Not A Blog™

I don’t really spend a lot of time driving, but it’s so different from other things with people that I find myself always studying and analyzing it. I drive often without music or anything, and so I have a lot of time to think about what hell is wrong with other drivers, and why they’re so bad. Since this article is still about bad drivers, I think it could be considered a (more serious) part two to my original classic, Driving.

What actually got this rolling was another Not A Blog™ entry I’m working on. It’s composed of little pieces that don’t stand on their own, but I’ve got so many of them that I thought it would be fun to dump them into a single entry of randomness. Except it didn’t turn out to be that random because a significant number of these things had to do with driving. Some of them I’ll save for that article, but one stands out to me and it fits better with what I want to say here.

Has anyone else noticed that the most “cautious” drivers—those who do slightly less than the speed limit, crawl around corners, and wait an extra second after the light turns green to make sure the intersection is really clear—has anyone noticed that these types of drivers are the most likely to have dented cars? I’ve noticed this all over the place. It’s not always some shrunken old person, either. They can be any age. But often, cars with damage are being driven like their operators are scared.

Now, I realize it is very possible that in all these instances, the person could have recently been in an accident and so is driving more cautious as a result, and they haven’t had time to repair the damage yet. But I don’t think that’s always the case. First of all, I’ve noticed that after people are in a fender-bender, they tend to drive much the same way as they always do, even a few minutes after the accident. Secondly, when traversing the same few roads every day, as I do, you tend to see the same cars. There was one car I saw every few days with a patched up bumper. The driver was always slinking along, but for weeks sporting a broken bumper. The car isn’t around anymore, which makes me think the driver replaced it when the inspection expired, but the point is that the person was just an unsure driver, and it would make perfect sense that they were in an accident of their own creation, based on how they handled themselves the few times I saw them. Anecdotes do not proof make, but I’m sticking to this because it fits the larger theory. Thirdly, there are plenty of people I know who are crazy drivers, yet never seem to get in accidents. If crazy driving was really as dangerous as everyone says it is, there are a number of people I know who should be wrecking their cars every couple of months.

Driving home from work just last night, I noticed this again. There was a car with a dent in the door. The traffic pattern is a little tricky to describe, but it’s like this. There is a major road intersection near where I work, and it’s always backed up. There are also two ways out of the parking lot—both to the same road, necessitating a left turn across traffic to get to the light. The light is always jammed, so I take the further-away exit from the lot, then come down on the line of traffic at the light. This is opposed to most people who try to pull out of the exit right next to the light, snarling traffic because nobody lets them in. The annoying thing is that most people want to make another left at the light, so some of them try to pull into traffic, and then into the left turn lane, which is just annoying. (Not to mention, you can’t tell who’s going to do this because they already have their left-turn blinker on.)

As I was approaching the light (having exited the parking lot from the “upper” exit), the guy in front of me slowed to let Dented-car make the left into the line of traffic from the lower exit. No traffic coming—but Dent paused. He did that super-annoying move I’ll call the Pull-Out Bop. It’s when someone starts—then stops! Then creeps forward an inch—then stops! Repeat as necessary until you’re half way out into the intersection and still just boppin’ along, not sure if it’s safe to go. Gah, so annoying.

So Dent is bopping into the intersection and stops. Now I have to make the descision because I want to turn left, too, and if I go around the car in front of me (who’s going straight), I have the right of way to get into the left turn lane. Cars are approaching behind—most likely also looking to turn left—so I have to make a move. As I’m pulling out around the guy in front of me, I see this car with a dent in his door and I’m thinking, “oh, geez. He’s probably one of those bad drivers who’s overly cautious—that’s why he’s not pulling out. I need to be careful here.” And sure enough, just as I was thinking about how carefully I’m going to have to approach the pre-intersection intersection, Dent pulls right out in front of me and slips into the left lane.

Gottverdammt, if I didn’t see that coming a mile a way.

Later the guy has problems merging on the highway, cutting across the split-hazard markings, again at the very last second, slowing all the traffic in front of me, since I had already successfully (and without slowing anyone) merged into the lane.

And it was then that it dawned on me what is going on here. It’s deeper than just good drivers and bad drivers. There are crazy drivers who are good, who cautious bad drivers would classify as bad, and good cautious drivers who don’t foul everyone up. To be fully disclosed, I must admit that I’m a rather aggressive driver: somewhere between a six and a seven on a scale of ten, ten being the most assholey driver imaginable. But here’s the thing: even when I drive defensively (as when I ride my motorcycle), it doesn’t automatically make me like Dent. I can still driver without making an idiot of myself.

It comes down to this: good drivers don’t feel like they’re operating a heavy piece of machinery. They feel like they’re sprinting along the road—like they are sprinting along the road, period. When I’m driving, I don’t feel me in the car—I feel like I am the car, running down the road at a speed higher than I can run unaided, but it’s still me. At the very least, it’s a sort of symbiotic relationship where the car does what I ask before I think about it, and in return I get air conditioning and a comfortable place to sit.

People who are bad drivers don’t just handle their vehicle like they’re unsure; they handle the vehicle like it’s some unwieldy monstrosity that they can barely keep under control. In fact—and this may just be coincidence, but it’s interesting nonetheless—the people who I’ve noticed are bad drivers are also not particularly adept at handling the computer. I think the same thing is happening in both cases. It’s not just a matter of me typing a lot (although I do), but of actually feeling like the computer is an extension of my bod. As soon as I start to think about it, I can’t type—and I can’t drive, either. But if I just go drive, the same way I’m just going to go walk, it’s no trouble at all. In fact, it’s a lot of fun. I love to drive, just not with morons on the road.

I think it could be evidence of an intelligence in the vein of Gardner’s theory of Multiple Intelligences. It’s not a matter of spacial intelligence, nor bodily-kinesthetic (of which I have little), but in cortical mapping ability. The great thing about the brain is its high level of plasticity. One weird thing of which the brain is capable is to map inanimate objects to a part of the body. This is really awesome stuff; words cannot convey. In fact, you can do it with a friend in the comfort of your own home. Put your leg under a table and have the friend rub the table and the leg at the same time in the same pattern. After about thirty seconds, the brain, receiving visual input from the table and sensory information from the leg, maps the leg to the table. At that point, you can start to do weird things. Move just a little bit on the leg, but further on the table and it feels to the recipient as if the leg is grossly elongated. Get someone to suddenly stab a knife straight down on the table, and the recipient will—no kidding—feel stabbing pain.

This trick is exploited in order to do uber-cool things like making people with robotic arms feel touch without having to do invasive, wiring-into-your-brain type surgery. The sensor on the robotic arm sends a signal to a small electrode on the skin. The chest is what was used in the specific example I’m thinking of. After a few trials, the same thing happens as with the leg-table trick, except now it’s persistent because you’ve got a robotic limb constantly feeding you input. The fingers of the robotic hand are mapped to the chest—but to the recipient, it still feels like a hand, and it works the same way.

As soon as I read this article, I had the following thought: That’s a great idea, but for some people, it’s not going to take! I didn’t know why that should be the case, but it seemed right. Now I know why.

I posit the following: people who are good at driving aren’t good just because they have good spacial abilities or hand-eye coordination, but because they’re good at remapping the car as part of their body. Conversly, people who are poor at driving have trouble feeling the car as an extention of themselves. I’d be willing to bet that a good predictor of how well someone can control a prosthetic limb is directly related to how well they drive. For bad drivers, it’s not going to take, because their brain will have more trouble remapping some other part of their body to this robotic extention.

To be sure, they get a lot of help with the prosthetic, and it may very well be that anyone can use it. The thing sends electrical pulses, and you get concrete visual feedback—unlike a car which sends no signal back (except vibration—I’m getting to this) and when you only get approximate feedback, because you can’t see the edges of the car. However, you’re still going to see a range of talent with these things, with some people who continually have difficult controlling them, while others act like they were born with a robotic arm instead of a real one.

The interesting thing for me is already seeing how the car has been remapped to my body. I’ve heard that one should avoid potholes because it’s hard on the car’s suspension. I do indeed swerve around them, but not for this reason. I try to avoid them because they hurt. No, I’m not kidding. Another example of this happened a few years ago during a TTT shoot. Throughout high school, my friends and I would get together and shoot stupid little home movies. Unfortunately, the shooting day was often 80% messing around not getting anything done, and 20% actually making movies. One day we were outside shooting a fight scene, and as is typical, the people who weren’t in the scene were running around goofing off. In particular, they were playing frisbee in the street. Someone whipped the frisbee so that it arced high and then stalled, falling right toward my car. I watched in horror (because I really liked that car) as it came down, and when it smashed into the hood, it felt like someone knife-handed me across the solar plexus. Everyone was nervously laughing, but there was no damage, so it wasn’t a huge deal, except that I remember shouting, “Arg! That physically hurt me!” I played it off as a joke, but it was true.

It makes sense why people would get so attached to their cars. There’s an unconscious cortical-map happening there. It makes you wonder if some car-related deaths aren’t at least partially due to psychosomatic shock. I could see that as perfectly reasonable.

This also explains why I’m so interested in using BCI’s to control car functions. It makes perfect sense now. I get angry at, as I wrote, “the blathering incompetence of windshield wipers” because unconsiously, I’m not seeing them as these little rubber extentions on servos, but as part of me. When they don’t work right (as in, when I would be unconsciouly clearing my vision by wiping an arm across my eyes), I get all frustrated. I’ll bet that if I had a button on the steering wheel (rather than the wiper lever, or even a BCI), it would be much less frustrating because I could just hit it without interrupting my driving flow.

Unfortunately, all these means that I can’t reasonably get mad at bad drivers. If they can’t map themselves to this giant machine they control, they’re going to do a crappy job at it. It doesn’t matter. I’m still going to get mad at them because they’re gumming up the works for the rest of us.

-Ted