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NYer's Nick Paumgarten looks into why two Northwest pilots overshot their destination:
Around the same time, researchers at Western Washington University released the results of an experiment in what’s called “inattentional blindness”—a state of such absorption in an activity that you fail to notice really obvious stuff around you, like a guy in a gorilla suit or the state of Wisconsin. In this particular case, it was a clown on a unicycle, pedalling through an open square on campus. Of the test subjects who were walking by while talking on their cell phones, roughly three out of four failed to see the clown; of those who were merely walking, and not talking, the number was much lower. The conclusion was that when you are on the phone you are out to lunch—unless you are actually out to lunch, in which case if you’re on the phone you aren’t really at lunch anymore.
When you're out to lunch really be out to lunch and put your telephone away, especially when you're with a friend.
