Why We Make Mistakes
The chapter I read was about multitasking and people becoming so engrossed in the current task that they lose the oversight of other tasks. The author relates it to CFIT (controlled flight into terrain) in that plane pilots focus so hard on one task, they forget to fly the plane and they crash into some terrain. The myth of multitasking comes from computers and their ability to "multitask" between programs. They cannot however multitask, they just switch between processes extremely fast. The human brain works the same way and often when we switch between tasks, we forget what we were going to do when we come back to the original tasks. Our brain has a to-do list sort of like RAM or cache in the computer, except in our case, we can pop an activity from the stack and forget to complete it altogether.
One of the examples the book gives for this was a bus driver who slammed into a bridge. He was talking to his sister on the phone and was not paying attention to his surrounding. He slammed his twelve-foot bus into a ten-foot bridge and it ripped off the top. This is called inattentional blindness. Car manufacturers and the government are at odd with car distractions. The car makers keep wanting to add new features in order to charge the consumer more and make more of a profit. The government wants to reduce deaths by completely blocking some of these features altogether. Multitasking becomes more and more of a problem in today's world and accidents will continue to occur unless new measures are taken to prevent people from interacting concurrently with multiple processes at a time.
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