The very loud music that we usually listen to while driving does not seem to disturb our ability to drive, stop at traffic lights , or maintain the appropriate distance from other vehicles in circulation. In fact, there are many people who like to drive listening to the radio or music at full volume, but all of them, or the vast majority, have something in common: they turn down the music when they are about to park their car. But why is it ? Why do we lower the volume on the radio when we park?
Why do we turn down the volume on the radio when we park?
Lowering the volume of the radio while parking is something more common than it seems, in fact it also usually happens when we are looking for parking or we are doing the opposite, leaving where we were parked or also, if we are looking for a certain house number on an unfamiliar street.
What triggers this action? What is the mental automatism that leads us to do this? The immediate answer to why we turn down the volume when we park might be that we try to eliminate distractions, but that is not the case. The fact is that despite what you may think, our brain does not know how to do many things at the same time and when it comes to managing situations that require more attention and concentration than usual, its resources are limited.
The answer is in the brain
The brain is the organ of the central nervous system that is responsible for receiving and processing all the information collected through sight, hearing, touch, smell and taste; in addition, he evaluates at all times what is his main task, that is, the one that requires more energy and attention, and possibly what is his secondary task, which requires less. Simply put, as cognitive scientist Art Markman explained to Mel Magazine, we can drive and listen to a song by our favorite artist without a hitch because ” driving doesn’t completely use up all of our mental resources.”
However, things change when the level of attention required by one of the actions we are performing changes.
For example, it becomes difficult to carry on a conversation if we drive in particularly stressful situations , such as when it suddenly starts to rain, or if we are lost and have to rely on traffic signals, other situations in which we also lower the volume of the radio of the car. What happens in these circumstances is that in order to continue to function well and do its job, our brain needs to focus most of its attention on the task that it identifies as a priority .
The point is that when we do two things at the same time , like driving and listening to music, our brain doesn’t really pay attention to two things at the same time, but rather “bounces” from one to the other very quickly. This “coming and going” between one stimulus and another, between one task and another, however, requires a lot of energy and can slow down our performance, or decrease our reaction times, lead us to make mistakes or put us in difficulties, especially when one of the Two actions require much more concentration than the other: in this sense, turning down the radio serves , so to speak, to take space away from the brain’s secondary task , which can thus concentrate on the main one: parking.
Philip Smith and Simon Lilburn, respectively professor and researcher of Psychology at the University of Melbourne, discussed this in more detail in an article in The Conversation.
Smith and Lilburn recalled that in 1959 the physiologist Neville Moray observed for the first time that when people listen to two speeches simultaneously , while concentrating on one of the two, they can still locate its name , if it is spoken in the other conversation. Moray’s study helped to understand that we are capable of perceiving and making sense of different sensory information even when we are not focused on them, but above all it helped other scientists to understand that the human brain does not have infinite resources and although it is capable of functioning no problem in up to two tasks quite efficiently, when you try to do more than two things at the same time, one of the three is automatically discarded, so to speak.
