I was driving along — eating a peach and thinking about world affairs, wondering what kind of president Jerry Springer would make, doubting whether any president could get peaches to taste like they used to, checking the back seat again (one-handed) for that darned missing relaxation tape — when something on the radio distracted me.

It was a shocking report about distraction.

It said we are very distracted behind the wheel — that while driving our 3,000-pound vehicles through traffic we basically have the attention span of TV-viewers.

We cruise the radio dial, talk on the phone, fix our hair, eat our lunch, balance our checkbooks, breast-feed our babies …

Well, I have never breast-fed a baby while driving my car. And in fact, the breast-feeding part was not in this particular report. It was in the newspaper recently in Columbus, Ohio, where a 29-year-old woman was charged with child endangerment for breast-feeding her 7-month-old daughter while driving on the Ohio Turnpike.

But it is all part of the same fabric of human folly. The driver’s seat of a car has come to be, in our minds, another living space — a place to go to get a little work done, to be alone with one’s thoughts, feed the baby, check the messages at work — a place to which one retires between other places, at legal speeds of up to 75 miles an hour.

A quarter of all accidents are caused by driver distraction, according to the American Automobile Assn. That is a lot of pain and suffering.

So, this is not meant as a joke, folks. I have actually decided to clean up my act, recognizing in myself all the symptoms of serial driver-distractedness. I invite you to do the same. First, I will really try to stop eating and drinking while driving. Radio-dial switching, I will have to work up to. …

The study that caught my distracted attention was funded by the American Automobile Assn. and conducted by some clever researchers who basically conned 70 motorists into allowing them to mount tiny video cameras inside their cars without telling them exactly why.

According to Reuters, the test subjects were told only that the cameras would record “how traffic and road conditions affected their behavior.” They were not told that the main thrust of the research was to study the dumb things people do while driving.

In brief, the study found that we do many dumb things.

All 70 drivers were distracted at least 16 percent of the time. Seventy-one percent ate or drank at least once during the three-hour test period, 46 percent groomed themselves (putting on lipstick, taking a pill, picking their teeth in the rear view mirror), 91 percent cruised the radio dial or CD player, 40 percent read or wrote (the report said “most” of them did this while stopped, though it didn’t say how many was “most”). About a third used a cell phone at least once during the three-hour test.

The report did not single out cell phones as the most distracting of distractions. Instead, it focused on the broader context into which cell-phone use has plopped down upon us: We apparently will do anything to keep from admitting that we’re strapped into a car with nothing to do but drive and check mirrors for unforeseen hazards.

In my gut of guts, still, I know that talking on the phone — of all the dumb things I have done — is the most distracting of all the stupid driver distractions. Hand-held, hands-free, no matter. A conversation with another person — even a mechanical conversation — is a dream state that involves conjuring another person, processing a spoken voice, replying in language symbols that are more complex than we give ourselves credit for; and never mind whether deep emotions get into it, which they often do.

But that is another study. I should not be distracted by personal peeves. I shall instead resolve, while driving, to be cell-free, calorie-free, nevermore to tie a tie knot or skim the newspaper in traffic jams, or twist open jars of olives and pass them to people in the back seat.

There may be worse things we do in the course of an average day, but few of those are actually dangerous to the lives of fellow human beings.

And no, I did not write this on a laptop on the way to work.