Steve Casner, Careful : a user's guide to our injury-prone minds, 2017
Casner, Steve, author.
Careful : a user's guide to our injury-prone minds / Steve Casner.
Accidents──prevention. | safety education. | public safety | industrial safety.
LCCN HV675.C35 2017
DDC 613.6--dc23
https//lccn.loc.gov/2016049067
International edition ISBN: 9780735216662
Steve Casner, Careful : a user's guide to our injury-prone minds, 2017 [ ]
( Casner, Steve, author. )
( Careful : a user's guide to our injury-prone minds / Steve Casner.
Accidents──prevention. | safety education. | public safety | industrial safety. )
( LCCN HV675.C35 2017 )
( DDC 613.6--dc23 )
( https//lccn.loc.gov/2016049067 )
contents
1. words to live by 1
2. paying attention 16
3. making errors 34
4. taking risks 49
5. thinking ahead 69
6. looking out for one another 85
7. taking and giving advice 106
8. around the house 119
9. watching kids 134
10. from here to there 159
11. at work 197
12. fires and natural disasters 212
13. at the door 229
14. getting older 252
15. will we really be safer? 269
acknowledgements 289
notes 291
index 313
p.6
The British Parachute Association reports that the number of people who jumped out of an airplane for the first time last year is up 50 percent from 10 years ago. Try explaining any of this to your grandfather. He'd probably ask you, “Do you not have enough work to do?”
p.9
In 1453, the sack of Constantinopole was expedited when someone neglected to lock one of the gates to the city.
p.15
Each day in the United States, preventable injuries cause 350 deaths, and 7 of those are kids under age five.
p.21
If you had been staring at the first picture the whole time and saw things change, it wouldn't be as much of a brainteaser. But when you switch your attention away and then back again, noticing what's different is a whole lot harder.
p.24
But as they turned their attention to the landing gear, the crew inadvertently switched off the autopilot, the system that was supposed to fly the airplane while they tried to diagnose the situation. Unnoticed by the three crew members in the cockpit, the airplane began a slow and subtle descent toward the ground. Just before impact, the captain spotted the diminishing altitude and yelled out, “Hey, what's happening here?” Less than ten seconds later, the airplane crashed into the Florida Everglades, killing 101 of the 176 people on board.
p.24
mind wandering or task-unrelated thought.
p.25
Smallwood and Schooler are quick to point out that mind wandering has its benefits. Taking a mental break here and there is a great way to revisit the other things we have going on in our lives. A good zone-out lets you figure out what you're going to do later in the evening or who's going to pick the kids up from school tomorrow, what psychologists call autobiographical planning. Mind wandering allows to remember things that we have forgotten, like the dentist appointment we have the next day.
pp.25-26
Studies of mind wandering have shown that people come up with some of their best ideas when they are spacing out.
p.26
In a most unusual study, a team of researcher in France walked up to hospital beds in an emergency ward and asked car crash victims if they had been mind wandering at the time of the collision. Mind wandering was reported by more than half of all these drivers, while about one in eight reported thinking about “highly disruptive/distracting content” during their mental excursions.
p.26
It's important to know that mind wandering is just as distracting when our eyes remain focused on whatever it is we are supposed to be watching. When our mind drift, we experience what psychologists call perceptual disengagement ──while our eyes and mind continue to function, they just sort of stop talking to each other. Even when something is seen by the eye, it may not be processsed by the brain in the same way as when we are paying full attention.
p.26
Paying Attention is Exhausting
p.27
[Norman] Mackworth found that our ability to intently monitor or supervise just about anything begins to deteriorate after as little as 20 or 30 minutes. Mackworth called this phenomenon the vigilance decrement.
25 minutes
paying attention wears us out quickly.
p.27
You Have to Know What to Look For
p.28
Researchers a the University of Portsmouth in the United Kingdom found that beach lifeguards with several years of experience were five times as likely to spot a drowning person than lifeguards who had less than a year of experience. When they looked at where the lifeguards directed their gazes, and for how long, the researchers found that, regardless of experience, most lifeguards were using the same basic scan patterns. What seems to make the difference for the experienced lifeguards is that they are better able to read the sublte signs in the water──what the reseachers called “expertise differences in information pick-up”. Although the researchers were unable to define what trouble looks like, it seems that experienced lifeguards are more likely to know it when they see it.
p.28
We can't pay attention to two things at once. We can't pay attention to one thing for long because we get tired, our minds wander, or something eventually pops up and distracts us.
p.29
or at least improve the definition to explain that there is really no such thing as multitasking?
p.31
Prioritizing and Postponing
Sometimes we don't have others around to help us, and we get stuck with having to do it all ourselves. Pilots have a technique for doing this that's founded on the old adage of “first things first”. This involves giving priority to some things and postponing others. We do the most important stuff first and let the less important stuff wait.
p.31
In aviation, we use a simple prioritization scheme: “aviate, navigate, communication”. That means we fly the airplane first. And when that is completely under control, then and only then do we move on to the other two things in the list.
pp.31-32
If you lose control of the airplane, no one is going to care whether you crash in eastern Idaho or western Wyoming. The whole point is to fly the airplane and not let either of those things happen.
p.32
When you're asked to do two things, don't be afraid to admit you can't do two things at once. Pick one and save the rest for later.
p.32
It's your choice. Pick either one, but don't pick both.
p.33
Dan Simons didn't seem too alarmed about the limits of our ability to pay attention.
p.33
“The real danger is our mistaken intuition about our own limits”, he [Dan Simons] said.
p.35
Absolutely no one is immune from screwing up.
p.35
We will learn how training, skills, and experience tend to change the kinds of errors we make but it doesn't eliminate them.
p.35
Slips Happen Even When We're Good at Something
p.36
Have you ever tripped and fallen down while walking along a perfectly paved sidewalk? Errors like these are what psychologists call slips.
p.36
After we learn to do something and practice it many times, we experience what is called automaticity. A skill becomes automatic when it no longer requires much conscious thought or our constant attention to perform. When it becomes a no-brainer. Automaticity is what allows us to get good at something and do it efficiently and effortlessly. Automaticity is what makes us look like a pro. While beginners fumble through the pages of the instruction manual, an expert fires up a chain saw with one rip of the cord. The crowd applauds and feels sorry for the poor sap who's still trying to figure it out. But it turns out that smooth expert performance, when our minds are sort of engaged and sort of not, is fertil ground for making errors.
p.36
There seems to be no limit on the creative ways in which we humans can sometimes slip while doing even the most routine things. Psychologists Don Norman and James Reason have collected hundreds of examples of slips and have even categorized them. Like the student who came home from jogging, took off his sweaty shirt, and tossed it in the toilet.
36. Don Norman and James Reason: Don Norman's classic paper about slips is Norman, D. A. (1981). Categorization of action slips. Psychological Review 88(1), 1-5. Two books about human errors, including many entertaining examples, are Norman's The Design of Everyday Things (2013; New York: Basic Books) and Reason's classic Human Error (1990; New York: Cambridge University Press).
p.37
But this time, after extending the landing gear, instead of grabbing the flap handle, the first officer pulled the fuel cutout lever for the number two engine. Instead of extending the flaps that you often see coming out of the back of the wing, this action shut down the airplane's right engine. In midflight. A few thousand feet from the ground.
p.37
The first officer soon noticed his error and quickly returned the fuel switch back to the ON position.
p.38
25,000 years ago, if someone picked up a stick instead of a banana, they would laugh and laugh because you can't eat a stick. Today, the banana is an airplane flap handle and the stick shuts down a jet engine and not a single one of the two hundred passengers in the back is going to think that mixing them up is in the least bit funny.
p.38
Memories fade when we don't activate them on a regular basis, and this is normal. We're supposed to keep the stuff we use on hand and let the rest slip away. But the sort of memory failure that gets us into trouble more frequently is what psychologists call prospective memory : when we try to remember to do something in the future. After a few decades of research, psychologists have determined that we're not so good at this.
p.39
Mistakes Happen When We Don't Know What We're Doing
p.40
No, I planned to do the wrong thing and I pulled it off without a hitch. Psychologists call this kind of error, the flawless execution of a mostly dumb idea, a mistake.
p.40
Unlike slips that happen in the midst of skilled performance, mistakes often happen when we are missing a piece of the story about what we're about to do. Mistakes can often have consequences that are much worse than slips. Mistakes can be huge blunders.
p.40
..., and when you buy a stock on a whim without consulting a single person about whether it's a good idea: these are mistakes.
p.40
We can also make a mistake when we don't know what we are doing but we assume that someone else does.
p.40
Why We Make Mistakes, Joseph Hallinan
p.41
It turns out that the gang of vigilantes was assembled by someone who had confused the word pediatrician with the word pedophile and then when looking for justice.
p.41
The injury statistics reflect many situations in which we make some common but often hard-to-see mistakes, even when we're convinced that we know what we're doing.
p.42
After all, errors are embarrassing.
p.42
p.43
We all make errors. It doesn't matter who you are, how competent, experienced, or well trained you are: you're sometimes going to screw it up and there is nothing you can do to stop it. So now what?
pp.44-45
The ultimate reminder is what design thinker Don Norman calls a forcing function and what the Japanese call poka-yoke. A forcing function makes it difficult to do the wrong thing. If you are trying not to forget a folder of paperwork before you drive off to work, you can put your keys on top of the folder.
p.45
Complicated plans in which the next step depends on successfully completing a previous one, and in which any of the steps depends on someone else doing something, can easily turn out to be a comedy (or tragedy) of errors.
p.45
When anything that involves your safety “sounds complicated”, always ask yourself or others if there is an easier way.
p.45
Making fewer mistakes is trickier. It usually requires laying your hands on some knowledge that can help point out errors in your thinking.
p.46
Catching the Errors You Make
The next line of defense we have against errors is to catch them and fix them or at least point them out before the consequences get out of hand. How good are we at this? James Reason surveyed several studies of error-detection rates and found that people who performed routine tasks at which they are skilled tend to catch about 85 percent of their own slips. That's pretty good, but there is the matter of the remaining 15 percent. Mistakes can be much harder to catch. The problem with mistakes is that we usually think we are doing the right thing when we make them. Thus, mistakes often require time or input from others to expose their wrongheadedness.
p.46
Probably the greatest resource we have when checking our work is one another. Our pilot who claims to make a mistake every two to three minutes is hardly alone. Entire books have been written about the astonishing frequency with which errors are made in the airline cockpit. This is why we use two pilots in the cockpit who play the roles of “pilot flying” and “pilot monitoring”. One pilot to make the errors and the other pilot to catch them.
pp.46-47
Another great way to catch an error is to know when they are most likely to happen.
p.47
If you put yourself in that situation a few times, it's not a question of if you're going to forget, it's a question of when.
p.47
My NASA colleague Everett Palmer likes to use the phrase error tolerance to describe the notion that making errors is okay as long as you have a plan in place to survive them when they do happen.
p.48
But how do we step up to an opportunity to do something that seems fun, productive, and inviting and decide whether it's actually a bad idea? This is not always such an easy call for us to make.
pp.49-50
Christmas Day, 1991, Florida newspaper, 45-year-old woman who had been tragically killed in a small plane crash just two days before.
p.49
The woman, a certified pilot, had been flying the twin-engine aircraft with a certified flight instructor, who owned the airplane and who was seated in the other seat.
49 Florida crash: The National Transportation Safety Board's final report and probable cause statement can be found under NTSB Identification MIA 92FA051. Multiple December 1991 newspaper articles appearing in the Lakeland Ledger covered the crash.
p.50
Risk is what lets us accomplish things that no one has accomplished before, and when it's done doing those, risk is what allows us to have a little fun.
pp.50-51
How do we end up in risky situation that we probably should have avoided?
• We don't understand the risks
• We think the risks don't apply to us
• We are more accepting of risk than others
• Temporary insanity
• Everybody else is doing it
• It was totally worth it
pp.54-55
And here is where our previous successes can hurt us. When we flight instructors see an overconfident flight student walk in the door, often one who has enjoyed financial success, we tend to hide under the desk and hope that a different instructor will get stuck with them. Unlike in the movies, aviation is no place for the bold and daring. Humility and carefulness are the things that keep pilots alive. With an overconfident flight student, we know that we're going to have to replace their “can do” attitude with a “can die” attitude.
p.55
I remember sitting in a meeting at an airline some years ago. As everyone introduced themselves and said something about their background, one airline manager mentioned that he had some military flying experience. Another pilot at the table who knew him interjected, “You were the flight leader of the Blue Angles [the U.S. Navy flight demonstraction team that thrills crowds at air shows].” The manager retorted, “Well, that's military flying experience.” In aviation, this is the kind of humble attitude that leads to growing older.
p.55
Growing older is another hazard we'll talk about later.
p.55
Small risks stop being small when you have to face them over and over again.
p.58
Zuckerman's experiments have also shown that sensation seeking is highly heritable. When it comes to sensation seeking, the apples tend to drop right under the tree.
p.62
Instead of continuing to provide the standard government-issue glasses, the military switched to a sportier, sexier style of eyewear. The number of eye injuries plummeted. Instead of not being able to get soldiers to put them on, they now couldn't get them to take them off. They found that soldiers wore them even when they didn't have to. How's that for framing a problem in just the right way?
62 Attractive eyewear: Gawande, A. (2004). Casualties of war──Military care for the wounded from Iraq and Afghanistan. New England Journal of Medicine 351(24), 2471-2475.
p.77
Jonathan Sime did a telling study in 1985 that showed how, in a fire entrapment situation, people tend to move toward familiar people and familar places. This phenomenon accounts for much of the pileup at main entrances and the underutilization of less-familiar exits. The sound man in the Rhode Island nightclub used his knowledge of this phenomenon to choose a lesser-used exit, which would improve not only his chance of getting out but also those of the people at the main exit by not adding himself to the crowd.
pp.87-88
p.88
88 Noise and empathy:
88 Warm temperatures can rile us: Anderson, C. A., Anderson K. B., Dorr, N., and DeNeve, K. M. (2000). Temperature and aggression. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology 32, 63-133.
88 Hungry judges: This study helps you obey laws, or at least bring snacks to your next sentence hearing. Danziger, S., Levav, J., and Avnaim-Pesso, L. (2011). Extraneous factors in judicial decisions. Proceeding of the National Academy of Sciences 108(17), 6889-6892.
88 Crowds and bar fights:
88 Bad music and bar fights:
88 Women and bar fights:
p.93
“ethics becomes a luxury as the speed of our daily lives increases”
p.93
Crowded, expensive cities are not good places to rely on the kindness of strangers.
p.93
In 1972, two social psychologists discovered another reason why we sometimes help and sometimes don't: it depends on what kind of mood we're in.
p.98
Apparently, no matter how empathetic we are, we just can't psychologically multiply sadness or empathy. One study found that the psychological impact of an increasing number of deaths dramatically slows after the first few have been announced.
pp.98-99
While psychological numbing surely protects use from being overwhelmed with sadness and fear, it might also underlie our very attitude about staying safe in a world full of real threats.
p.99
Checking the dipstick, it looks like society might be about a quart low on the caring for others.
p.99
Remember the discussion about System 1 and System 2 from the last chapter? How after we establish and practice a routine we tend to just do it from then on in a no-brainer fashion? Psychologists now believe that we also automate our thinking about and behavior toward other people.
p.99
This sort of thinking and behavior may have become automatic for us. And that rewiring the way we think and behave in social situation is going to take some effort.
p.100
Another thing to realize is that, in so many situations of everyday life, our safety depends not only on our own actions but on the actions of others.
p.100
Robert Caildini writes in his classic book Influences, ...
p.101
moderating our behavior
Moderating Our Behavior
When crowds assemble, temperatures rise, or time runs short, it's not easy to take a deep breath and take back control of our own behavior. To ask ourselves if whatever it is that we're about to do is really going to accomplish anything other than pass on worry, stress, or risk to someone else. As we will discuss in the last chapter of the book, adopting a new thinking and behavior pattern like this is much harder than making other changes such as using checklists from now on to avoid forgetting stuff. This is a fundamental change in the way we think and respond to others, and these changes are anything but easy to bring about.
p.101
thinking ahead about others
pp.101-102
Thinking Ahead About Others
Here is the skill that combines this chapter with the last one: the skill of being able to pause and consider the likely consequences of whatever it is you're about to do, not only for yourself but for those around you.
p.102
reading minds and being predictable
p.103
intervening and helping
p.103
Many organizations are now offering “bystander training”. The U.S. government website Not Alone (www.notalone.gov) offers specific guidance for witnesses of sexual assault. The University of Arizona has developed a program called Step Up! that teaches students to be more active and proactive in helping others in distress.
p.104
Several jurisdictions now also have Good Samaritan laws that give legal protection to anyone who provides reasonable assistance to someone in need.
p.108
But this swindler didn't use a knife or a gun. He put his wits up against mine and he outsmarted me.
p.108
We sometimes find ourselves in situations where we are a little short on knowledge or experience. When this happens, things can improve quickly when we get a little advice from someone who knows what they're doing. Advice can redirect us when we are headed in the wrong direction or stop us when we are about to do something foolish. Advice has another benefit: it can help spread around the liability for a decision or an action. Imagine telling a judge and jury “I decided to do this” versus “My group of advisors recommended that I do this.” It's as handy as having a second set of prints on a murder weapon.
p.109
Psychologist Charles Shaw advised us in 1920 that “the new advise will come as soon as we realize that we should live shared lives. In such shared lives, the experience of one will become the value to the other.”
p.113
It turns out that the price of advice matters to us.
p.113
When the coin came up heads and people had to pay, they were more likely to use the advice than when they got it for free. Note that the advice was the same quality either way. People were just more likely to use the advice after coughing up some money for it. This might help explain why people tend to toss free pamphlets in the trash, even when they are written by the most knowledgeable people on the planet.
p.146
Many people learn the hard way how good kids are at climbing. They're strong and they weight nothing. Kids weight about one pound for each inch of height and corresponding muscle. Kids have what automotive engineers call good power-to-weight ratio.
p.148
Hot, Heavy, Sharp, and Toxic Things
p.151
NSC - National Safety Council
The NSC's [Amy] Artuso had another idea: “Create routines”. She says that not only can we take something unpredictable and chaotic and make it more predictable, but that creating routines is the perfect opportunities for teachable moments. This hit home with me because it's exactly what we do in aviation.
p.151
Why not make a standard procedure for cleaning hour in which the child is taught to knock before entering the bathroom?
p.151
In aviation we use standard callouts for so many things. Why not make everybody call out “Hands clear” when closing a door? There is never perfect compliance with these procedure, but it brings the chaos down to a more manageable level.
p.158
But maybe the more important thing we can do for the kids is to try to get some safe-thinking practices going in their minds.
p.158
Taking risks without giving it much thought is what kids do: it's a necessary port of the development process. And then sometimes they get hurt. Our experts just told us that our job is to interfere with the second part of that without interfering too much with the first part.
p.168
If it's a shorter, low-profile car you go up over the top. If it's a high-profile SUV or pickup truck, you go underneath.
p.172
Highly emotional conversation topics are also more distracting. “Stop and get eggs and milk” is different thing than “Steve, I'm leaving you for your best friend who I've been sleeping with for a year.”
p.178
But we seldom seem to be able to look at any given situation from the other person's vantage point.
p.178
Few of us are the pathological types who show up on the road looking for a fight. But many of us are prone to getting lured into being aggressive when someone else gets aggressive with us. We retaliate.
p.179
When you vent, you're just rehearsing your anger.
p.181
Of the 200 fatalities and more than 1500 injuries cause by “backover” crashes each year, kids under five (31 percent) and adults over seventy (26 percent) account for more than half of them. At least 50 kids are fun over every week. On average, 48 of them end up in the emergency roon and two of them die.
p.184
A native of the Netherlands, Sierhuis understands how efficient but also how fragile the Dutch system can be. All it takes is one bad actor to cause a logjam or a collision. “When I see a bicyclist in Amsterdam”, [Maarten] Sierhuis said at a recent car conference, “I know if they're from Amsterdam or if they're a tourist.”
p.185
Two emergency medicine doctors at Stanford University published a study showing that temperatures inside a car can rise 20 degrees in ten minutes and almost 30 degrees in twenty minutes.
p.188
Pilgrim says that teens march right out and take all the risks they see their parents take, armed with none of the experience, skills, or judgment that parents have managed to gather over the years. When we model the wrong things for a teen, we're setting them up to get hurt.
p.197
According to these statistics, we don't work in a slaughterhouse, we live in a slaughterhome.
p.219
Two researchers in Israel have shown us that, unlike the bravado and sensation seeking that often account for active risk, passive risk seems to be something different: something that we don't yet understand. The important thing for us to realize for now is that not preparing for fires and disasters can be as daring as jumping out of the back of an airplane.
p.220
My airline pilot friend and research colleague Richard Geven and I did a study a few years ago in which we presented airline pilots with in-flight emergency events. We called it the Oh Shit Study. We came up with the name after reading so many cockpit voice recorder transcripts in which every pilot utters the phrase “Oh shit” as soon as something goes wrong. The point of our study was to compare emergency situations for which pilots were specifically prepared against those for which they were not.
p.220
What did we find? Just what you would expect. There is a standardized list of emergencies that pilots train for every year. And when we presented the pilots with those emergencies, they handled them quite nicely. But when we threw something different at them, performance wasn't the same. Pilots sometimes seemed confused about what was going on and about what they should do next.
p.220
What Given and I found out is that the way to perform well in crisis situation is to have practiced recognizing and responding to a variety of these situations. So when disaster strikes, the ahead-thinking has already been done and you get right down to executing the plan.
p.207
Other safety variables are surely at work here, but the role of safety cultures and the ways that pilots influence one another has been linked to safe and unsafe practices in aviation many times over.
p.207
Reseachers who study workplace culture find that small subcultures naturally develop along with ideologies and behaviors that are quite different from those of the company at large. If you work in such an environment this is something to watch out for. Statistician Ken Kolosh at the NSC [National Safety Council] points out that 52 percent of construction site fatalities happen among contracted or “contingency” workers. Kolosh points out that we wander into dangerous territory when we temporarily work in an environment in which we don't have a chance to get fully integrated into the safety culture.
207 Workplace subcultures:
207 Contracted worker fatalities: Kolosh, K. (2016). The real risks are all around us. Safety First: Blog of the National Safety Council. www.nsc.org/safety-first/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?ID=104.
p.207
Think about it from the perspective of the first officer. They are stuck with having to learn and memorize every captain's idiosyncrasies.
p.208
Meanwhile, the standard operating procedures get demoted from the way things are to be done to a style guide full of suggestions.
p.208
Playing by the Rules
For now, we understand how things go astray when we don't take advantage of the systems that we provided for us at work. Work is the place where people have already thought through many of the things in this book and have built them into the system. What a luxury to have that already worked out for us.
p.208
They could have followed the standard checklist procedure. It contains checks for broken parts as well as checks for broken thoughts.
p.210
Work has other things going for it that we don't have at home. At work we really do only a few things: things that we have become so good at that employers are willing to pay us to do them. At home, we're amateurs at most everything we do. When we step out of our area of expertise, things can come apart quickly.
p.210
My colleague Ed Hutchins, a cognitive anthropologist, reminded me of the words we use to describe being at work and not being at work: on and off. We might consider the idea that we have a “being-careful switch” in our minds that bears these two simple labels. A switch that may get flipped off when we clock out and head home for the day.
p.223
It turns out that the film Twister is the best-selling disaster movie in almost 50 years.
pp.223-224
My colleague Pat Murphy, a warning coordination meteorologist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), told me that Twister prompted a spike in the number of enrollments in the university meteorology departments. The meteorology program at the University Oklahoma, which is featured in the film, saw its student population double within a few years following the release of the film. “We called them Twister Kids”, says Murphy.
p.224
I asked my daughter, who has lived all five of her years in San Francisco, what the word was on the kindergarten playground. “Earthquakes are not that bad”, she explained. “Your house just goes like this──it sways back and forth”. I then asked her about tornadoes, a natural disaster for which she has no real-life or even TV news exposure. “Tornadoes suck things up”, she warned. “You'll be gone forever.”
p.225
The stuff you'd need for a zombie apocalypse is precisely the same stuff that would come in handy during a fire or a natural disaster.
p.225
The zombie campaign was the brainchild of none other than Dave Daigle at the CDC.
p.226
“I remember when I first joined the preparedness division at CDC”, said Daigle. “My kids asked me if we had a survival kit or a rendezvous point. I was embarrassed.” but it's not like kids get to decide home policy issues. Or do they? “My kids often shame me”, Daigle said. “They are very good at it.”
p.226
But as it turns out, chatter may matter.
p.226
A key characteristic of those who actually took steps to prepare was that they had talked to other people about preparedness.
pp.226-227
It seems that people who talk about preparing prepare.
p.227
While the movies seem to help raise awareness of natural disasters, you do not want to rely on them for how-to information. “This can be dangerous”, says Rick Wilson, an engineering geologist at the California Geological Survey, “because the viewer will not be able to distinguish between science fact and science fiction.”
p.228
Can you imagine looking both ways before crossing a street one time and then never having to look both ways ever again?
p.239
Culture
How is it that so many people know the name and specifications of the processor of their new smartphone but know almost nothing about how their own bodies work?
p.241
How our bodies work is fun thing to learn with kids. My five-year-old knows that we have two kidneys, they are about the size of a fist, and they make pee (this cracks her up). And if she would like to continue peeing, she should take care of her kidneys by drinking plenty of water and not eating too many salty foods. Fruits and vegetables are good for kidneys. She knows that smoking is not only bad for your lungs, it's also bad for your kidneys.
p.241
With kids, it's a game of monkey see, monkey do.
p.242
How many people actually die from medical error? The size of the problem is hotly debated, but the figure estimated by the recent Johns Hopkins study (251,454 per year in the United States) is quite an eye-opener. Physician and author Robert Wachter likes to measure the problem in what he calls jumbo jet units. If these fatalities were all happening inside large commercial aircraft, we'd be looking at about 3 crashes every two days.
p.245
When Doctors Don't Listen, doctors Leana Wen and Joshua Kosowsky
p.255
The Art of Aging, Sherwin Nuland
p.256
CRAFT (Can't Remember A Flippin' Thing)
episodic memory
p.257
It seems that older drivers avoid the deleterious effects of their reduced attentional abilities simply by avoiding risky behaviors that put them to the test.
p.259
Carmi Schooler
Jonathan Schooler
p.261
“Staying fit is indisputably a down payment on our future.”
p.262
strength and balance training
Tai chi
p.262
The fatality numbers multiply by seven after age 75, when falling becomes the leading cause of death for people between ages 75 and 90.
p.264
Tom Meuser is a clinical psychologist who heads the gerontology program at the University of Missouri, St. Louis.
pp.284-285
Stuntwoman Jill Brown says that her job has reprogrammed her to think more carefully, no matter where she is or what she's doing. “I think in terms of chess move. If this happen, then that could happen, then the shit could hit the fan”, she explained.
A few week ago at a stop sign, I encountered a classroom full of little kids about to cross the street with their teacher──in front of my car. The teacher made them all hold hands as they started to waddle across the street. In an instant I realized that their safety depended on my foot continuing to press my brake pedal. What if I slipped or sneezed or died suddenly? I shifted the transmission into park and kept my foot on the brake.
p.288
We stopped using the word accident many years ago and replaced it with the phrase preventable injury.
p.291
Notes
2 Gave the kids heroin: An over-the-counter children's preparation of heroin was marketed by at least one drug company in the early 1900s but was changed to prescription status in the United States in 1914 and then altogether banned in 1924. Edwards, J. (2011). Yes, Bayer promoted heroin for children──here are the ads that prove it. Business Insider, November 17. http://www.businessinsider.com/yes-bayer-promoted-heroin-for-children-here-are-the-ads-that-prove-it-2011-11.
9 Sack of Constantinople: Crowley, R. (2005). 1453: The holy war for Constantinople and the clash of Islam and the West. New York: Hachette.
p.304
Notes
195 Air pollution deaths: World Heath Organization. (2014). Ambient (outdoor) air quality and health. Fact Sheet no. 313. Washington, DC: WHO.
p.309
253 Future longevity: Olshansky, S. J., Goldman, D. P., Zheng, Y., and Rowe, J. W. (2009). Aging in America in the 21st century: Demographic forecasts from the MacArthur Foundation Research Network on an Aging Society. Milbank Quarterly 87(4), 842-862.
p.310
Notes
257 Attention and aging: Schultz, R. (2006). The encyclopedia of aging, 4th ed. New York: Springer.
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