I used to drive a lot. Six western states as a sales territory. Some of that was during the 55 mph days. Yeah a few years ago, lol. Ugh, that was really boring on the big empty stretches. No cell phones yet. No internet. Radio was it. Most of that powerful Mexican AM stations. So the mind would wander during that ten hour drive to Tucson from Los Angeles. The only real distraction out there was Phoenix.

But now with so much media in the car with us it’s a far more dangerous pastime. Our autopilot fails when interrupted by certain distractions like looking at a small screen for texting.

Many of us have experienced prolonged stretches of driving where we’re seemingly oblivious to our surroundings, and we’re left dumbfounded that we didn’t get into a serious accident. A new study suggests that a specific brain function protects us from these bouts of absentminded driving—but that it completely breaks down while texting.

In 2014, over 3,000 people were killed as a direct result of texting while driving, while another 431,000 were left injured. And there are other forms of distracted driving that are worthy of attention, such as absentminded driving, or driving while upset. A team of scientists from the University of Houston and the Texas A&M Transportation Institute recently embarked on a project to study the various ways drivers become distracted, and how it affects their performance.

Their results, which now appear in Scientific Advances, shows that absentminded driving, or driving while angry or upset, is not nearly as bad as previously assumed—and in some instances, can actually improve our driving (up to a point). The reason, said the researchers, has to do with a part of our brain that acts like a “sixth sense,” protecting us from distractions. At the same time, this cognitive process becomes impaired when we’re incessantly looking up and down at our smartphones—an observation that reaffirms just how dangerous texting-and-driving really is.

More: Why We Don’t Crash Our Cars While Daydreaming and Driving