Your Drive World with the Chief Driver - Hot car deaths

We all have those moments of forgetfulness in which we temporarily forget where we are going and why we are going there. Sometimes, we turn into a familiar street out of habit, such as happens if your weekend shopping takes you into the neighbourhood of your workplace.

In other instances, we tend to forget about dropping off or picking up something or someone in a particular place – just because it’s not part of our regular driving routine.

In most cases, no-one gets hurt from this forgetfulness, but in a few rare cases, it can prove fatal, especially when it involves leaving a helpless baby locked up in a hot, airless vehicle throughout an entire day.

A Texas-based couple are reeling from the momentary forgetfulness that led to the death of their one-year-old daughter earlier this year.
On the day Ray-Ray died, “I glanced at the clock, and it was flashing 9:43, and the whole household was late,” Kristie Reeves says. “It was totally chaotic.” While her husband Brett frantically got ready for work, Kristie dressed up Ray-Ray.

“We both gave her a hug and a kiss and told her we loved her, and she waved goodbye to me,” Kristie said.

As he drove through Austin, Texas, Brett came to a T-intersection. To the left was Ray Ray’s childcare facility, to the right was the route to work. “That morning he took a right-hand turn instead of a left, one single wrong turn setting off our tragedy.

Hours later, the couple would discover Ray-Ray dying of heat-related complications in the back seat of Brett’s car. Emergency responders tried to resuscitate the tiny child to no avail.

The tragedy of Ray-Ray’s death is experienced by the parents of an average 37 children each year. Most parents believe that forgetting their child in a car is something that will never happen to them, until it does, according to a professor of psychology who has studied the science behind the phenomenon of children forgotten in cars, and the power-struggle that can occur in all human brains when it comes to memory.

Over-worked brains

“We all experience when we have a plan to do something in the future and then we forget to complete that plan.” Researchers say that this is where several competing factors in the brain come into play. The first component is the basal ganglia, the brain centre, which operates on a subconscious level, such as the ability to ride a bicycle, allowing people to “go on autopilot.”

The basal ganglia works independently of the hippocampus, which is the part of the brain that has to do with conscious awareness and new information. The hippocampus and the frontal cortex work together to plan future activities and events.

In interviews with several parents whose children have died after being left in cars, a pattern begins to emerge in these stories.
In that subset of cases, the basal ganglia is taking you on a route that does not include a child, according to researchers. The child is often quiet and out of sight, or even asleep in such cases, which causes the parent to lose awareness of their presence.

“The twist is, they did not stop at day-care on the way but the brain creates a false memory putting the child at day-care. If the child isn’t in the car, then they must be where they belong, and the parents go to work with absolute certainty the child is safe.”

It goes on to say that the brain will fill in the gaps, and the importance of the forgotten person or item begins to diminish.

“What we try to get across to people is that it’s not about the importance of the item. It’s about a dynamic brain system that can take things as trivial as a cup or purse left on top of my car. And it goes to tragic memory failures such as leaving dogs and children in cars.”

When it comes to forgetting a child in the car, it’s all about routines, and breaks in those routines that can prove fatal.

Several remedies have been put forward, such as using a phone app that helps alert a parent to a child in the car, putting a shoe or a briefcase in the backseat or making sure a parent opens the backdoor and trunk at every stop.

The recent Hot Cars Act of 2017 in the US Congress seeks to install visual and auditory cues in cars to signal to a parent when a child is in the backseat before the driver exits the vehicle. An NGO, Kids and Cars, is still working to build support for the act.

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