Think the Answer's Clear? Look Again

Win an Academy Award and you're likely to live longer than had you been a runner-up.

Interview for medical school on a rainy day, and your chances of being selected could fall.

Such are some of the surprising findings of Dr. Donald A. Redelmeier, a physician-researcher and perhaps the leading debunker of preconceived notions in the medical world.

In his 20 years as a researcher, first at Stanford University, now at the University of Toronto, Dr. Redelmeier, 50, has applied scientific rigor to topics that in lesser hands might have been dismissed as quirky and iconoclastic. In doing so, his work has shattered myths and revealed some deep truths about the predictors of longevity, the organization of health care and the workings of the medical mind.

"He'll go totally against intuition, and come up with a beautiful finding," said Eldar Shafir, a professor of psychology and public affairs at Princeton University who has worked with Dr. Redelmeier on research into medical decision-making.

Dr. Redelmeier was the first to study cellphones and automobile crashes. A paper he published in The New England Journal of Medicine in 1997 concluded that talking on a cellphone while driving was as dangerous as driving while intoxicated. His collaborator, Robert Tibshirani, a statistician at Stanford University, said the paper "is likely to dwarf all of my other work in statistics, in terms of its direct impact on public health."

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"Life is a marathon, not a sprint," [said Dr. Redelmeier], adding, "A great deal of mischief occurs when people are in a rush."

To that end, he studied the psychology around changing lanes in traffic. In an article published in Nature in 1999, Dr. Redelmeier and Professor Tibshirani found that while cars in the other lane sometimes appear to be moving faster, they are not.

"Every driver on average thinks he's in the wrong lane," Dr. Redelmeier said. "You think more cars are passing you when you're actually passing them just as quickly. Still, you make a lane change where the benefits are illusory and not real." Meanwhile, changing lanes increases the chances of collision about threefold.

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