Extra Credit #1 - Why We Make Mistakes

Why We Make Mistakes
Chapter five of "Why We Make Mistakes" investigates the concept of multitasking and the effects of multitasking on the human brain. Joseph Hallinan does a great job driving the importance of this idea home early in the chapter by telling a story about a commercial airplane that crashes because its pilot was distracted. Upon descent, the pilot noticed that the landing gear light was not lit even though he lowered the landing gear. The pilot asked for the copilot's help and even contacted a passenger that was a Boeing aircraft mechanic. While the pilot and company were investigating this strange occurrence, the plane had continued its descent and had crashed into the Florida Everglades killing everyone on board, nearly 100 poor souls. The point is that while distraction seems like a minor inconvenience and a nuisance at most, it actually can lead to a major accident.

Hallinan wastes no time relating this event to countless other similar occurrences, establishing that this was not an isolated incident. His explanation for this behavior is that while multitasking seems like a benefit, it can really be a curse, causing overwhelming amounts of distraction. Most people imagine that our brains multitasking is similar to a computer downloading a file while simultaneously playing music. However, computers actually switch back and forth between processes at a super fast rate. So fast in fact, that the users perceive no noticeable gaps in performance. The human brain does not work this same way. Every time that we focus on a new task, we lose the short term memory associated with the previous task.

This idea is evident in the example of the bus driver that took the roof off of his coach bus with a group of students on board. He was supposed to follow the lead bus, but its driver did not include him in the trip planning process and was not answering his phone. As he was driving, he called his sister to vent and while he was ranting his bus approached an arched bridge with severe height restriction in the right-hand lane. The lead bus changed lanes into the center lane to avoid an overhead collision, but he did not. The top two feet of the bus was sheered off and a passenger was severely injured. Luckily no one was killed. When interviewed, the bus driver told officials that not only did he not see the warning sign, he did not even see the bridge at all.