Join the Car Talk Community!  Wait, Wait... Don't Deceive Me  A
week or so ago, the popular NPR news quiz show "Wait,
Wait...Don't Tell Me" asked guests to fill in the blank on the
following statement:    What!? How could this be?!  Well, for
starters, our friends at "Wait, Wait Don't Tell Me" didn't get
anything wrong. After all, that was one of the stories in the
news that week. But the rest of media definitely blew it. Here's
how it happened.  The report never claimed that using a cell
phone actually improved driving safety. The research in question
(which is available online, here) actually claimed that cell-
phone use did not increase crash risk. Of course, this claim
goes against several hundred scientific studies, surveys of
drivers, and common sense. The claim simply flies in the face of
everything that is known about the neuroscience of attention. A
central tenet of cognitive neuroscience is that you cannot do
two attention-demanding activities at the same time without
impairments to one or both tasks