing things about the brain it fools us into thinking we can do four more than we are really can kind of science calls perception the grand illusion because you think you have this

one hundred and eighty degree full color or emotion based high definition three dimensional panorama available to where we really start looking at the brain it's one that you can process about four objects you're really seeing about a fist size window of the world at any one moment time and as your brain tries to do multiple things it has to take away from the resources to actually see the world and concentrate on the other thing so when you're talking on phone to someone's on the car literally we can look at your brain and there's been a number of scientists have done this now and we can see areas of the brain responsible for seeing the roadway turn off in favor of areas of the brain that are responsible for it listening to the conversation talking starting to turn or so you're driving is hard talking is hard at it and texting is incredibly difficult and not just for me i'm from a stranger to it i don't do very much but no one can really drabble two tasks at the same time with a complete fluency and so

we try to do something that anchors a big risk like driving a bad things happen go back a little farther in time meant that the story of reggie n and how that legal battle is unfolding it's way back to world war two and the science and attention yet i'm in first doctor actually paul is a big character in this book and i loved how he articulates that and he sums up a lot of what they began to discover really into little bits and pieces going back eighteen fifty but you know in large part around world war to what happened was you had these pilots in britain and these radar operators and they had one jobs their job was to save that their country in life and death situations from the nazi bombing the bombing of breath and they would get distracted in the scientists the early neural scientists at the time said this doesn't add up you've got one

job how could you conceivably mistake the blip on the screen or lose focus when it's your children and families below who wore dying and they began to explore the limitations and power of attention and i will give you just the only a much more layperson example of what paul just gave you that they established the principle called the cocktail party effect to understand to try to define the power and limitation of attention and you your listeners could you can do this at home or at a party cocktail party goes like this party effect goes like this you're you're talking to someone at a cocktail party and you're focused on them and you try to focus on the person behind you and what you will learn is that you're quite obviously your listeners know that you can't do both what you wanna doing is switching between those tasks so you go from the person in front of you to the person behind you and about the only thing that you can pick up

if you're focused on the person in front of you from the person behind you is their arm is their voice and engender that deny bad about that that i find that's about right unless something really silly like they say your name pops out it's a very limited amount of information and so we and as you go forward through the twentieth century that there begins to be at a greater understanding of the both the power of attention and its limitations and for a very good survival reasons our attention that words are both extremely powerful meaning we can attend to things like no other creature and that another also limited and may i give one arm or maybe had just offer one thing in and i think all collaborate more but can i give you an image about why they need to be both so powerful and so fragile our attention now works yeah i mean there's a lot to be said there but the a one of the things i think you talk

about in the book that readers need to understand and this goes back to you're talking about reggie as a real person is that these networks that were discussing what are really the last kinds of things to get fully wired human brain a lot of a lot of our networks are responsible for the response retention exist in an area called the prefrontal cortex which i would say is really the thing that makes this uniquely human and support its newest physiologically for your brain it what's amazing is those networks don't get fully wired and women until they're twenty three and young men until they're twenty five and they're often the first things to go with a jigsaw and its dementia that's where you start to see the effects first and those areas are responsible not only for attention but also for cord meeting tasks and the other thing that they're really responsible for is inhibiting bad behavior switches one of his young men do stupid things until they get a little bit older and if those networks are being used to pay attention to the world of for example when you're driving are trying to pay attention fora to a conversation you like the willpower to to not do

stupid things like pick up the phone and start a text with a visit to the one k if i might the one most evocative example of gotten from you know paul another terrific girls scientists in this book is if you can imagine a cave person of color for bear standing in front of a fire that it's that it's that front part of the brain that is involved in building a fire no other animal can do that it he cries it requires incredible attention but if you get a tap on the shoulder from behind a mask and a rhetorical question we could cook the cave person not turn around of course not you have to know that opportunity or a threat so when reggie driving down the road and hears that and that takes his that front part of the brain which is already compromised is he's young and that and the pain comes in from the phone it's like a tap on the shoulder from anyone anywhere in the war old and it's i mean i think doctor x paul would tell you it all these things get almost

impossible to ignore yet they're just really compelling because what the brain really seeks is information it wants to know where it is in its environment and it really wants to know about other people and so you've got this device that is equivalent to the tap on the shoulder from someone presumably in your social network your brain can't and shouldn't ignore that kind of information so these devices are just exceedingly compelling to us not only because social information but because that information may lose value quickly and so we better attentiveness quickly as we possibly can and can i just add to that one of the things that makes this even more perverse k is that there is as paul describes he a lot of that is valuable but really perversely you would you would think there's this other magnetism of it and it actually has to do with the fact that much of what we get is junk you would think that you know you know most of your email is spam i think it's sixty seven percent as spam so you think yourself oh well i could become conditioned to ignore the phone as i know most of its workforce but it turns

out that that actually makes your phone war magnetic and the reason has to do with the fact that it acts like a slot machine you never know when you're going to get the good thing so you're checking all the time to see is this the good one is this the good war and say you got the social currency plus the slot machine effect you start to add these things up you're talking about a very very compelling experience that's right and sometimes when you do get that valuable information you're going to get this great wrong word from your brain is gonna give you a chemical that's associated with doing something like completing a major task and so as soon as you get a text from your girlfriend would say you know you would have no khamenei says while someone that you like is trying to contact you so now you've gotten an eating get cash at a slot machine but you got something that your brain really was a chemical ward and so it's really the functional equivalent as a whole is its absolute is money is just a moderator for it yet there's a joke in her assigned to really really loved you think you think you love your wife you think you love chocolate really what you love far the dough can interject in certain energy rewards that you get from those things the chemicals that

your cocktail party would recite this bailout we get a philosophy with we go too far down that road but really easily if you if you ask him that was being put some of the quotes from kian students in the book who been asked to give up media for twenty four hours you look at their reactions they report feeling handicapped going through withdrawals feeling like a rat right one young woman on monday say she yeah she's lost her phone a couple times and it felt like she was missing in on you and if you think about not getting those chemical reward for some period of time just no wonder that that that information is compelling and some people would argue that it's in fact addictive so house concerned should we be as a society that we've developed this technology that is so addictive and so compelling that we can't walk away from it even if we want to i i'm going to say that we should be extremely concerned an end we should be concerned because we are developing devices that are designed to take what's really a limited resource and that his attention

you know that there's this phrase uses i like it that we called the attention of connie mcnamara says were in the age of attention i and he's right because we really this environment we have a limited resource what we can pay attention to within any moment of time and we have so many things that are vying for that resource using tools like social media that are just really attractive to our brain we have to be worried that were tapping into it when your source in a way we never have before and if we're doing it for with the minds of young people who haven't developed the skills and the willpower to actually learn to ignore that very compelling signal as a parent i think you have to be very concerned it so difficult to make those good decisions though you reference in europe but man i am an advertisement for google glass and giant in what you call the glorification of multitasking yeah

yeah i mean it was so called ivan talk about the science but then there's another layer there's the cultural heir and and i think there's an ad i reference in the book where in addition to the world the google glass you brought up actually al pas on the google glass one of the very first pictures public pictures of the beta version of the google glass was taken by somebody using the glass while driving down a big hill in san francisco you know i mean we should just do a full stop denying that but terrifying but another at the other kinds of ads you see are you see to clone a class is a bad dc abroad a glorification of being always on so you know there's an ad from somewhere i think a wireless carriers to ask where'd i asked a bunch of kids a better do two things at once or won and the kids say of course too we're all on you know read fine print the ps also not possible you know and then there's also the ads from car companies now which are only advertising but marketing and selling infotainment systems

so you know cars are truly the essence of the american experience and here they are being you know glorified through more and more information in the car you're you're you're sending some pretty pretty conflicting signals to people know the cultural issues are particularly interesting one to me to its atlanta cover psychologist no i haven't really been that ancient culture until a few years ago when i started injected a safety culture and we've looked at countries around the world and how they react to traffic safety issues japan's and really interesting example they found because people in japan are very willing to tell the truth the police officers at the scene about what the cause was back in the early two thousands that they were experiencing a number of crashes due to distracted driving us invaded a ban on cell phones pretty quickly they're about four times as safe as us in terms of their crash rates and such and in part that's because they have a culture that says that driving is very serious and is to be taken seriously and so when you as matt as we want to when you send a

signal that you know it's not really that serious that you pay full attention to the road or we don't have laws in effect that are very strongly telling people we expect you to treat this as your number one job driving when you're driving for it sends a very obvious and clear signal to drivers that threatens not that risky and union does require full attention and you can do these other kinds of things and we know from history if you look at the drunk driving at the epidemic even though we have laws on the books for drunk driving since nineteen seventeen it really wasn't till candace lightner lost her daughter on the fingers may thirteenth nineteen eighty that we started to really enforce those laws and now the attitudes have shifted now that enforcement and laws have become more serious we just laughed that sort of social cultural emphasis and then so were the gap of time right now one of the complaints that i often hear about why it would be difficult to enforce

a texting ban is that it's hard to see if someone's texting no one i'll say i can i see people don't say all the time is not that hard to spot that you know you have that same argument when see that mandatory seatbelts were required that well it will be hard to enforce that and yet it wasn't just the light it was the la plus the educational aspect of a third cricket or ticket right why are we seeing more of that happening so you know matt talk at the beginning about reggie being taken to the hospital a lot because he's injured but because they needed to do a blood test and the problem is distracted driving is that unlike a drug driving we can take your blood even if there is a fatality at the scene we can determine that you're drunk or drugged with distracted driving there's no blood test for distractions only through her wrote efforts on the part of the police in many cases such as in this book that they're able to navigate the system to get that kind of information so one of the things we have to do to set norms as have information to help us understand how

risky and dangerous things are and we just don't have that information right now a national safety council estimates that about at least i think they're being conservative laws help or help them with a study about fifty percent of fatal accidents were they were able to establish that a fund was being used or not reported as involving a phone so it's a huge underreporting issue and they estimate about a quarter of all those know thirty to forty thousand that they tell these every year directly due to cell phones or just not seeing it it's not visible and without that degree visibility it becomes very difficult to make a case to a legislature or to a company that they should be doing something about and in large part because of the efforts of reggie shaw and utah became the first state that banned texting while driving i think second there very shortly there after a night washington state how things stand at this point you've got forty five states that ban texting and driving it all remains among the

toughest they've ratcheted up about ten states if memory serves ban handheld use of a faun the laws of had really marginal fact it's they're beginning to measure a little a little bit but not not a lot there still a huge gap between attitude and behavior so if you look at a portal say ninety six percent of people say texting in and a substantial portion also even talking is dangerous behavior and then thirty to forty percent will say they do it it's a monstrous gap i'm not sure that attitudes are the problem right now i think that there is aids remains a a glaring disconnect between attitudes and behaviors that we need to figure out how to reconcile people people understand that in the abstract it's dangerous and should be done but that attitude doesn't translate to a behavior kitties students they say it's worse than drunk driving ninety seven percent of them text and drive according to research so that the magic is education laws

and enforcement and when she changed her behavior then attitudes will change well matt your story begins with reggie star in two thousand six it's two thousand fourteen now house reggie doing yet reggie is i guess he's doing ok and it depends which lou angle you'd you shine the lens from but as a matter of a societal contributor he's doing amazing he you know he has this accident he lies about it he's prosecuted in a historic way and then he goes on to admit what he's done especially when he sees the science he says oh my gosh i can see on my brain was divided there's this sort of collision of science and reggie's denial and he goes on to become an incredible spokesperson he changes utah's laws he speaks in front of the nba he speaks in front of hundreds of classes of students he gets on his knees and he sobs and he begs please don't become like me it is quite a transformation but personally it's been

very hard on reggie he he he'd be bears this cross you know that the thing that was said to me that was so meaningful was all these people testifying to reggie's contributions secretary ray lahood former secretary transportation calls him a hero the prosecutors say he used the heat reggie's done more than they at anyone they'd ever met to redeem himself but most of all is this mission president a guy who brought the law in utah and who understands how important was for reggie to go on a mission and he says to reggie in the book he says you've done a mission greater than you could've ever anticipated for lds please forgive yourself and reggie says i'm trying i'm trying but the minute i start telling people that the risks are there i feel i may have put someone at risk i owe it to the world and so i hope they can forgive himself he's given up a lot i'd been visiting with matt rick tell

he's the author of a deadly wandering as well as dr paul actually university of kansas professor of psychology thank you both so much for a visit with me today think you think you i'm j mcintyre kbr present is a production of kansas public radio at the university of kansas who's the next president that's the only question that matters when you're talking about the future of the supreme court next sunday on kbr presents the us supreme court is about to start its new term we'll hear from cnn legal analyst jeffrey toobin it is sometimes believe that is sometimes told it is sometimes devoutly wished for that the united states supreme court to be a refuge from the political our conflict that is so familiar to us on here to tell you for better for worse that is not the case for cnn for legal analyst jeffrey toobin on next week's kbr percent decline next sunday evening and kansas public radio

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