A closer look

Australia boasts a stretch of highway so notoriously straight, flat, and mind-numbingly boring that the government actually installed trivia games on road signs to prevent drivers from falling asleep at the wheel. The Eyre Highway features a ninety-mile section with absolutely no curves, no hills, and no scenery other than relentless scrub brush, regularly inducing a dangerous state of highway hypnosis. To stop motorists from drifting off into the Outback and crashing, officials placed brightly colored signs asking multiple-choice trivia questions, with the correct answers revealed a few miles down the road. It is a wildly creative strategy to hack the human brain’s desperate need for stimulation when faced with the sheer existential emptiness of the Australian continent. It is simultaneously the most brilliant safety initiative ever designed and a hilarious testament to how easily our brains simply shut off when deprived of internet access for more than two hours!