Crime and Courts: Death of teen wearing headphones highlights 'inattentional blindness'

It appears incredible that it does not happen much more frequently. We all see them, particularly about campus: young people crossing the street wearing headphones, sometimes oblivious to what's going on around them.
I've hit the brakes over as soon as for bicyclists and pedestrians who have floated in front of my moving automobile on University Avenue, by no means glancing in my direction. They can't hear you honk. All you can do is shake your head and hope that individual doesn't end up dead.
Like Joey Kramer. He was walking to Longfellow Middle School in Wauwatosa on Monday and was hit and killed by a freight train. Regardless of the warning whistle beats by dre studio, he by no means heard it coming. He was listening to headphones.
No one formally tracks how often headphones play a component in pedestrian injuries or fatalities. But only weeks ago, University of Maryland medical researchers took at stab at it. Of the accidents they had been able to discover from media and other sources that involved pedestrians listening to headphones dr dre headphones, they noted a six-fold increase from 2004 to 2011.
Researchers have a name for the distraction caused by electronic devices: inattentional blindness. In brief, it means there are an excessive amount of stimuli for a person's mental resources to handle.
In the Maryland study beats pro, researchers looked at 116 accident cases involving headphones from 2004 to 2011, 70 percent of which had been fatal. Fifty-five percent from the accidents involved trains.
Larry Corsi monster headphones, pedestrian and bicycle safety plan manager for the state Department of Transportation, says he's "not seen a lot" of accidents related to headphone use monster beats, but it's probably been an undocumented factor in some cases.
"It's not something we track that closely," he says.
In Wisconsin the good news is that pedestrian injuries have decreased by 44 percent since 1990. But there are still lots of them. The DOT reported 1,239 accidents resulting in injuries in 2010. Of those, 54 resulted in death. Corsi says that number rose to 58 final year.
The tragic case of Joey Kramer puts this year's pedestrian deaths at 3, compared with 10 at this date final year.
But you have to wonder just how much the injury and death rate could be additional decreased if fewer pedestrians were afflicted with inattentional blindness.