Regarding the whole talking on the cell phone thing versus driving drunk, I have to say I talk on the cell phone all the time while I drive. I have bluetooth in when I'm doing it but I am having a cell phone conversation. The emotional attachment of the cell phone conversation has little to do with the relative danger of driving while using a cell phone. It is the answering manually, manually holding the phone, manually dialing the phone and manually texting on the phone that I believe is the dangerous part. This is why many places have tried to institute handless cell phone conversations as the law.
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Yeah, Nick, most people think it's all the manual movement associated with the cell phone that causes the drop in reaction time. But in the studies they've done, it doesn't matter whether it was hand-held or bluetooth. The cognitive energy used to carry a conversation is what detracts from one's reaction time, not any physical activity associated with using the phone (though that's a cause too). The laws that state that it's OK to talk on your cell phone if it's in wireless receive mode are missing the point... It's a matter of doing more than one thing at a time and humans aren't really meant to multitask as much as the modern world makes it seem we should.
you wanna link the study your quoting?
because i can only think of one, and it in fact pretty much verbatim backed up nick, and recommend that while no one should talk on a cell phone, hands free is the least impactful, and no more distracting than listening to music at a extremely loud level.
also, that study found that hands free is not equivalent to driving with a BAC of over .10
again, this is assuming its the one i saw, which was actually the one referenced when mythbusters did the same thing and found the same results.
The one thing it did find that sounds kind of like what your saying is that emotional calls (read: your angry/distraught) make you focus more on the call than the road, and that those are the most unsafe form of cell phone conversations, but thats the same if your arguing with someone IN the car.
sober and alert > cell phone hands free > cell phone manual > drinking, in that order, according to the mythbuster tests, not that those are scientific, but they pretty much confirmed the study based on there own tests that copied the study.
There conclusion was that while both driving while on a cell phone and driving at .10 (what they established as drunk) impaired performance, drinking was much worse.