Hang Up and Drive

January 11, 2026

I’ve been trawling through stuff I’ve gathered and posted over the years. Turns out I have shared about 900 youtube videos on Facebook. With a little help from Gemini, I built a script that will make posts that can go on my blog given just a youtube URL. It grabs the description from youtube, downloads the thumbnail picture as a local jpg, inserts it into the post and makes it clickable. It’s simple to take that blog post stub and add my commentary to it, so I have a source for a whole bunch of new blog posts now if I am feeling blocked.

I found this one in the pile and thought it was worth resharing here. This video describes the neurological consequences of context switching and relates it to talking on a cel phone while driving. It doesn’t matter if you are using hands-free. It’s about the circuitry of your brain, not what you have in your hand. When you talk on the phone while driving, you might as well be drunk.

I have been someone who never talked on the phone while driving. I let my guard down a couple times in the last year, and was consequently in a minor accident that was never reported. A friend was on the other end, and the conversation went like “bla bla bla.. aw crap i was just in an accident. talk to you later.” No one was hurt, we both had crappy old cars, and there was no damage other than a little scuff that wouldn’t be noticed anyway.

I’ll be going back to my policy of not engaging in conversations if I know that you are driving. I can wait. My opinion on the subject was formed after watching a TV show in which a man was talking to his wife about what to buy at the grocery store, and the last thing onscreen before the commercial break was a cel phone in a pile of broken glass and blood, the wife’s voice “honey? what was that noise?”

“Driving while talking on a cell phone is worse than driving drunk,” says John Medina, author of “Brain Rules.” http://brainrules.net/ (more)

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