With texting and driving causing serious car accidents on our streets how do we go about encouraging drivers to put down their cell phones and focus on the road? The answer may be as simple as addressing the problem. In this article about teens and texting scientist are starting to think that texting might be a new addiction.
Some people say that we can stop the texting and driving problem by teaching our teens that they shouldn’t text and drive before they ever get behind the wheel. This task may have just become much more difficult than anticipated.
Approximately 80 percent of kids today own a cell phone and over the last three years the rate of sending text messages has increased 600 percent. As you can see texting has already become ingrained in to their daily lives.
Why is this becoming such an “addiction”? Doctors are saying that texting provides an instant gratification that floods the brain’s pleasure center with Dopamine every time a text is received. Take a moment and think about your own experience. Do you feel that little rush when you receive a text and then instantly (almost on auto-pilot) reach for your phone to see who it was and what they had to say?
According to brain specialist Michael Seyffert,
“Neuro-imaging studies have shown that those kids who are texting have that area of the brain light up the as an addict using heroin And they will actually describe, when I don’t have it I feel bad, I feel anxious, or I feel sad.”
As a Columbia car accident lawyer I’ve seen first hand what damage texting and driving can do. Now that scientists are finding out that texting is similar to an addiction we really need to look at how we can teach just how dangerous it is while operating a motor vehicle and hopefully prevent texting related car accidents.
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