Who hasn’t unconsciously experienced this? turn down the car radio volume when you are parking or reversing? Or maybe when you realize that you are lost on the road and you need to find some signs to find it again. But you might rightly ask: and what does music have to do with it while you are parking? If we listen to it, it is our ears that should be involved, and not our eyes, which we need for driving and maneuvering. This is true, but the reason why we lower the volume or turn off the car radio altogether has a very specific reason, which does not have direct roots in our sense organs, but in our brain which has limited resources in terms of attention, and cannot do more than one thing at a time well. For this reason, it must eliminate the task that requires less attention at that moment – that is, listening to music – leaving more concentration and mental resources to carry out the action that requires a greater attentional effort (parking, maneuvering, finding the right direction, driving in torrential rain or during snowstorms), improving performance behind the wheel.
In 1958 the psychologist Donald Broadbent he wrote that attention acts as a filter: all the information that comes from our senses (what we see, hear or feel with our skin, nose and tongue) is retained in our mind for a very short time as a physical sensation (a color in a position, a tone in the left ear). However, when we have to “give meaning” to this information our abilities are limited. This is where attention comes into play, and which filters which of them are useful and should actually be processed.
Not long after the psychologist Neville Moray found that when people listen to two conversations at the same time and are focused on one of them, they can usually still recognize their own name if it is mentioned in the other conversation. This means that even if you are not actively paying attention, some sense information is filtered and processed by the attention department of your brain, and it gives it meaning (“Hey, that set of sounds they are saying is my name!”).
This discovery intrigued two other psychologists, Anne Marie Bonnel and Ervin Hafterwho in 1998 through a series of studies understood that normally People have a finite amount of attention to divide between sight and hearing.
To put it more simply, Bonnel and Hafter imagined attention as an arrow that can “swing” back and forth, pointing either toward sight or hearing. When the arrow is fully pointing toward sight, it has no room to focus on auditory information, and vice versa.
But if part of the attention goes to hearing, it means that there is less attention paid to sight. And this is where we return to the example of the car radio: if we are focused on listening to music, of course, we continue to have the field of vision in front of us, but the attention of our gaze is still diminished, because it is partly directed towards the auditory stimulus. This is why automatically, without realizing it, the hand reaches for the button to lower the volume or silence it completely.
In short, as long as you listen to music while driving, research suggests that’s a win-win, as it can help drivers stay focused on the road during long (and sometimes monotonous) trips, as long as you don’t have to fiddle with a media player or touch the car’s controls too much. For parking and other complex tasks, even our instincts know to turn the music down.
