- Occipital – center for visual-spatial processing, movement, color recognition
- Temporal – the primary auditory cortex, interprets smells and sounds
- Parietal – processes sensory information, coordinates spatial relations, movement and visual orientation, visual perception, and information processing
- Frontal – problem solving, reasoning, motor skills, impulse control, planning, and regulating social behavior.
Conscious Vs. Subconscious Driving
You may be amazed at the fact that you do all these activities and process all this information while you drive – even while you sing along with the radio, listen to a podcast, or speak with your friend in the passenger seat. The reality is that most of what you do is routine and automatic once you learn to do it. There’s significant evidence that most of your daily routines are conducted almost subconsciously without much conscious thought on your part. That’s why if you become distracted while you’re driving, you may not even remember passing familiar landmarks. You’re on autopilot. Under duress, however, your conscious mind takes over. When you drive in a snowstorm or a torrential downpour, or on icy roads, you devote your entire conscious mind to your driving. You tune out the radio—or turn it off— pause the podcast or quit talking with your friend. But what about when you’re driving and suffer from cognitive impairment?Driving With MCI Or Alzheimer’s Disease
Alzheimer’s and other dementias can impact all four lobes of the brain. People with Alzheimer’s may experience slow visual, auditory, attention, and decision-making processes that can make driving unsafe. As you probably know, Alzheimer’s starts silently and unobtrusively without very many symptoms. It may affect thinking and memory but still allow normal function. That’s the mild cognitive impairment stage. When the disease affects more of one’s cognitive function, it’s at the dementia stage. One study found that folks with Alzheimer’s had more than double the car wrecks per year as healthy people of the same age – 0.09 crashes per year compared with 0.04 crashes. Another study showed that people with mild cognitive impairment and very mild dementia were impaired to the same level as 16- to 20-year-old drivers. However, we allow new drivers to drive with few to no restrictions. Not every person with Alzheimer’s disease or MCI needs to stop driving, however. Alzheimer’s has stages that can last for different lengths of time in different people, and a lot depends on the severity of the disease and which cognitive abilities are affected.When Should You Stop Driving?
The American Academy of Neurology established standards to help professionals decide when those with Alzheimer’s disease or MCI should stop driving. The questions to ask include:- Do caregivers consider you to have marginal or unsafe driving skills?
- Do you have a history of citations and/or crashes?
- Do you drive fewer than 60 miles per week?
- Do you avoid driving in certain situations?
- Are you aggressive or impulsive while driving?
- Is your cognition impaired on normal cognitive tests?
- Do other factors impair your driving, such as alcohol or medications that cause mental impairment, sleep disorders, visual impairment, or motor impairment?
