Wired.com’s science blogger today posted a report on another mobile phone use study. This one has the catchy headline “Driving Distracts Cellphone Users,” and its summary statement reads:

Cellphone conversations don’t just interfere with driving. Driving dents the capacity to describe and remember cellphone messages, at least for some of the youngest and oldest drivers, a new study finds.

Shocker. I’d pretty much inferred that conclusion from the outcries for usage bans while driving and the studies citing mobile phone use as a significant safety risk.

I am constantly amazed at how the current generation multitasks. Watching television carrying on multiple simultaneous chat sessions on various social networks talking on a phone or phones firing off tweets doing homework. The lack of traditional series punctuation matches the activity. As someone a few months short of 50 years on the planet, I question the quality of what anyone is able to accomplish in that environment. As the blog further states:

These new findings challenge the belief that work productivity benefits by conducting important conversations, such as business negotiations, while commuting.

The singular differentiator for world class athletes like Jordan, et al, is the ability to focus on one thing to the degree time moves in slow motion. They block out all distractions. Most of us will never accomplish anything on such an order, but the more balls in the air to divide focus pushes us incrementally farther from the goal.

I refer anyone with doubts, and especially anyone ages 16 to 34, to this U.K. public service announcement on texting while driving on YouTube. WARNING: the video would sport at least a PG-13 rating in U.S. theaters and be relegated to cable-only channels bearing a TVMA-V rating on broadcast television. If not for the innocent bystanders damaged as a result I’d call such activities a contemporary proof of Darwin’s theory of natural selection.