Worst drivers and couch potatoes

By: Brent Kreud

Date: Monday, 15. January 2007

Its kind of like a couch potato's dream. You lie there with your beer and munchies and learn to be a better golfer, or tennis player, or footballer!

A recent paper published in Neuron magazine by Canadian psychologist Paul Gribble and student Andrew Mattar describes research which indicates that observing others perform complex motor tasks (such as a golf swing) helps us learn.

It would seem that the hours spent watching sports on television can not only tell our conscious minds about what movements need to be made, but more importantly can inform our motor systems about how to make them, says Gribble.

One of the striking findings of our study is that motor learning can happen without actually moving, but just by observing someone else moving, Gribble adds. The motor systems, the brain areas involved in generating movements, are being subconsciously activated when we observe the actions of others. Our brains are essentially imitating the actions we observe, in our minds, without us being aware of it.

Ok, I knew that all along, I hear you say. But the study, carried out by the Departments of Psychology and Physiology & Pharmacology at the University of Western Ontario, adds some academic weight to the idea. Now we can feel more justified spending those sunny week-end afternoons watching Tiger and VJ battle it out for golfs number one spot. Were improving our golf swing as we sit there on the couch.

So, if this works for sports why not for driving? Why not get rid of all those world's worst driver programs and concentrate on the positive -- a program on the best drivers.

It would be very boring, you're thinking. And sure it would -- unless someone figures a way to make the glorious ballet of everyday traffic into hot video footage with keen human interest. But why not?

When you think about it, the wonder of modern traffic is that, with all the conflicts and congestion and complaining, it really works marvelously well. For the most part, great rivers of traffic flow along our highways, and millions of drivers get to work and home safely and efficiently day after day. And, for the most part, busy congested traffic in towns and cities interacts like a practiced ballet.

One radio commentator marveled at the exquisite little movements he observed in traffic as drivers conducted their delicate little negotiations with pedestrians and other traffic at intersections. Of course he was talking about Paris, France, where a different environment and different traffic culture made these little details more visible.

But the phenomenon exists everywhere there's traffic. There's marvelous stuff going on out there if we could see it and make something out of it. Driving is like any other human activity. There are super performers, and perhaps even superstars like VJ and Tiger, if only we could watch them and learn.

Maybe some day creative TV producers will team up with driving experts and use Hollywood-class production values to give the public something more positive than The World's Worst Drivers .

It would be a new era, and great driver training for couch potatoes.