Preventing One of America’s Deadliest Killers

Austin Liu

Preventing One of America’s Deadliest Killers

Driver education is essential to the overall safety of all drivers. With many drivers having gaps in knowledge of how to approach certain situations, disorder and unpredictability is sadly a common theme in daily driving experiences. This chaotic property of unruly, careless driving is the root cause of all road accidents. Therefore, tailoring driver education to target the origins of careless driving would consequently reduce the number of driving fatalities. While this is quite an obvious conclusion, identifying those origins is not so clear cut.

I believe that a specific origin of negligent driving, namely meta-awareness, if given more attention, would have a profound effect in minimizing unfocused and careless driving. As some background information that will make my reasons clearer, meta-awareness is simply defined as being aware of what the mind is doing.

With the rise of technology and the internet, people today undoubtedly experience a level of constant brain stimulation that is incomparable to that experienced by anyone before the 21st century. Among the various consequences of this is a steep increase in impatience, which stretches out to affect driver safety. Aside from the direct impact this impatience has on decision making when driving ( running red lights, dangerously cutting lanes to pass cars, etc. ), it also has enormously negative effects on our focus. Studies have shown that the average American adult is not paying attention to what they are doing for 47% of their waking life. Furthermore, the average human attention span is presently around 8 seconds, which is less than even that of the average goldfish. It is clear to see how a rather mundane, high risk, and focus-driven task like driving would result in substantial death counts in the climate of today’s culture. Teaching of the importance of meta-awareness and the practice of it is crucial to combatting this. Neuroscience research has shown two things that support this statement: (1) meta-awareness results in happiness, (2) people are unhappy when their mind is wandering and happy when their mind is focused. Putting these together, we can see that meta-awareness leads to a focused mind, which is our goal for reducing the death rate associated with driving. Additionally, studies have also shown that people can quickly obtain meta-awareness by merely attempting to focus on where their minds are. The reason more people are not meta-aware is simply because they do not know of it and how to achieve it.

By making meta-awareness a required part of a driver’s education, it exposes them to critical information that will both increase their focus and attention span, and allow them to more often recognize when they are distracted, giving them the ability to refocus. As we have explored, this is absolutely vital to preventing driving accidents, and this implementation has the potential to save thousands of lives.

I have personally been in situations where accidents nearly occurred, but fortunately, I have never experienced or witnessed any extremely costly accidents. In order to be a better and safer driver myself, I apply what was discussed in this paper and minimize distractions when I drive, such as music or radio.