Gridlock Guy: Crank that song? How some music impacts the way we drive.

Two particular songs have caused me to speed, or at least so I’ve always believed.

I wrote about these tunes almost exactly five years ago. Back then, I should have gotten a speeding ticket on Clairmont Road when “Wet Sand” — by my favorite band, Red Hot Chili Peppers — busted loose in its crescendo. Some 10 years before that, “Welcome to the Black Parade” by My Chemical Romance garnered me an expensive infraction on Buford Highway in Doraville.

In both cases, I got lost in songs I liked and my attention drifted from how fast I was going.

This is why I perked up when I saw a recent piece from the news site The Conversation about music’s effect on driving. Milad Haghani, an associate professor of urban resilience and mobility at the University of Melbourne, helped conduct tests with subjects using driving simulators in his own lab in Australia. He also compiled a couple of decades’ worth of research from around the world to help him draw some broad conclusions.

Driving in silence results in fewer errors, he said. There’s a reduced risk of crashes and drivers are better at controlling their speed and maintaining the distance between them and the vehicle in front, Haghani told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution and 11Alive.

However, he said evidence has not shown music to impact how well drivers maintain their lanes or their reaction times.

He doesn’t promote the abolition of music in cars, which he notes affects driving far less than when motorists hold their phones or drive drunk. Haghani, though, has found the songs we play can have different impacts on how we drive.

Loud music, he said, does not necessarily cause poorer driving. And, surprisingly, data shows fast-tempo beats don’t either.

But the genre with the biggest impact is often both fast and loud, Haghani said.

“Aggressive genres such as heavy metal and genres of that category — they have been shown to nudge the driver towards not only higher speed, but overall a more aggressive and a more risk-taking style of driving,” he said.

He also said younger or less experienced drivers are more impressionable to being swayed by music, or any other distraction while driving.

What he and other researchers are measuring, basically, is the amount of brain power any kind of action takes. The more things the driver has to process, the more likely they are to make a mistake. So, Haghani said, motorists in labs have performed better when they pick their own music, songs they like and recognize.

This bolsters my opinion that whoever drives the car should choose the music. This also could dispel my theory on how the Chili Peppers and My Chemical Romance affected my driving years ago.

Haghani also had some interesting findings regarding the spoken word: Podcasts and news broadcasts have little effect on driving, unless the subject matter is heavy (economics and finance caused some mistakes).

Conversations about ordinary things are OK, but back seat passengers cause more brain-load. And using hands-free voice assistants are just as distracting as a hands-free phone call.

Haghani’s findings show that we should pay more attention to what distracts us the most. Even if we don’t completely delete Metallica from our playlist, maybe we will hit the “next” arrow when we are driving in the rain or on an unfamiliar road at night.

Every little bit helps.