From Campaign Outsider’s Late-To-The-Party bureau:

The piece on DWT (Driving While Talking/Texting) in Thursday’s New York Times presented a harrowing picture of what’s called distracted driving:

Studies show that someone who talks on the phone while driving is four times more likely to crash, even using a hands-free headset, than someone who is simply driving. The risks are even greater when sending text messages.

Hands-free, hands-on – talk however you want on a cellphone, your risk factor is equal to drunk-driving. Worse yet, you’re not even doing a good job of multitasking, according to research cited by the Times:

According to that research, a person focused on a single task remembers what he has learned using the hippocampus, a part of the brain critical to storing and recalling information.

But when that person multitasks — like trying to learn something new while driving — the brain relies more on the striatum, a part of the brain used more for learning motor skills.

The researchers concluded, “Don’t multitask while you are trying to learn something new you hope to remember.”

“The brain is fundamentally built to unitask,” said Clifford Nass, a communications professor at Stanford, where he is also a co-director of a new automotive research laboratory.

Nowhere in the Times piece, however, was there any mention of audiobooks. But wait a second – aren’t they as distracting as a phone conversation? Don’t they qualify as “trying to learn something new while driving”?

Apparently not. Plug “distracted driving audiobooks” into nexis and you get . . . nothing. Plug the same into Google News and you get five results that have nothing to do with the actual topic.

I dunno – am I missing something?