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

by Matt Richtel

  RORY SPARROW, THE NBA player’s rep, had characterized Reggie as “reliving” the experience every time he tells it. The NBA invites him back each year. He’s spoken to the Detroit Lions football team, and gives a regular presentation to the top high school basketball players in the world when they gather at national clinics.

  Sparrow says: “I’m not going to be so naive and say no one in the group ever texts and drives, but Reggie definitely changed attitudes.”

  Reggie has engendered respect, even from those who once fought him.

  Linton: “I have never seen anybody try to redeem themselves as much as Reggie Shaw. Period. End of story.”

  Judge Willmore: “He’s done more to affect change than anyone I’ve ever seen.”

  By 2013, Reggie had spoken at some forty different events for Zero Fatalities, the public safety group in Utah. Brent Wilhite, a program manager with the group, says it relies on people like Reggie who have been involved in accidents to put a human face on issues. But Reggie, in his own way, stands apart. “We’ve worked with people convicted of dangerous driving behaviors and they’ve been great ambassadors, but no one else has had the long-term commitment and passion as Reggie. He’s gone so far above and beyond.”

  Wilhite says Reggie is good with an audience because he seems like an ordinary guy, the person who could be your friend or son, your boyfriend.

  When it comes to finding a messenger, “we can’t find anybody like Reggie.”

  Secretary LaHood, who in his four-and-a-half-year tenure as the nation’s chief transportation authority, came across many harrowing tales and difficult safety issues. He says Reggie has really struck him with his commitment and testimony. The secretary invited Reggie to speak at his second federal summit, and then heard him at regional summits in Florida, Texas, and Illinois.

  “He’s a hero,” Secretary LaHood says. “He bears his soul, he admits his guilt, and he tries to use that to persuade others to do right.

  “Reggie has had a tremendous impact on people’s thinking about distracted driving.”

  One could make a strong case that no single person has made as much of a difference when it comes to sending the message about the risks of texting and driving. Policy makers, like Secretary LaHood, who made driver distraction a national priority, certainly have had a huge impact. So have the early researchers, like Dr. Strayer, who were often sailing against headwinds generated by the corporations and profiteers benefiting from connected drivers. Among those three hundred people gathered at the distracted-driving summit, there were vigorous voices of people who lost family members, who created MADD-like groups to take on distraction.

  But Reggie stands alone for changing a state law, taking his message nationally, showing relentless courage, putting himself, personally, on the line, to try to connect with the vulnerable age group of teen and young drivers.

  Stephen Clark, the legislator who brought the bill to ban texting to the Utah House, eventually was honored by being named an LDS mission president in Missouri. His life now revolves around counseling young people and helping them digest their issues. He thinks Reggie has fulfilled a mission as great as any he could’ve aspired to through church work.

  “If I was Reggie’s mission president, and I was sitting across the table from him, I’d tell him: Your mission started the day you made that bad choice and caused that horrific accident. You started on your mission and you battled through the many, many challenges, the ups and downs, and you have been tried and tested and you have done all you can to make it right, and you have blessed the lives of many others who could be in the same position you are. Because of your willingness to stand forward and say ‘I made a mistake,’ you have fulfilled your mission in life. It was to tell the world that texting and driving is deadly. That’s the missionary you have been.”

  He adds: “I believe Reggie has suffered enough. He needs to be able to forget it and move on.”

  I relayed this to Reggie as part of a long conversation we had on how he might be able to move on. When he heard what Clark said, Reggie started to cry. “Do I deserve it? Do I deserve to feel okay? What if I stop talking and making presentations and I feel better, or don’t feel better, and then one day I wake up and read a story about someone who died texting and driving and I know I could’ve done something to stop it?”

  That seemed to be the hardest part. Could Reggie move on? Would he allow himself to? Should he?

  AND THERE WAS ANOTHER question. Reggie’s many fans described him as a perfect spokesman because he is just a regular guy. Is he? Could any of us have done what Reggie did? Or was he more or less predisposed than the rest of us to lose his focus, take his eyes from the road, fiddle with his phone?

  The increasingly sophisticated tools of neuroscience have something pointed to say about that.

  CHAPTER 46

  REGGIE’S BRAIN

  AS I WAS GETTING to know Dr. Gazzaley in the spring of 2013, we sat down for lunch in the cafeteria at the UCSF campus where he has his offices. I told him about the accident and Reggie’s story. Dr. Gazzaley listened quietly as he dug into a chopped salad.

  I said I had a question for him: “Can I show you Reggie’s brain?”

  At first, he seemed a little taken aback.

  “Sure,” he said. Dr. Gazzaley’s up for anything. Then he added: “He’s just a regular guy, isn’t he?”

  Precisely what I was trying to find out.

  BACK IN UTAH, DR. Strayer and a colleague named Jason Watson had been using advanced technologies like the MRI to look at attention from inside the brain. What networks are involved? What does distraction look like? While others in the field had been doing this as well, their work was more unusual in that it was part of a larger body of research aimed at exploring whether there are people who are particularly good at managing the onslaught of information. In other words, who can “multitask” better than other people? Are there people who are worse?

  Where did Reggie fit into the spectrum?

  If, after all, he was an outlier, someone with a predisposition to distraction, it would be worth knowing. For instance, was there some signature on his brain of the concussions he sustained playing high school sports? Was there something odd in the way he processed information? Was he more likely to text and drive than the rest of us, or, when texting and driving, to be less able somehow to juggle the tasks?

  In early April 2013, I drove with Reggie from downtown Salt Lake City to the University of Utah’s neuroimaging center. The drive took us up I-15, the same route he’d driven with his parents when he came home from his first mission. Then we took the 600 South exit, heading east, in moderate, midafternoon traffic. Reggie said he was nervous, the idea of getting into the tube, having his head examined. Would they find something wrong?

  On the other hand, this was the Reggie I’d come to know. He would turn down virtually no request that helped illuminate texting and driving—or its risks.

  We almost didn’t get to find out about Reggie’s brain, at least not on that day. We almost wrecked instead.

  Reggie was piloting his 2007 gold Mazda in the far right lane. In the lane to our immediate left was a sedan. In front of us, there was a pickup truck carrying stacks of folding chairs, the kind you put outside for a backyard barbecue on a sunny day, like this one. The chairs came loose from their bundle. We could not have been more than one hundred yards away, when the chairs began falling into our lane, setting up imminent impact. I looked quickly to the right, to the shoulder, but one of the chairs had fallen in that direction. To the left, the sedan had us boxed in.

  I felt instant terror. I flashed on my kids and the idea that we would hit the chairs and start spinning around the highway, and I braced for impact. Reggie swerved left, narrowly missing two chairs rolling our way and sending us toward the sedan. Reggie veered smoothly back to the right, missing by a few feet the sedan, which was now just half a car length ahead of us. It was that close. Had Reggie not had his complete focus on the road,
had he been lost for a millisecond, we’d certainly have crashed.

  A few minutes later, dosed with perspective, we arrived at the neuroimaging center in a nondescript industrial park. Dr. Watson and Dr. Strayer were there to greet us. They walked us through the procedure. They’d take two kinds of pictures of Reggie’s brain. One would be MRI images that would show us the structure of his brain. They’d also take fMRI, functional MRI images—so-called real-time MRI—which would measure blood flow changes as Reggie engaged in different behaviors. Specifically, they were going to watch what happened as Reggie tried to juggle tasks.

  But before they did that, they wanted to know whether Reggie was the sort of person who was good at focusing and attending to information. So prior to putting him in the white tube, they asked him to sit in a small, windowless office, and take a written test. It involved solving some relatively complex equations, and also trying to remember information he’d been asked to memorize a few equations prior. This let them measure not just focus, but his short-term, or working, memory. What was Reggie’s “baseline” ability to attend to information?

  Then Reggie walked down the hallway, got into a medical gown, and climbed onto the MRI bed. The radiology technician made sure everything was in place. She put on his head the helmet that would allow him to see video images. She slid him into the tube.

  THE FIRST RESULTS TO come back, the easy part, were the structural images. With Reggie’s permission, Dr. Watson had sent them to Dr. Gazzaley, and he walked me through the images on his computer. It was a midsummer day, fogless. Through Dr. Gazzaley’s window, across the quad, was the new Benioff Children’s Hospital, a state-of-the-art facility funded by the largesse of Marc Benioff, who, along with his wife, gave $100 million to build the hospital from a fortune he made from his company Salesforce.com, which distributes and manages software for companies on the Internet. The convergence of technology, science, and medicine was on display everywhere you looked.

  Dr. Gazzaley sat in a chair and called up a grainy black-and-white image. Reggie’s brain. Just like he’d once before pulled up Mickey Hart’s.

  “Before we get to it, there’s one thing I want to point out,” he said. He drew my attention to the front of Reggie’s skull. There was a little bump, a slight protrusion just in front of the sinus cavity.

  “He’s got a heavy brow.”

  There’s nothing problematic about that—just an anatomical variability—though it might explain why Reggie sometimes looks as though he is leaning forward. Beside the image, Dr. Gazzaley pulled up the brain of another twenty-six-year-old—a random image taken from the lab—and there was no such protrusion.

  Side by side, the two brains looked fairly similar. Dr. Gazzaley noted some very understated differences. Reggie appeared to have a slightly bigger ventricular system, for instance.

  “Brains are like faces. There is lots of individual variability,” Dr. Gazzaley said. He concluded: “It’s a brain.”

  So far, so good, just a regular guy.

  A FEW WEEKS LATER, after technicians and Dr. Watson in Utah had taken the time to process the rest of the fMRI results, I again visited Dr. Gazzaley’s office. This time, he got Dr. Watson on a sleek black speakerphone. It was afternoon, and Dr. Watson was in his office, talking on a cell phone, and cautioned he might get interrupted because he was also watching his seven-year-old son, Nathan, fresh off summer camp for the day.

  “He’s sitting on the floor behind me, playing video games,” Dr. Watson said.

  “That’s good for his brain,” Dr. Gazzaley said. They both laughed.

  “They’re educational games, mostly.”

  Dr. Gazzaley had two different images on his two monitors. On the larger screen were several images of a brain, with three key spots lit up in orange. On the smaller monitor was a graph that started high on the left and descended to the right at about a forty-five-degree angle.

  The scientists explained that we were looking at measures of Reggie’s brain as he attempted to multitask in the MRI machine. The particular activity that Reggie had undergone while his brain was being imaged in the tube is called a dual n-back test. In it, he was trying to juggle two different demands: remembering and responding to audio cues in his headphones and, separately, remembering and responding to visual cues projected into a mirror he could see while lying in the tube. This is represented by the curve on the smaller of Dr. Gazzaley’s computer monitors. As the task load increases, performance falls. In that way, Reggie looked like lots of other people Dr. Watson and Dr. Strayer have studied.

  So, too, the increased demand on Reggie’s brain showed up as a very familiar brain-imaging pattern to Dr. Watson. Three key areas that were lit up in orange were the anterior cingulate cortex (labeled ACC); the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DL-PFC), and the prefrontal cortex (PFC). These areas, the scientists explained, are part of the attention network, and the fact that they are lit up reflected an increase in blood flow to those locations. More blood flow means they are taking on a greater load.

  That should come as little surprise. Greater demand on attention puts more demand on the attention networks. But one of the things Dr. Watson and others have begun to understand is that people whose performance suffers less—who are, in effect, better “multitaskers”—see a lower load on their attentional networks. The reason is not yet clear, but it might have something to do with how efficiently the brain uses its resources.

  Regardless, Reggie’s brain, and his performance, was right on par with most test subjects. His attention network took on a predictable load as his performance imploded. As Dr. Gazzaley had put it, Reggie was “just a regular guy.”

  “There is one thing that surprised me,” Dr. Watson said.

  It wasn’t the imaging, or Reggie’s performance on the dual n-back test. It was what happened before—before he got into the imaging machine. Just prior to the test, he’d been asked to take a performance test aimed at establishing his general ability to sustain attention. It’s a “baseline” test. How good is Reggie at focusing and dealing with complex problems? Better than most: His score was in the top 25 percent, Dr. Watson said.

  “I’d classify Reggie as high in terms of attention,” he said. “It really illustrates that even those of us with a lot of attention still have a breaking point.”

  In other words, Reggie was far from being someone likely to get distracted—behind the wheel or elsewhere. He has a pretty good ability to focus. Nothing superhuman, just solid. And certainly not more of a liability than the typical person. Nevertheless, when his brain was asked to do too much, to multitask, it became overloaded.

  “Everybody has a limit. That’s the bottom line,” Dr. Watson said.

  CHAPTER 47

  TERRYL

  REGGIE IS A REGULAR guy who rebounded from tragedy.

  Terryl rebounded, too. She and her family were happy, the Warner children thriving, the product of a profound generational change in her bloodline.

  Jayme and Taylor teamed up and won the state history day contest in 2009, and took ninth place in nationals for a project on Joe Hill, a labor activist.

  In 2010 came more remarkable accomplishments. That year, Jayme won first place in the DuPont Challenge, a huge, international science essay competition. She won for her essay titled “Salt: Enhancing Lives One Breath at a Time,” which focused on using salt water to help the breathing of young cystic fibrosis patients. Jayme based her research in part on her sister Katie, who is suffering from the disease.

  She was the first winner to come from Utah.

  But not the last.

  The next year, Taylor won first place, and they became the first sibling pair to ever win, let alone back-to-back. His project focused on solving environment problems, notably waste, by using a natural resource: earthworms. The idea had come after Terryl had suggested putting earthworms in the kitchen in a big box to help compost in a natural and effective way.

  In 2012, Jayme placed third in the state for National History
Day with her paper “Come, Come Ye Saints: Reactions of Early Mormon Pioneers to the Persecutions They Faced.”

  In 2013, Taylor placed fourth in an international science competition, comparing texting while driving to driving under the influence. “He is now considered a published scientist,” Terryl coos.

  Taylor graduated early from high school, in 2013, at the age of sixteen, and was the valedictorian at InTech Collegiate High School. It is a small charter school, public, just 140 students, but U.S. News & World Report ranked it as the top high school in Utah, and one of the top seven hundred in the United States. In his valedictory speech, Taylor thanked his teachers. He thanked his parents. He thanked Steve Jobs, or, at least, quoted the Apple cofounder:

  In the first sixteen to eighteen years of our lives, we have lived between 140,160 hours to 157,680 hours. However, between now and the average life expectancy of seventy-five, we will live about five hundred thousand more hours. In mathematical terms, we are barely scratching the surface of our lives at this point. After today, when the caps have been thrown and the parties have ended, we will all begin our journey into the next half million hours of our lives. Whatever we choose to do, we will be well on our way, due to many who influenced us. Steve Jobs once said, “Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition.”

  Before his conclusion, Taylor said:

  In our future hours of our lives, let us not forget the power of education; the education we have received and the education we face for our future. While millions across the world struggle with illiteracy, poverty, violence and war, let us remember that we have the power, determination and creative minds to help fight and eliminate those social problems. I hope that in our future hours, we will find time to remember our responsibilities to others and resolve to give something back to our society.