A Deadly Wandering: Part Three

It became, arguably, the most powerful, and effective public safety advocacy group in the country.

Something visceral and less tangential than, say, statistics, laws, police enforcement, or television commercials: The issue had to be made personal.

Could a video game—the very technology that often seems to distract someone by drawing them away from other priorities or to shorten attention span through habituating players to constant stimulation—hold the keys to training people to sustain attention?

It was a basic power struggle and Dr. Greenfield adopted what he describes as a “paradoxical approach.”

Such an agreement, called a plea in abeyance, would allow for his record to be wiped clean, should he meet all the conditions.

He didn’t say it, but ever since Dr. Strayer’s testimony, he was obsessed by the idea that he had been texting, maybe not at the precise moment of the crash, maybe a moment before, he couldn’t exactly remember.

His was the last case on the docket, and by the time they got to him, it was dark outside.

He’d begun to bridge the vertiginous gap between what he told the world and the truth he knew deep inside.

Kaylene now had to have a direct, possibly tough talk about it with Terryl, who, remarkably enough, had just had her own harrowing driving accident.

Driving home, distraught and reckless, speeding, she’d nearly gone off the side of the road.

Terryl was irate. Reggie would skate with a little jail time and community service, and then have his record wiped clean.

They gathered in room 25, nothing fancy, more like city council chambers than a rotunda, the committee members in a horseshoe at the front, and a smattering of people in the two aisles of chairs looking on.

“What will it take to make this work for you? What can I do to get your vote? What do I need to do to make this palatable?”

Gregarious and happy to engage on any topic, Wimmer jumped right in during the hearing to express his concern about the proposed texting ban.

He read from a law passed just a year earlier that made it a class A misdemeanor to drive carelessly for any number of reasons, including using a mobile phone.

On March 10, at 3:50 p.m., justice was served in a maelstrom of emotion, grief, and a nagging uncertainty that had plagued these people since it all began.

There was one, on page 74 of his edition, that comes under the heading “A Place for Arriving at Convictions” and discusses a chaotic courtroom scene in France in the early 1900s, where the book’s protagonist, Jean Valjean, faces judgment.

At one end of the hall at which he found himself, heedless justice in threadbare robes were biting their fingernails or closing their eyelids, at the other end was a ragged rabble.

To these families, it all seemed so disingenuous, the thinly veiled plea for mercy and, most of all, the idea that Reggie was taking responsibility, “willing to man up.”

How contrite or sorry could Reggie really be, and why?

“I can’t take back my actions. I can only live from this day on in service to others in remorseful remembrance of James Furfaro and Keith O’Dell.”

She talked of his many accolades as a rocket scientist.

Linton addressed the judge, saying this had been one of the toughest cases, “perhaps more difficult than cases gotten more notoriety and more attention—murder cases, rape cases.

He is caught by a benevolent bishop, who keeps Valjean from going to prison for life by telling police he’d given the squalid ex-prisoner the candlesticks as a gift.

As Reggie hands over his old clothes, Linton’s voice comes in: “He will be in with some very unsavory people.”

People who focused on doing only one thing performed learning and memory tasks with the hippocampus, the brain’s memory center, whereas people trying to do two tasks relied more heavily to learn and memorize on the parts of the brain associated with motor skills.

The letter went on to discuss a few finalities involving insurance and Mr. Kaiserman and to explain that Reggie’s file could be expunged and the court records sealed.

If, after all, he was an outlier, someone with a predisposition to distraction, it would be worth knowing.

The convergence of technology, science, and medicine was on display everywhere you looked.

His attention network took on a predictable load as his performance imploded.

The idea had come after Terryl had suggested putting earthworms in the kitchen in a big box to help compost in a natural and effective way.

Honesty can be hard, obviously. That’s in part because it can be so hard to even see the points of conflict or dissonance. We have powerful defense mechanisms—personal prejudice, shame, societal messages, and, yes, technology.

Why is one person who didn’t have such a bad childhood so ill, and why is another person who had such a horrendous childhood able to function at such a relatively high level?

The research, led by Emma Seppala, the associate director of the Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education at Stanford University, found that the veterans saw a significant decrease in their startle response when they did deep breathing.

The sum of these studies, and others along the same lines, offer a pretty clear road map to reaching a state of mind that allows for good decision making and better awareness of one’s life—the precursors to balance and happiness.

She was in her late twenties, a high-level speed cyclist, Olympic caliber.

On the screen of her iPad, she plays a relatively primitive video game that entails identifying targets that at first appear in the middle of the screen but get farther out on the periphery.

“It is clear that multitasking behavior has become ubiquitous in today’s technologically dense world, and substantial evidence has accrued regarding multitasking difficulties and cognitive control deficits in our aging population,” reads the introduction to the Nature paper.

Indeed, the research earned kudos from a range of attention scientists.

For the most part, the idea made her feel squeamish, as it does for lots of people.