A Deadly Wandering: A Tale of Tragedy and Redemption in the Age of Attention

by Matt Richtel

  “It was a big point in my life, and I chose to look people square in the eye and lie about it.”

  IN BETWEEN HIS MEETINGS with Gaylyn, on September 28, Reggie left the house a second time. He had a midday appointment to see Jon Bunderson, a lawyer who Reggie’s dad, Ed, had gotten a referral for. Bunderson had an office twenty minutes away, in Brigham City, where Ed worked in a machine shop.

  Mary Jane drove Reggie from Tremonton, and they picked up Reggie’s dad at the Brigham Implement Company. Ed’s employer sold farm equipment but also had a machine shop that he had managed for nearly a decade, helping building it up into a substantial operation that did metal fabrication, built parts for airplane Jetways and automobile airbags, and took on odd jobs, like fixing a bicycle or making parts for an irrigation ditch.

  It was blue-collar all the way, located inside a corrugated metal shell; metal shavings covered the floor around the heavy equipment, which filled the shop with a regular hum. Out front was a line of loaders and tractors waiting to be repaired. But you could hardly beat the shop’s setting—if you looked west, beyond nearby Brigham City, the Rockies exploded dramatically toward the sky.

  The family drove to Bunderson’s office. It was located in a single-story building near the county courthouse. It was unassuming to the point of being ugly, with a pink, unkempt exterior and a mass-manufactured mailbox with an eagle on top of it. It cut a stark contrast to the impressive municipal offices and other tall, well-manicured downtown buildings of this historic city, where, in 1877, Brigham Young delivered his final sermon.

  Inside Bunderson’s office was a reception area covered in green-striped wallpaper. Despite the less-than-ornate surroundings, Reggie immediately felt he could trust Mr. Bunderson. Reggie thought of him as a smaller man physically, in his late fifties, with a mustache, wearing a suit and tie. He had a quiet intensity, a bit of gravel in his voice. He seemed authoritative and smart. He asked Reggie the basic questions about what happened the morning of the accident. And Reggie replayed what he remembered, tearful but not as emotional as when he’d met the therapist. When he faltered, his parents filled in the blanks.

  Reggie concluded by saying he thought the accident was caused by the wet roads.

  “I remember the weather that day,” Mr. Bunderson concurred in the meeting. He said he wasn’t surprised that something tragic could result from the rough conditions.

  He asked Reggie if he’d been on the phone during the accident, not just before it. No, Reggie told him.

  Bunderson asked if he might get a copy of the phone bill. And Reggie’s family said: Sure.

  Bunderson gave Reggie assurances, and a few instructions. He told him he should not make contact with the families of Jim Furfaro and Keith O’Dell. Even though Reggie hadn’t done anything wrong, “apologizing was admitting guilt.”

  “Things should be fine, Reggie,” Bunderson told him, and addressed the whole family. “I’ll call you if I hear anything.”

  Reggie felt some relief, reassured that jail wasn’t imminent. And he felt he’d unburdened himself about the accident. As he looks back, he says: “I continued to believe what I was telling him was everything I knew and everything I remembered.”

  ON OCTOBER 21, a few weeks after the meeting, a seventeen-year-old named Michael “Taylor” Wick was driving south on Highway 91, in Cache County. His passenger was Christopher Lee Dorius, also seventeen. Both were football players at Sky View High School in Smithfield, the second largest city in Cache County after Logan. It was 6:15 p.m.

  According to the highway patrol, Wick drifted off the road, overcorrected to get back onto the road, and was struck at high speed by a pickup coming from the other direction. Both young men were killed on impact.

  The preliminary report could find no cause for this seemingly inexplicable accident. It just seemed like another teenage driving tragedy.

  “He’s been a part of the team for four years—a major part of the team,” Sky View coach Craig Anhder said of Wick. “It’s just a shock.”

  Eventually, there was a possible explanation. The local prosecutor’s office was told that Wick was holding his phone at the time of the accident. But prosecutors didn’t pursue the case because the two boys were already dead.

  CHAPTER 11

  THE NEUROSCIENTISTS

  IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY, Helmholtz and Donders had begun trying to measure the capacities of the human brain. The next wave of pioneering brain scientists, a remarkable group of men and women, took their inspiration from World War II and the struggle of human operators to keep up with the staggeringly powerful machines and weapons of war.

  One of these pioneers was Anne Taylor, who was a little more than five years old when World War II started and the bombs rained down. She’d hear the piercing siren. Her mother or father would scoop her up along with her younger sister, Janet, and take them down to the damp and musty cellar. They’d also take Tinkle, the family’s tabby cat. And they’d wait. Sometimes they’d take their pencils and scrap paper and draw to pass the time.

  As she got a bit older, still enduring the Luftwaffe’s bombs, her drawings showed curious little doodles. They represented the German’s deadly planes flying overhead.

  When the “all clear” message would come over the loudspeakers, the family would ascend to the ground floor of their little house in Kent, England, midway between London and the Nazi airstrips in France. Her mother was a homemaker. Her dad was a chief education officer for the Medway towns of Rochester, Gillingham, and Chatham. In the living room, there was a map on the wall with pins in it, and Anne’s dad, Percy, would move the little flag pins to show what was happening at the front.

  Around Britain and across the world, war raged. It was a mechanized affair. Men in planes and tanks, or armed with guns, artillery, and advanced weapons, tore apart the bodies of millions of soldiers and civilians. At the same time, not unrelated, machines were being put to important scientific use: Researchers were trying to measure the ability of pilots and soldiers to sustain their focus while operating the advanced weaponry.

  How could pilots navigate these powerful planes—traveling at hundreds of miles an hour—while looking at the cockpit gauges, listening to the radio, evading antiaircraft fire, and dogfighting? How could soldiers on the ground, bombs falling all around, call in the right coordinates for air strikes? How could the air traffic controllers keep track of the blips on the radar screen amid heavy fighting?

  “People were looking at these screens, these very primitive displays, and looking for signals, like German planes coming overhead, and they often missed them,” explains Alan Mackworth, a professor of computer science at the University of British Columbia, who also holds the title of Canada Research Chair in Computational Intelligence.

  Mackworth wasn’t born until 1945. But he well knows the science, from his own study, and because his father was smack in the middle of it. Norman Humphrey Mackworth, known as “Mack,” was working for the RAF, the British air force. They weren’t doing theoretical work; they were trying to save lives by helping pilots and radar operators stay alert and capable in the face of an onslaught of information.

  “There was a huge crisis,” says Alan. If you misread the radar screen, got distracted, fell asleep, well, people died. Villages burned. Without being too hyperbolic: Battles were won and lost, and wars, too.

  There was a young man, Donald Broadbent, who volunteered for the RAF at age seventeen. He would later go on to do some of the world’s pioneering work in attention science, alongside the senior Mackworth. Broadbent’s interest also stemmed from the war, and the basic day-to-day challenges he observed pilots facing as they tried to stay focused. The New World Encyclopedia quotes a former colleague of Broadbent’s recounting an anecdote:

  “The AT6 planes had two identical levers under the seat, one to pull up the flaps and one to pull up the wheels. Donald told of the monotonous regularity with which his colleagues would pull the wrong lever while taking off and crash land an
expensive aeroplane in the middle of a field.”

  Paul Atchley, a professor of psychology at the University of Kansas, points to this collision course of man and machine during World War II as a central reason why scientists developed a new urgency around understanding the human brain.

  “We had these highly motivated individuals—radar operators and pilots—who would miss attacks or drop bombs on the wrong cities. Why did they fail?”

  They were running up against the limits of their own brains. “Technology was outstripping cognitive capacity,” Dr. Atchley explains. “We could quantify the machine, but not the human. That’s where cognitive neuroscience really started.”

  FOR HIS PART, NORMAN Mackworth had been born in India, the son of a British eye surgeon who performed cataract surgery for locals. The family then moved back to Britain, where Mack grew up in Aberdeen, and became a scientist, a tinkerer, a great piano player, with a bit of a short attention span himself. He was prone to moving from concept to concept, but making big strides in a handful of key scientific camps. So maybe, given his own impulse to jump around, it’s not surprising that, during the war, he came up with the Mackworth Clock.

  It was a black box with a point on it that turned in a circle. The point moved at regular intervals of a second. Except that sometimes it would skip the one-second interval and move after a two-second interval. Such jumps happened at periodic, unpredictable times. It was the job of an experiment subject to press a button whenever there was a two-second jump. Simple, right?

  After about thirty seconds, the subject’s ability to focus—his “signal detection”—went down markedly. No wonder the radar operators, sitting eight hours a day in front of screens, could miss these life-threatening blips, these German bombers that could kill their friends and family. But why?

  Unknown to little Anne Taylor, doodling to distract herself while her family tried to survive the bombs, defended by the RAF, this intersection of man and machine—the struggle to survive in wartime—was setting the stage for the next wave of attention study. What had begun with Helmholtz and Donders was taking a next major turn. And Anne, who later married and took the surname Treisman, was destined to be one of the researchers at the center of that stage.

  “ANNE TREISMAN IS BRILLIANT,” says Dr. Gazzaley. “She was a pioneer.”

  Dr. Gazzaley sits at Maverick’s, an upscale eatery serving American comfort food. The restaurant is a one-minute walk from the Gazzloft, so close that Maverick’s lets Dr. Gazzaley and his girlfriend, Jo, take home the plates when they order out. They’re regulars here, it goes without saying, and Dr. Gazzaley, as much as he craves new experience and new stimulation, cannot help but always order the same thing: the southern-fried chicken with a biscuit and greens.

  Dr. Gazzaley is nothing if not a convincing figure. He’s sold five of the other six diners on the fried chicken. Patrick Martin, the big-time magician, is among them. He’s got a thick build, short curly hair, wears a leather jacket, and seems to be a careful observer with a mischievous twinkle in his eye.

  He promises, later in the night, maybe back at the Gazzloft when First Friday starts, to show a trick or two—to demonstrate more about the power of attention and distraction.

  For now, Dr. Gazzaley is talking a bit about how attention science unfolded, and the leading researchers upon which modern work is built.

  What was so amazing about Dr. Treisman?

  “She was crucial in helping us understand bottom-up attention,” says Dr. Gazzaley.

  ANNE’S FAMILY SURVIVED THE war intact. She performed well academically; so well, in fact, that she was among just a few students from her grammar school fortunate enough to get admitted into Cambridge and Oxford. Early in life, she’d expressed an interest in the sciences, but her father thought she’d have no culture and so at Cambridge, she studied French literature.

  Her success earned her an offer for a graduate fellowship, but she thought spending three years studying a single medieval poet sounded restricting. She asked Cambridge whether she might pursue a degree in psychology, which was growing in prominence and credibility.

  “They said in horror: ‘It’s all about rats!’ And I said that might be interesting.”

  Much of the focus in psychology at the time was around behaviorism. B. F. Skinner, John Watson, and others were focusing on the idea that human behavior could be understood by how people reacted to things; they put less focus on what was happening inside the brain, which seemed at the time like an inscrutable black box, the contents of which could not be observed.

  Dr. Treisman was inspired to think differently by one of her instructors, Richard Gregory. He did all kinds of odd and even amusing experiments, like trying to show how vision could be impacted through neck strain, something he demonstrated by walking around the classroom wearing a heavy helmet to stress his neck muscles. Then he’d see how his vision changed. Could the physical environment change what was happening inside the head? The work was a distant echo of the work of Donders and Helmholtz, and the idea that brain activity could be measured.

  By now, Norman Mackworth was the first director of the applied psychology unit at Cambridge. Working with him was Broadbent, who at seventeen had observed pilot error in the RAF, and who was on his way to becoming a godfather of cognitive psychology. After the war, he studied auditory channels, trying to understand what we focus on, and how much information we can absorb and process and under what circumstances. It was the precursor to the cocktail party effect, named by another British researcher, Edward Colin Cherry, in 1953.

  Another researcher, a Canadian named Donald Hebb, was exploring a different angle. He theorized that the organization of the central nervous system and neural networks were involved with and impacted attention. His name and work would become increasingly appreciated as neuroscientists delved beyond behavioral studies and looked at the physical structures of the brain. Hebb’s seminal 1949 book, The Organization of Behavior, illuminated a new pathway for studying the anatomy of the brain’s attention networks.

  These were among the seminal researchers in the field, but there were others and, collectively, with the war behind them, they had a new luxury: Gone was the immediate, life-and-death pressure of figuring out how to help pilots and radar operators sustain attention under duress. And there wasn’t really a thought that technology—in a general sense—could distract people on an everyday basis.

  AFTER ALL, THE DAILY dose of computers or telecommunications was still far away from most people. In 1945, for instance, AT&T began introducing a kind-of mobile phone service, derived from military radio technology, in a few metropolitan markets in the United States. Far from being ubiquitous, it could only be used simultaneously by no more than twenty people in a single city.

  In 1950, about 9 percent of American homes had televisions, the first screen that would become part of most people’s lives (by 1962, 90 percent of households would have one).

  Researchers, absent the urgent need to know why radar operators fell asleep, started a new generation of more formal, deliberate experiments, trying to measure the capabilities of the human mind.

  “Behavioral psychology was turning into the cognitive revolution,” says Dr. Treisman. How does the brain process information? How much. And, she says: “What kind of things overload the brain?”

  IN 1957, TREISMAN MOVED to Oxford to pursue a PhD. She posted a flyer around campus, asking students if they’d like to be subjects in a psychology experiment, and got plenty of takers. A subject would show up in a small room with a short wooden desk adorned simply with a Brenell Mark 5 two-channel tape recorder and a pair of headphones. The subject would don the headphones and discover that each channel was playing a different passage from a book (the same book—typically, Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad). Dr. Treisman instructed the subject to listen to the passage coming into one ear—say, the left ear—and then to immediately repeat what he or she heard. The trick was to ignore what was coming in on the right ear.

 
; Then Dr. Treisman added a twist. After the first fifty words or so of the recording, she switched the passages, such that what had been coming through the left ear was now coming through the right, and vice versa. About 6 percent of the time, as the subjects were repeating what they heard in the left ear, a word from the right ear, the unattended one, would slip through into their report.

  To Dr. Treisman, there were two basic conclusions: first, “the attention filter is very effective,” but second, “our filter is not a total block.”

  That was a relatively powerful discovery for the time. Broadbent, for one, had assumed the filter was total. He assumed people could focus on what they wanted and block out the rest. For all his contributions, Broadbent’s assumption turned out to be simplistic in much the same way that, before Helmholtz, people thought reaction time was immediate, infinite.

  So what kinds of things get through the filter? What interruptions and stimuli rise to the surface even when we’re intent on focusing on something else?

  In a nearby office, a colleague of Dr. Treisman named Neville Moray made an interesting discovery also by experimenting with subjects hearing two different messages through headphones (known as the “shadowing technique”). He found that subjects listening to one message would, in only about 30 percent of cases, recognize that their own name had been said in the unattended ear, or be thrown off, derailed, by the sound of their name.

  Dr. Treisman herself made an indirect discovery about the kinds of things that pop to the surface, even when we’re trying to ignore them. It happened by accident. At one point, she tried her experiment by playing passages not from Lord Jim but from Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak, the book that launched the epic film. One day, a subject started doing something Dr. Treisman had never seen before: He started remarking about the passages from Doctor Zhivago that were being read in both ears. It appeared, on its face, to be a highly unusual capacity to attend to both streams of information.