If texting and driving is such a bad idea, why do so many people do it?

“We’re good at perceiving gist,” said Thomas Sanocki, who teaches perception at the University of South Florida. “The overall meaning of a scene. People are really good at that.”

It feels like we can text and drive because we generally know what to expect. We’re better at it when we know the scene, especially close to our homes. We know the stop sign is at the corner, that there’s a traffic light and a sharp turn and a speed bump. We get by, most of the time, even if we’re not doing our best. We’ve been trained to spread ourselves thin.

Companies downsize and don’t decrease workloads. Television always fights for focus, whether it’s a tease to American Idol in the corner of your Family Guy episode, or an MTV music video playing during Teen Mom credits, or stock figures and sports scores swooshing across your cable news. But just about every study out there points to one conclusion: When we do multiple things at once, we perform worse.

Want to know more? Coming soon in the Tampa Bay Times and on tampabay.com, you can read a story from reporter Stephanie Hayes, who followed a family affected by texting and driving and tried to unlock the reasons why we feel bored enough to pick up our phones while hurtling a car down the highway. The family in the story, Steve and Agnes Augello of Spring Hill, lobbied hard in the 2012 Florida Legislature for a bill that would put limits on texting while driving, but at publication time, the bill’s chance of passing was slim.