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Good morning and welcome to Episode 031 of the Train Your Brain Podcast with Dr. Michael Trayford. Every Monday we produce a 30-minute episode. Tuesday through Sunday we produce episodes with five-minute tips. Every episode of the Train Your Brain Podcast features a tip, so you can receive pointers 365 days a year that will help enhance the performance of your brain!

In Episode 031, Dr. Trayford gives us the all-important tip to “drive safe,” as they say. Injury from a motor vehicle accident could be very traumatic for your body and substantially harmful and disruptive to your brain function. Please practice this preventative brain health tip and drive safe.

Note: If you should have any grammatical concerns about the title of this episode, please consider the following commentary about flat adverbs.

If you have any concerns regarding the information and applications discussed in this podcast, please consult your physician and a doctor who is experienced in functional neurology. Michael Trayford DC, DACNB is available for consultation by calling (828) 708-5274. Thanks for listening.

This falls into the category of. The obvious. This tip is simply drive safe. There’s a lot to this. There’s a lot more to it that I want folks to look into and investigate.

Now we all know that we have to drive safe. We had to take classes and tests that taught us how to drive the right way and our parents told us to drive safe. But what does it all really mean?

Jason: Sorry I thought you were asking! For me, they call me Grandma Pyles, just so you know. I’m maybe the safest driver I know. Or at least we all fancy ourselves as safe drivers. But I’m very serious about not get crazy behind the wheel.

Understood and it would be nice if we could get into other folks heads when they’re on the road and try to figure out what’s going in their minds as they’re not doing things that are all that safe. It just seems the more and more people you talk to. It seems the roads are just getting crazier and crazier. Particularly with all the activity that’s going on with people looking at smart phones when they’re behind the wheel.

Jason: Oh my Goodness!

Driving safe is critical and I speak from genuine experience with this. In March I had a pretty bad accident where I wound up leading me into surgery for my back. I stopped at an existing accident scene and basically the lights were flashing and we were just waiting there and had been struck from behind from a car traveling at a very high rate of speed. About sixty miles an hour and I was stopped.

Basically this is an individual that got caught up in the lights and chose not to slow down when driving through an accident scene. We can’t change other people and that particular case I likely couldn’t have avoided the situation.

But my point with this is, I was born and raised in New York. In New York… And this is a pop quiz. Do we have offensive or defensive drivers in New York?

Jason: Wow it’s… Boy that’s a really good question because I’ve encountered both. If you’re a cab driver, definitely offensive. And if you’re around cab drivers, then you have to drive defensively.

I’ve done a lot of big city driving and typically it’s that everyone has to be offensive and in a strange sort of way that works. If everybody is on that same wavelength.

I guess down in Florida it might be the opposite where everybody is defensive, slow and cautious. That’s the stereotype I hear. I don’t spend a lot of time in Florida.
It’s quite different everywhere you go. The bottom line is that after that accident I became a very defensive driver. I’m watching what every single person on the road is doing so that I can protect myself as best I can and protect my family as best I can when something goes wrong.

That’s quite a different twist on things from how I was raised and how I was taught to drive and learned to drive as I grew up. But it’s really critically important to protect yourself in your vehicle. We see the end result of these head injuries. In my particular case it was a back surgery but with that I was laid up for months and my brain suffered as a result because I couldn’t exercise any more. I was in quite a bit of pain all the time. And these things all take their toll.

So we want to avoid these things, we want to use our own safe habits and control our aggressions while we are driving. Make the appropriate choices, looking both ways, even after that light turns green. A lot of common sense issues that you learned about when taking driving tests and when learning how to drive. But putting them back into play, because in that quick moment when you take to assess the situation around you on the roadway, can be the difference between life and death or significantly altering the normal life that you potentially enjoy right now.

So I can’t stress that enough. Let’s be safe on the roads, lets teach our kids to be safe on the roads, lets put those devices away.

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