It’s a scenario familiar to countless drivers: You’re in your car, eyes forward and hands on the wheel. For just a moment, you look down — maybe to check a message on your cellphone. You’ve done it a hundred times and you’ve never crashed. https://www.10tv.com/article/news/local/hidden-dangers-distracted-driving-ohio-how-to-avoid-mistakes/530-cca95691-be9e-4a6f-af7c-60919b662086 But what you may not realize is that taking your eyes off the road for five seconds is equivalent to driving the length of a football field blindfolded at 55 miles per hour. This common behavior is more dangerous than many think, according to Kevin Rider, a human factors expert who investigates catastrophic accidents. “The more your eyes are off the road, phone or otherwise, the more likely you will be in a terrible collision,” Rider said. Rider added that distracted driving isn’t just about looking at your phone; it’s about how our brains process information while being behind the wheel. There are two main pathways to distraction: cognitive tunneling and inattention blindness. Cognitive tunneling: Narrowing your view “When you are focused on something, both your actual vision and your mental awareness just kind of tunnel,” Rider said. Imagine driving as if your vision was restricted by looking through a narrow tube. The world outside your focused area — like a child darting across the street — can disappear from your awareness. “You look down, and something changes while you look back down, and you look back up. Your brain has to reprocess the entire visual scene and you will likely miss whatever changed,” Rider said. That brief moment of lost focus can mean the difference between stopping in time or slamming into the car in front of you. Franklin County leads the state with the most distracted driving violations, with almost 3,000, according to data from the Ohio State Highway Patrol. That’s double the amount of violations for Cuyahoga and Hamilton counties.