54 pages • 1 hour read
Matt RichtelA Deadly Wandering
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2014A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Summary
Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Key Figures
Themes
Symbols & Motifs
Important Quotes
Essay Topics
Tools
BetaChapters 11-14Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 11 Summary: “The Neuroscientists”
During WWII, brain scientists grew concerned at the fact that while WWII pilots looked at their screens, they would sometimes miss signals that German planes were flying overhead. One of these scientists, Alan Mackworth, a professor at the University of British Columbia, worked with Donald Broadbent, who volunteered for the Royal Canadian Air Force at 17, to do important research in the field.
A decade later, Anne Treisman studied psychology at Cambridge during a time the field dominated at the time by B.F. Skinner and behaviorism. She was interested in cognitive psychology, and what could “overload the brain” (103). At Oxford, she ran an experiment where two separate audio feeds were played in the right and left headphones and subjects had to focus on only one and repeat it. The conclusions of this study were that the brain’s “attention filter is very effective,” but “our filter is not a total block” (104).
Treisman’s research clarified that our attention travels in two directions, which tend to impede one another: top-down (our brain’s intention to pay attention to a specific input wills our attention in its direction) and bottom-up (incidental stimuli catch our senses and are then funneled to the brain for further analysis and processing).
At Gazzaley’s loft, a magician does a trick: He takes a twenty-dollar bill and appears to make it float, controlling the audience’s top-down attention with his demeanor and showiness. He asks the audience to watch him, and their intentional attention is captured; during this time, they are less susceptible to bottom-up attention.
Personal communications capture both aspects of our attention. They buzz and chime beyond our control, stimulating the bottom-up attention channel, and they give us important information, capturing our top-down attention.
Chapter 12 Summary: “Reggie”
In October, Reggie takes a job at a car dealership. His mind wanders, drifting back to the accident.
Keith’s widow Leila seeks an attorney to look over the insurance details. The one she meets with mentions that the Shaws approached him to represent Reggie, which confuses her—why would Reggie need a lawyer if the incident had just been an unavoidable accident?
A few days later, Leila returns to the site of the accident. Overcome with emotion, she has to be taken to the hospital a few days later.
Jackie, Jim’s widow, deals with her grief as well. She plays the online computer game World of Warcraft, which she and her husband used to do together. In the game, she messages Gary, an old friend from Indiana who was the best man at her wedding, and tells him she’s not doing well.
When Jackie gets a copy of the police report to submit to the insurance company, she learns that Reggie has retained a lawyer, possibly in preparation for suggesting that it was Jim who had drifted over the yellow line.
Chapter 13 Summary: “Hunt for Justice”
The case is pushed from Rindlisbacher to an investigator named Stan Olsen, but Rindlisbacher is still interested in subpoenaing Reggie’s phone records. Meanwhile, Reggie’s mom gets the phone bill and sees nothing amiss. Neither does Reggie’s attorney. Reggie continues to insist that he wasn’t on his phone.
Rindlisbacher goes to the Cache County Attorney’s Office and finds one of the county attorneys, Tony Baird. Rindlisbacher explains that he thinks Reggie is lying, and though Baird is a little surprised—he hasn’t even heard of a law that would allow them to pursue the case—he likes Rindlisbacher’s tenacity.
Chapter 14 Summary: “The Neuroscientists”
As the 20th century progressed, brain-imaging technology allowed scientists, including Dr. Posner at the University of Oregon, to get a better idea of what parts of the brain are involved in attention. At Princeton University, researchers discovered that “focusing on one source (a person, a mobile device, the road ahead of you, etc.) comes at the cost of lost awareness of everything else” (121).
Gazzaley thinks it may be possible to expand the limits of focus with training. He’s been working on a study for the last four years that looks at how older adults can use a driving simulator to improve attention.
Aviation attention science, which arose from attempts to understand the costly mistakes pilots in WWII made, evolved into a new field applying attention science to driving. Working at GTE Laboratories, a telecommunications company that produced car phones in the early 1990s, Dr. David Strayer became concerned about their safety. His employer rebuffed him, so he took his research to the University of Utah where his experiments found that the number of errors made in a driving simulator doubled when a driver was talking on the phone as opposed to listening to the radio.
Gazzaley and Strayer met and hit it off. They decided to collaborate, bringing together research into distracted driving with cutting-edge neuroscience.
Chapters 11-14 Analysis
Chapter 12 tells of the grief experienced by Reggie, Jackie, and Leila. They each have their own way of dealing with the accident: Reggie withdraws emotionally, Jackie tries to find some sense of closure, while Leila, the most lost and grief-stricken, ends up in the hospital after waking up vomiting. Reggie begins to look guiltier to those around him, but he maintains that he was not looking at his phone. His refusal to admit the truth about the accident’s circumstances comes from personal guilt and shame rather than legal fears: As revealed in Chapter 13, it’s likely that there were no laws outlawing using a phone while driving at the time of the accident.
Meanwhile, Chapters 11 and 14 chronicle the history of attention science from its inception, amid concerns of lost life and money in World War II. Through the research of neuroscientists in the decades afterwards, scientists learn how human attention works. Eventually, we reach Gazzaley and Strayer’s collaboration, which brings focus to the question, “Why does interactive media do such an extraordinary job of capturing our attention?” (128). In Strayer’s words: “The devices took a driver’s mind off the road, even when hands were on the wheel and eyes were looking ahead […] it’s a visual, manual, cognitive problem’” (126).
