Here’s a hat tip from a research that was recently published in the British journal Injury Prevention, where it was headed by Richard Lichenstein of the University of Maryland Hospital for Children in Baltimore. According to this research, there is a worrying trend that the number of US pedestrians who were killed or injured badly had tripled in a matter of half a dozen years – and the common denominator would be this – all the victims wore headphones.
The annual figure hit 47 last year compared to just 16 in 2004, which means over the last six years or so, the total number of deaths numbered at 116. Over half of the incidents involved pedestrians who were hit by trains – definitely not a good way to go, not to mention the kind of mess it creates after that. Gory. Just to prove that males are, once again, more carefree and prone to take risks in their youth, 67% of the victims were males who have yet to experience taste of how being in the 30s age bracket is like. Wearing headphones might cause “inattentional blindness”, where this distraction lowers the resources the brain devotes to external stimuli, and hence increasing the risk of being hit by a train or other vehicle. The study involved iPods, MP3 players and other musical devices, but did not include phones (smart or otherwise).
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