What’s the relationship between memory loss and driving?

You’ve just seen your doctor, and you’ve been diagnosed with mild cognitive impairment or Alzheimer’s disease. Does that mean you shouldn’t be driving?

Driving requires many brain systems to work together

Driving is a complicated skill and a dangerous activity. Almost 43,000 people died in motor vehicle crashes in the U.S. in 2021.

In addition to good physical health, driving requires many brain systems to function together. The thinking part of your brain consists of four pairs of lobes — occipital, temporal, parietal, and frontal — in the left and right hemispheres of the brain, and all of them are active when you are driving:

The visual-object system in your occipital and temporal lobes processes the images coming in from your eyes to enable you to distinguish cars, bicycles and pedestrians.

Driving combines conscious and unconscious brain activity

“Wow,” you may be thinking, “how can I do all of these activities while I’m driving and still sing along with the radio, listen to an audiobook, or speak with my friend sitting in the passenger seat?” The answer is that, once you’ve learned to drive, most of your routine driving occurs automatically and unconsciously. In fact, there’s increasing evidence that you go through most of your daily routines automatically, without conscious effort controlling your actions. This is why, if you become distracted while you are driving, you may find yourself heading to work on autopilot when you meant to go to the grocery store.

Your conscious mind takes control, however, whenever the situation requires it. So if you are driving in a snowstorm, when it is raining, or on an icy road, your conscious mind will devote its attention to your driving. That’s why you’ll stop singing, pause the audiobook, and ask your friend to hold on for a minute during these situations.

Alzheimer’s disease and other dementias impair driving

Alzheimer’s disease and other forms of dementia affect a variety of different brain regions, including all four lobes of the brain. For this reason, people with Alzheimer’s disease often show impaired visual, auditory, attention and decision-making abilities. However, not everyone with Alzheimer’s must stop driving. It depends on both the overall severity of the disease, as well as the specific cognitive abilities that are impaired.

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