54 pages • 1 hour read
Matt RichtelA Deadly Wandering
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2014A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
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BetaChapters 7-10Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 7 Summary: “The Neuroscientists”
Dr. Gazzaley hosts a party in his San Francisco loft. There, he explains the “cocktail party effect”—the idea that at a party, where multiple streams of conversation are happening, you can only truly pay attention to one stream at a time. This demonstrates the limitations of attention: While you can control where you direct your attention, you can only focus it on one specific thing. Attention is “more like a laser than an overhead light” (62).
Up until the mid-19th century, it was initially believed that the brain was infinite in its capacity to process the stimuli of the world. However, Herman von Helmholtz performed experiments related to neural conduction time and discovered that it actually took time for current to travel to the brain—a factor that would necessarily limit the bounds of reaction time. Building on this work, in the 1860s, Francis Cornelius Donders of the Netherlands conducted a series of experiments on the circumstances that caused both shorter and longer human reaction times. He found that the more complex the task, the longer the reaction time, and the more likely it is for humans to make an error.
Back at his party, Gazzaley points out the creator of online virtual world Second Life wearing a Google Glass device, which can display a stream of information in your glasses. To show Richtel the power of distraction, which is not necessarily the opposite of but “an antagonist to” attention (70), Gazzaley enlists the help of his magician friend.
Chapter 8 Summary: “Terryl”
In 10th grade, in the middle of the night, Terryl’s dad came into her room playing the saxophone. It was yet another incident in a long line of abusive encounters. He had been berating her throughout her high school years because Terryl stood up to him on occasion. He occasionally flashed his gun, threatening to take away Mitchell, the youngest son, if Terryl’s mom tried to leave.
Terryl tried to keep her mind off her turbulent home life. At 16, she got a job at a mom-and-pop accounting business in town. At 18, she joined the cheerleading squad. Danny continued to drink and berate her, often in front of her friends or other adults. Midway through her senior year, Terryl accompanied her mother to the courthouse to file for divorce. There, Terryl learned that Danny was not her biological father—that man never wanted to be a father to her.
At community college, Terryl joined the debate team and argued against the use of violence in advertising. After two years there, Terryl applied to colleges and enrolled at USC, where she took criminal psychology classes. But Danny returned after her first year and again threatened her with the prospect of never seeing her brother Mitchell. Mitchell remembers the altercation another way, “underscoring the differences in how some children saw their parents, and the strife” (79).
Chapter 9 Summary: “Reggie”
Mary Jane, Reggie’s mom, receives an aggressive call from Rindlisbacher, who accuses her of knowing something she’s not telling. They set up a follow-up interview with Reggie.
Reggie’s best friend, Dallas Miller, has nothing but good things to say about Reggie: “I was the wild one, he was the mild one” (84).
Reggie played video games with his brothers when he was young. His adoption of technology paralleled what was happening in the country. A study found that between 1999 and 2004, time spent using media skyrocketed, and in 2009, young people were spending an average of over 10 hours a day consuming media, due to the rise of multitasking.
When Reggie met his girlfriend, Cammi, his mother disapproved, because she thought Cammi would keep Reggie in town, preventing him from going on a mission, which is what eventually happened.
Chapter 10 Summary: “Reggie”
Reggie meets with counselor Gaylyn White and confesses that he can’t remember what exactly happened in the moments leading up to the accident. She takes modest notes, thinking of the legal implications if Reggie is ever charged.
White wonders if his thwarted Mormon mission is compounding his shame. Before the truth of their relationship was fully revealed and Reggie’s mission was canceled, Reggie at first lied to his bishop about having sex with Cammi over Christmas break when Reggie was 19. After lying to the bishop, Reggie told Cammi that he had told the bishop the truth, hoping to prevent her from telling on them.
Reggie visits a lawyer named Jon Bunderson and tells him wet roads caused the accident. Bunderson wants a copy of Reggie’s phone bill and tells him not to contact the victims of the family because any apology might be construed as an admission of guilt.
Meanwhile, a 17-year-old drifts off a road not far from Tremonton, hits a truck, and is killed. The prosecutor’s office learns that the driver might have been on the phone during the accident.
Chapters 7-10 Analysis
Chapter 7 begins to lay the serious groundwork for the scientific basis of attention, which will be important for understanding Reggie’s accident, as well as the larger dangers of texting and driving. Scientists once thought that reaction time was instantaneous and attention was limitless. When research showed that this was not the case, “it was quite revelatory in the middle of the nineteenth century. Up to that point, there was a general belief that the brain was ‘infinite’ in its power to take in and process the world” (63). Richter builds suspense by breaking off the scientific narrative just before Gazzaley’s magician friend can perform his demonstration of attention and distraction.
We learn more about Reggie in these chapters, and the portrait that emerges is that of a highly typical teenager. He is driven by hormones, feels guilty about having premarital sex with his girlfriend in defiance of his religious beliefs, but is overall regarded as a good friend and decent young man. Though readers who know the truth behind what happened during the accident feel the urge to condemn Reggie’s stonewalling and evasiveness—he claims not to remember anything, then insists that the wet roadway caused him to swerve—Richter does not want us to demonize him in the same way that, for example, Terryl’s stepfather Danny should be demonized. The comparison to Danny is salient because of Terryl’s future work on behalf of the victims of Reggie’s accident: Victims deserve the truth and recompense whether or not the perpetrator is a monster.
