It Seems Like Yesterday. Where Did That Time Go Anyway?

“Time moves in one direction, memory in another.” – William Gibson

Why does time seem to speed up as we get older?  When we were 8 years old, Christmas took forever to get here as we anxiously anticipated our Christmas gifts. Then, somehow, we got to “It’s Christmas already? Again?” Of course, objectively, we know that a year always takes the same 365 days to pass (except on a leap year, of course), and that each of those days contains the same 24 hours. Yet we also know that this is not at all how it feels. I would note, however, that no matter what our age, summer always goes too quickly. We also realize that some things that we think are older occurred at the same time as things we think are older still. Did you know that woolly mammoths were still alive while Egyptians were building those pyramids?  

“Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana” ……Groucho Marx or Anthony Oettinger.

Why is it that some things that happened years ago seem like yesterday, while other things get lost in the past? Yes, why is it that time seems to pass faster as we get older? Why do our brains warp the perception of time based on circumstances and subject matter? If you have time on your hands, there are several theories.

Adrian Bejan, a researcher at Duke University suggested that our perception of time changes due to physical alterations in our brains and bodies as we age.  Why do some days feel longer or shorter than others? And why does time seem to fly by as we get older? One explanation is “clock time” vs. “mind time” According to Bejan, there’s a distinction between measurable clock time and the time perceived by our minds.  “The measurable ‘clock time’ is not the same as the time perceived by the human mind. The ‘mind time’ is a sequence of images, i.e., reflections of nature that are fed by stimuli from sensory organs.” In other words, our brains process a series of mental images based on what we see, hear, and experience. When we’re young, our brains receive and process these images more rapidly. As we age, this processing slows down due to physical changes like the degradation of neural pathways. 

We all know that when you are at work nothing ruins a Friday more than realizing it’s actually Tuesday. 

Cindy Lustig, a psychology professor at the University of Michigan pointed out that as we age, our lives often become more routine. “When we are older, we tend to have lives that are more structured around routines, and fewer of the big landmark events that we use to demarcate different epochs of the ‘time of our lives”. With fewer new experiences, our brains lump similar days and weeks together. This can make time feel like it’s passing more quickly because there are fewer memorable events to distinguish one period from another.

Psychologists have been noticing this feature of the human mind, and have been forming theories about its origins, since psychology began as a discipline. In 1890, William James wrote in his classic text, Principles of Psychology  that this speeding up is probably responsible for the phenomenon which came to be called  “forward telescoping”: our tendency to think that past events have happened more recently than they actually have. For example, Anne Frank, Martin Luther King Jr., Audrey Hepburn, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Grace Kelly and Dick Clark were all born in 1929. The telescoping effect refers to inaccurate perceptions regarding time, where people see recent events as more remote than they are (backward telescoping), and remote events as more recent (forward telescoping). This mental error in memory can occur whenever we make time-based assumptions regarding past events. The Brooklyn Bridge is 11 years older than London's Tower Bridge.

 “The past always looks better than it was. It’s only pleasant because it isn’t here.” — Finley Peter Dunne

It is a short jump (time warp?) from your brain and biology and our perceptions of time to physics. Enter Albert Einstein who believed time is relative and developed his special theory of relativity, Einstein said that time depends on the observer's reference frame. We know that time is the same no matter where we are. “Not so fast” said Einstein although he probably said “Nicht so schnell.”  It depends on our reference point. In 1905, Einstein took a tram ride home and instead of reading a newspaper or checking his social media, he realized something that revolutionized modern physics. While receding away from the Zytglogge (a Clock Tower) in Bern, Switzerland, he imagined what would happen if the tram was zooming along at the speed of light (186,000 miles per second). He realized that at such great speed, the hands of the clock would appear to be completely stationary. However, he knew that back at the clock tower, the hands would tick at their normal pace. He recognized that when he travels fast, time will slow down. He concluded that the faster you move through space, the slower you move through time. Einstein proved that time is relative depending on its observer, rather than an immutably fixed constant everywhere in the universe.

 The idiom, “Time flies when you’re having fun” is mistakenly attributed to Einstein but it was in a 1785 play, Love’s Last Shift by William Congreve. We would add to time flying and fun that when you’re procrastinating, time flies even faster! Although Einstein did say, 'Put your hand on a hot stove for a minute, and it seems like an hour. Sit with a pretty girl for an hour, and it seems like a minute. ...”

And so that is why we know that 30 minutes is 30 minutes except the 30 minutes you get to lie in bed before getting up and starting the day goes a lot quicker than the 30 minutes waiting at the airport as the plane is delayed or at a boring meeting or lecture or cocktail party or your wife/husband et al, makes you watch the Hallmark Channel Christmas in July. Time can be your friend or your foe. The clock plays an important role. As for age, it is a simple fact that for a 10-year-old, one year represents 10 percent of their entire life and even 15 to 20 percent of their conscious memory. But one year for a 50-year-old represents less than 2 percent of their recallable life. Thus, we have those long days in school and almost endless summers of childhood, and the rapidly transitory days, weeks, and months that most of us adults experience. 

Of course there is what is known as the Time Paradox.  My General Practitioner and my Gastroenterologist are a paradox, well they are a pair a Docs anyway.  But we digress. As an example, take the twins Pierre and Marie. Their clocks will remain in sync, and they will age in unison as long as they are in close proximity to one another. However, things would be slightly different if Pierre were to board a rocket and travel through space at almost the speed of light to the Andromeda Galaxy. His voyage may have lasted merely a few months or several years. But for Marie, it might have taken decades or even centuries, depending on how quickly he moved. There is a good chance that when Pierre returns from Andromeda, Marie will be kaput.  Science Fiction writers get orgasmic over this idea. This is precisely what the laws of special relativity require: based on their velocity, various observers in the universe would calculate time differently.

 “Time is a game played beautifully by children.” – Heraclitus

From physics we return to our brains and biological theories. One is that the speeding up of time is linked to how our metabolism gradually slows down as we grow older. Because children's hearts beat faster than ours, because they breathe more quickly and their blood flows more quickly, their body clocks "cover" more time within the space of 24 hours than ours do as adults. Then there is the proportional theory, which suggests that the important factor is that, as you get older, each time period constitutes a smaller fraction of your life as a whole. Mind time and clock time are two totally different things. They flow at varying rates. This theory seems to have been put forward in 1877 by Paul Janet, who suggested the law that  William James describes as, "the apparent length of an interval at a given epoch of a man's life is proportional to the total length of the life itself. A child of 10 feels a year as 1/10 of his whole life — a man of 50 as 1/50, the whole life meanwhile apparently preserving a constant length."

“Time moves slowly but passes quickly.” –Alice Walker.  

Writer Philip Yaffe suggested the speed of time as we experience it has to do with anticipation and retrospection. We cannot wait to graduate from high school or college, and it can be an agonizing process at times. Yet, at the ten-year class reunion we cannot believe it was that long ago. Children and teenagers experience significantly more change, more frequently, than adults. They grow taller, wear new clothes, switch schools, have different friends, and learn new things, good and bad, at school. It is a world of transition and change. As adults, many of these factors level out and don't change at all. As we get older, our brains aren't wired to take in as many things from the outside world, or to learn in the same way. Therefore, three years ago can feel like yesterday: not much has changed in our brain, our perception, or our lived experience. Take Harriet the Tortoise for example. She died in 2006. She had seen Charles Darwin in person.  Harriet was collected by Darwin during his 1835 visit to the Galápagos Islands as part of his round-the-world survey expedition. She was then transported to England, and then brought to her final home, Australia, by a retiring captain of the Beagle. When Harriet was attacked by a gang of snails, the police asked her what happened. She said, “I don’t know, it all happened so fast.” 

Adding to the historical perspective goolash, in today’s digital age, excessive use of social media can also distort our sense of time. When we dive into our favorite apps, we’re met with an endless stream of posts, videos, and updates that continuously stimulate our senses.  Blackberries have come and gone for goodness’s sake. So has Twitter. Misjudgments in time stem from our tendency to assess remembered events by how long ago it feels they occurred rather than a deliberate calculation. Although it’s easier to spot these memory mix-ups in other people, they’re not always easy to detect in ourselves.

There are also physical changes in the aging brain. Our friend Bejan emphasized that these physical changes in our brains contribute significantly to this altered perception. “The rate at which changes in mental images are perceived decreases with age because of several physical features that change with age: saccades (a rapid movement of the eye between fixation points) frequency, body size, pathways degradation, etc.,” As our neural pathways degrade over time, our brains take longer to process new information. This slower processing speed means we’re generating fewer mental images in the same amount of clock time, making time seem to pass faster.  Look at 1977, the year our son was born.  Charlie Chaplin died in 1977, the same year Apple was incorporated. It was also last use of the guillotine in France, and the same year Star Wars came out. Seems like yesterday to us. 

“Time flies over us but leaves its shadow behind.” – Nathaniel Hawthorne. 

So, we continue to wonder why is it that some things that happened years ago seem like yesterday, while other things seem lost in the past? And why is it that time seems to pass faster as we get older? Why does it seem that our brains warp the perception of time based on circumstances and subject matter? Questionnaires by psychologists have shown that almost everyone — including college students — feels that time is passing faster now compared to when they were a fraction as old. And perhaps most notably, a number of experiments have shown that, when older people are asked to guess how long intervals of time are, or to ‘reproduce' the length of periods of time, they guess a shorter amount than younger people. Your children are about to finish school when it doesn't seem long since you were changing their diapers.  

Go back 10 years from your current age.  Could it seem like yesterday?  Ask a 25 year old to back 10 years.  9/11 will be ancient history to Gen Zers while it is etched in the memory of those of us over 40. 2020 and Covid is recent for all of us.  It will be history in 10 years for a 15-year-old. Perhaps in 100 years people will look on it the way we look on the Spanish Flu of 1919. Of course, that depends on how many new diseases the Chinese develop in their labs in the interim. 

I remember exactly where I was when John F. Kennedy was shot, I was taking a French test. I recall where I was when Neil Armstrong said, “The Eagle has landed” (Castle Douglas Scotland).  However, the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor was recent for my parents but ancient history to me. They knew exactly where they were. In fact, my father remembered being at a N.Y Giants football game when it was announced on Sunday, December, 7 1941. Pick a major historical occurrence during your life.  One generation’s current event is another generation’s history.   Just ask the Baby Boomers, Millennials, Generation X and Generation Z about the past.  My friend, Jerry, will occasionally call out “Babalu !”  when someone hits a very long golf shot. He did this one day when we were teamed with a 21-year-old. The Gen Zer said “what’s Babalu?”.  Jerry explained that it was from the TV show, I Love Lucy.  The 21-year-old said, “what’s that?”.  Each generation gives birth to their own cultural sayings, mostly so they can identify with each other, but also so that they can confuse previous generations as to what the meaning is …. Babalu!  As the Who informed us, we’re, “talkin’ ‘bout my generation.”  A reminder,  Idioms will come and go but idiots will always be with us.  

Speaking of the moon landing, Cleopatra lived 69 B.C.–30 B.C. and that first moon landing was in 1969, A.D.…which means Cleopatra lived closer to the moon landing than she did to the building of the Great Pyramid. Our perceptions can enable the past to fool us. 

“When to the sessions of sweet silent thought,                                                                                                        I summon up remembrance of things past”

Shakespeare, Sonnet XXX

• ·      William Shakespeare was still alive while America was still being colonized 
• ·      Harvard University didn't offer calculus classes for the first few years after the school was established in 1836.... because calculus wouldn’t be invented for another 30 years. 
• ·      In 1889 Nintendo was founded when Jack the Ripper was still practicing his surgical skills on live women. Nintendo originally made playing cards called hanafuda.
• ·      Today's oldest living tree (a bristlecone pine) was already 1,000 years old when the last wooly mammoth died
• ·      "Buffalo Bill" Cody was still alive during WWI. 
• ·      Oxford University is older than the Aztec Empire
• ·      The first book of the New Testament, the Epistle of St. Paul - 1 to the Thessalonians was written 16 years after Jesus’ death and resurrection. The first Gospel, Mark was written about 30 years after Jesus died.
• ·      Between the time it was discovered and the time it was “deplaneted”, Pluto did not even complete one revolution around the sun. Revolve in peace Pluto.
• ·      Jurassic Park baloney, the difference in time between when Tyrannosaurus Rex and Stegosaurus was 85,000,000 years. That’s greater than the difference in time between Tyrannosaurus Rex and now.
• ·      And the next time you say you’ll be a “moment,” know that it is actually is a medieval unit of time and is equal to 90 seconds.

“Old age and the passage of time teach all things.”…..Sophocles    

We know and even occasionally understand, that the concept of time involves biology and physics and memory.  Yesterday becomes recent. Recent becomes “then”. Then turns into history. And history becomes “where did the months/years go?”.    This will be the same for everyone regardless of age.  Gen Zers and those yet to be named “Gens”  to follow just like Baby Boomers and those that preceded will also wonder, “Is it Labor Day already?” We all know that children grow up too all too quickly.  Some events will disappear from our memories. Cultural references and idioms (“Babalu”) will become disused and antiquated and forgotten except for those contemporaries who remember and continue to use them to the confusion of a younger generation.  Recall, the last original episode of Seinfeld aired on May 14, 1998. “Not that there’s anything wrong with that.”  Time is an amazing and fascinating phenomenon. It is a fundamental quality of the universe along with the three known spatial dimensions: length, width, and height. It can also be a pain in the posterior.  The chronological passage of the hours, days, and years on clocks and calendars is a steady, measurable phenomenon. Yet our awareness of time shifts constantly, depending on external factors such as seasons, holidays/vacations, birthdates, anniversaries or physical changes such as wrinkles…..I’ll stop there. These will affect the perceived passage of time in minutes, days, hours, weeks and especially years. Now you know why we wonder where the time went yet we’ll  never stop wondering where it went.   But it sure has gone, hasn’t it? 

“Time and tide wait for no man…….Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales.

 

Sources:

https://qz.com/1516804/physics-explains-why-time-passes-faster-as-you-age

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/think-well/202011/why-time-goes-faster-we-age

https://brainworldmagazine.com/time-flies-growing-growing-older-perception-time/

https://thedecisionlab.com/biases/telescoping-effect

https://www.sciencetimes.com/articles/46978/20231108/time-relative-meaning-why-albert-einstein.htm

Time Picture - https://www.shutterstock.com/search/clock-with-wings?dd_referrer=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com%2F

 

 

 

That’s Funny! I Don’t Remember Being Absent Minded.

  

Lack of Attention = Absentmindedness.

 

Now pay attention and don’t forget to keep this in mind.

 

When did I leave my keys in the refrigerator?

 

Absent-mindedness is where attention and memory come together……or apart as it were.  The Oxford English Dictionary cites the earliest evidence for the term absent-minded as 1824 in an essay by author, biographer, and historian Thomas Carlyle.  “Absence of mind "habitual or temporary forgetfulness". Absent-mindedness refers to a cognitive state where a person is forgetful or inattentive, often leading to lapses in memory or awareness in daily activities. Like when someone sprays the flowers in his garden with weed killer instead of Deer Out. This never happened to me. I’ve heard it takes a day or so for them to turn brown. This phenomenon can be caused by distractions, stress, or multitasking, making it challenging to focus on the present moment - like attempting open the door to your house with your car key fob. Lapses in attention directly relate to being absent minded.  Daniel L. Schacter and Chad S. Dodson, of the Harvard Psychology department, note in the riveting journal Psychonomic Bulletin & Review that in the context of memory, "absent-mindedness entails inattentive or shallow processing that contributes to weak memories of ongoing events or forgetting to do things in the future". You live in New York City.  There was 2 ft. of snow overnight. You have an important appointment today. Your focus is how long will it take to dig out your green Toyota Corolla which you parked down on the next block from your apartment two days ago? What are the road conditions?  Am I prepared for the appointment?  Will I find a parking spot there? Will I find a parking space when I get home? You’re not really focusing on the digging out the car part.  Many cars look similar when covered with 2 ft. of snow.  The size, shape and preliminary wiping indicate a green car. With 1/4 of the job complete, yes, it is a green Toyota Corolla. Unfortunately, it is not your green Toyota Corolla. The owner of this green Corolla will be either very grateful or very alarmed. Your green Corolla, you now recall, is parked four cars further down the block.  Never happened to me.  

People may be talking.  They may be yelling. They may be waving their arms and gesticulating. Their lips are moving. You are looking at them, but you are tuned out.  You may even be nodding and smiling in agreement, but you are not really paying attention although they probably think you are.  Yes, we are all masters of what I call, Open Eye Coma. It is not paying attention while seemingly paying attention, frequently for extended periods of time. We develop it during early childhood at home while ignoring our parents.  We begin to master the skill in school, and we continue to perfect it as we go through life.  There is even an official name. Psychologists call it Optimal Inattention.  My mother would call it “in one ear and out the other”.  I even experienced open-eyed coma as my eyes perused some rather obtuse scholarly papers and abstracts on attention and absent mindedness as I researched for this essay.  I would read the entire article. Well, most of it. Don’t remember a word of it. Lack of attention makes you absent minded. William James, the father of psychology, (Mary Whiton Calkins was the mother of psychology), said during the 19^th century, “Everyone knows what attention is. It's the taking possession by the mind in clear and vivid form of one out of what seems several simultaneously possible objects or trains of thought.” You are having breakfast with a group of people at a professional conference. Everyone is talking at once. You are trying to listen to overlapping conversations and - instead of the maple syrup - you pour the coffee from the silver-colored jug onto your French toast. Never happened to me. Abby receives a phone call from her friend, Lynn.  They talk for a few minutes.  Suddenly Abby says in panic. “I can’t find my phone!”  Lynn says, “you’re talking on it”.

Paying attention is the root of the issue and that leads us to attention span.  How is absent-mindedness related to attention? Thinking of other things, you put on your boxer shorts, but you are already wearing another pair of boxer shorts. Never happened to me. We know that our attention has a limited capacity according to Sanbonmatsu, Strayer, Biondi, Behrends, & Moore, 2015. One theory suggests that when our limited attentional resource is occupied, the rate of absent-mindedness may increase. This means pointing the wrong end of the remote at the TV set………….repeatedly. Never happened to me.

A brain region, the prefrontal cortex (PFC) selects what information to focus on. The frontal lobe is the part of the brain that helps people to organize, plan, pay attention, and make decisions. Parts of the frontal lobe may mature a few years later in people with ADHD. 

Our attention has limited capacity. When we are focusing on a specific behavior or activity, we end up paying little attention to other actions or events in our surroundings. Margaret was visiting the supermarket. The main objective was the purchase of raw almonds and walnuts. On the way to the nut shelves and almond land, she noticed an interesting Irish sharp cheddar cheese and then a brie in the cheese section and then recalled that she was low on Kedem Tea Biscuits. She went off to the biscuit aisle. Then she saw that wine was on sale. 15% off plus Senior Discount!  She browsed and purchased wine. They give you these nice little six bottle wine carry bags.  How thoughtful.  She saved quite a bit of money and was very happy with her purchases as she checked out. When she got home, I asked if the almonds were back in stock.  That’s the story she told.

Attention plays an important role in memory – we often forget things because we weren’t paying enough attention to them in the first place. Storing information in memory is called encoding. If you just attend to something superficially, that information is not encoded, you are not likely to remember it. 

In a now infamous 2015 report on attention span, the Consumer Insights team of Microsoft Canada claimed that the average human attention span was down from 12 seconds in the year 2000 to eight seconds in 2015. They claimed that is less than the nine-second attention span of your average goldfish. Sounds fishy.  It is fishy. It is not true. It is a myth and, as we all know, a myth is a female moth. The media, of course, was frothing over this report and it took 2 years for the report to flounder and be proven to be flukey fake.  Simon Maybin looked into the origins of the myth in a 2017 BBC article and discovered that there are no statistics to back it up.  None.  There is no evidence that goldfish - or fish in general have particularly short attention spans or memories, despite the attempted insertion into popular culture. Now, on the other hand, guppies………

When I was a speaker at science education conferences, I reminded my audiences that as a general rule, in a classroom, most children can focus for a number of minutes equal to their age + 2 minutes. Therefore a 7-year-old – 9 minutes, a 10-year-old, for 12 minutes, a 12-year-old can focus for about 14 minutes. In fact, adults cannot usually focus for more than 15-20 minutes at a time.  After this time the brain needs some time to process the information in a different way so you should change your approach, continue the message but deliver it differently. Or just give it a rest for a few minutes. Or tell a joke.  I never did that of course. Several authors claim that attention span declines precipitously after 10–15 minutes. As a result of those claims, it is often suggested that presentations/lectures/talks should last no more than 10–15 min to accommodate the biological set point of our attention span. I started thinking about some sermons in church.  Pay attention! The most recent attention span research indicates attention spans of 9–10 years old: 20-30 minutes, 11-12 years old: 25-35 minutes, 13-15 years old: 30-40 minutes, 16+ years old: 32-50+ minutes. 

Getting someone’s attention is not usually the problem.  Keeping it can be. People have an internal radio station, WIFM – What’s In it For Me.  Chances are that they will pay attention if there is something of value for them. 

Attention control is affected by how much attention we give each task.  We only have a finite amount of attentional resources, and each task requires different levels of attention. This can lead to absentmindedness, that cognitive bias, which is, as noted, the failure to attend to a task resulting in mistakes and forgetful behavior particularly when two tasks are being attempted simultaneously.  You put on a pot of water to boil. Then you throw in some pasta. As long as the pasta is heating up you might as well attend to other tasks. While you are in another room vacuuming, the smoke alarm goes off and you end up with charbroiled pasta. Although sometimes you fill the pot with water and attend to other tasks and think, “gee, is the water boiling?” When you check you realize that you did not turn the burner on after you filled the pot. Other times you forget to put the water in.  Life can be difficult sometimes. 

Multitasking often leads to absentmindedness. It is not always the positive attribute it is made out to be.  You’re holding your phone and a sandwich, and you bite the phone.   Or, you are holding a cup of coffee, you turn your wrist to check your watch, the cup of coffee is in the same hand as your watch. I saw that in a Laurel and Hardy movie but I’m sure it occurs every day in real life. Life imitates art.  You leave the house with lots on your mind and then have to turn around multiple times to check if you remembered your wallet, keys, phone. Never happened to me.

There are several factors that affect attention and lead to you being absent minded; 1. Lack of Focus and Concentration 2. Stress and Anxiety. Chronic stress and anxiety overload your mind and impair your memory. When you’re frazzled, your mind is preoccupied with worries and less able to concentrate on routine tasks.  3. Multitasking 4. Sleep Deprivation - Most adults need 7-9 hours of sleep per night to function at their best. Less than that, and your memory, focus and decision making suffer 5. Information Overload (see lectures, college) 6. Relying Too Much on Technology (a danger of Artificial Intelligence )7. Aging and Memory Decline  8. Medications and Health Issues  9. Poor Organization and Planning. 10. Boring lectures, conversations, instructions, people, movies, TV shows, books……….

 As for aging and memory decline, there is the story of the two elderly gentlemen having a conversation.  The first says, “I’m getting worried about my memory.  I find myself standing next to the bed. Was I getting up or lying down? I’m holding the refrigerator door.  Was I opening or closing it? I’m at my front door.  Was I going in or going out?”  The second gentleman says “Well I’m sharp as a tack.  Haven’t lost a thing.  Never will”.  He knocks on wood for good luck, turns around and says, “who is it?”

Informational overload, our brains can only process so much information at once. When you’re bombarded with emails, texts, social media alerts, and sensory overloads in general, your mind struggles to keep up. Important details start to slip through the cracks, such as the failure to flush the toilet. So, absent-mindedness is characterized by a temporary lapse in attention or memory, for a variety of reasons, often resulting in forgetfulness or a lack of awareness of one’s immediate surroundings like pouring dish soap powder on your spaghetti instead of parmesan cheese while engrossed in a Discovery Channel documentary on the courtship rituals of the Pacific Walrus  on your TV.  It’s not the same as Attention Deficit Disorder, which is a more persistent condition. Sometimes there is a failure to empty your pockets before doing the laundry as paper money, (coins make a lot of noise in the dryer…..is this money laundering?)  receipts, iPhone, pet chihuahua, etc. join with your clothes in the washer. Confession, some years ago I found out that iPods were not waterproof. Even putting it in the dryer after the wash cycle didn’t help. “I must be getting absent-minded. Whenever I complain that things aren't what they used to be, I always forget to include myself.”…..George Burns……..

Absent-mindedness is typically temporary and doesn’t significantly impair overall cognitive function. It’s more like a brief hiccup, well in many cases several hiccups, in our mental processes, a momentary disconnect between our attention and our surroundings. You’re thinking about the day ahead and instead of milk, you pour the orange juice into the bowl of oatmeal.  Never happened to me. Doesn’t taste that bad though.

We’ve all been there – that moment of angst when you can’t remember where you parked your car in a parking lot and you walk up and down aisles of cars clicking your key fob so your car horn will honk and you realize the car is two rows over, or the sinking feeling when you realize you’ve forgotten an important deadline or phone call. These lapses in memory and attention are not just annoying.  They can have real consequences in our personal and professional lives like if you are on a cliff or edge of precipice or too close to a geyser. You were talking to someone and didn’t pay attention to the warning signs. You take a selfie.  You fall off/down/in.  You die. 

At its core, absent-mindedness is intimately tied to the workings of attention and memory. Our brains are constantly bombarded with information, and our attention acts as a filter, deciding what’s important enough to focus on. When this filter falters, or when our working memory becomes overloaded, that’s when absent-mindedness tends to rear its head. During Covid, you search online for the increasingly scarce antibacterial hand sanitizer wipes. You find them! Excited at your find, you order that pack of 200.  Great price too. You didn’t pay attention to the size. They are ½” x ½”.  Never happened to me. Good for cleaning your thumbnail though. I know someone who still has 180 or so left if you’re interested. 

As we’ve said (we have to repeat it so you won’t forget), absent-mindedness is a thought bias that happens when people “zone out” (open eye coma) and make mistakes in daily life (Broadbent, Cooper, FitzGerald, & Parkes, 1982). The mistakes can be anything related to a lack of attention, e.g., mistaking liquid hand sanitizer for eyedrops. Never happened to me. Note, it really hurts.

 Dictionaries define absentmindedness as an adjective: Unprepared or not paying attention. Synonyms includeoblivious, faraway, dreamy, distracted, abstracted, absent-minded, absent, ditzy, unmindful, heedless, distrait, preoccupied. You’ve boarded the plane from Paris to New York.  You survived the ordeal of security. Have I removed all the metal from my person?  You’ve bought overpriced items at the Duty-Free Store but at least you didn’t pay duty. You’ve survived the cacophony of sound in the waiting area. Your get on the correct line – section 3.  You have your passport ready. You just want to get on the plane and go. You board the plane. Will there be space in the overhead bin?  You find your seat. No one is in it. There is space in left in the overhead bin. The tension has eased, and you can finally relax. You reach in your shoulder bag to get your iPad.  It’s not there! You can’t find your iPad! Frantically, you search your bag. Not there. You stand up. Perhaps you sat on it. It is nowhere around your seat. You ask if you can leave the plane to look for it as boarding has just commenced.  No, you can’t.  But wait, a compassionate flight attendant allows you a few, escorted by him, minutes for a quick search.  You desperately check your seat and surrounding area in the lounge, and the last shop you visited.  Not there. The flight attendant looks at his watch.  You get back on the plane.  After takeoff you reach in your bag for a paperback book.  There, nestled underneath the book is the iPad. You missed it during your highly agitated rummaging.  After the fuss you made while searching you don’t want to take it out and have the flight attendants see you using it. You make the entire trip without using the iPad.  We’re not mentioning names Carol.  

When you are not paying attention to the task at hand, the memory is not encoded and stored, which means you’ll have a hard time recalling it. Although we believe ourselves to be talented multitaskers, the human brain is not wired to direct full attention to more than one task at a time. As a result, errors occur whether they are conscious or not. Other times, our desire to attend to a task is minimal resulting in low attentional resource allocation and higher rates of cognitive failure. You miss your exit while driving because you were searching for Elvis’ recording of Do the Clam on Spotify. Remember that the attention you are giving to each task is not equivalent.  When you multitask one task suffers, and mistakes occur. Moral of the story… stay focused on one task at a time! 

“I checked all around my house frantically for my glasses and couldn't find them ..until I realized that I was actually wearing them.” ……..A countless number of people over a countless number of years. 

Our attention has limited capacity. When we are focusing on a specific behavior or activity, we end up paying little attention to other actions or events in our surroundings such as when deep in thought while walking you accidentally march into a glass door. Most of us simply need to declutter our lives which is, of course, easier said than done. In fact we will probably forget to continue decluttering tomorrow unless we put little post it reminders to declutter all over the house. Thus, adding more clutter.  We can try to focus on the moment; manage stress; improve sleep, exercise and nutrition; and use cues and schedules to limit errors of absent-mindedness. Yes, we have all done it – forgotten someone’s name, left the house keys in the house, put something in the wrong drawer and spent forever looking for it, or that misplaced the car in the parking lot. And in all likelihood, we’ll do it again……… really soon. 

Lastly, Margaret related to me a story that she once saw on the internet. Quite a few years ago, a woman went into a small ice cream parlor in her Connecticut town. As she walked to the counter, she saw the famous, and handsome actor, Paul Newman sitting alone at a table enjoying an ice cream.  Determined to be casual about it, she continued to the counter and ordered an ice cream cone. Conspicuously pretending she didn’t see PAUL NEWMAN, she got her cone, paid, and collected her change.  When she got outside, she realized that she didn’t have her ice cream cone. She ran back inside and looked for her cone on the counter.  It wasn’t there. From his table, Paul Newman said, “you put it in your purse”. 

 

“What a waste it is to lose one's mind. Or not to have a mind is being very wasteful. How true that is.” …….Dan Quayle

 

Sources:

https://web.colby.edu/cogblog/2018/04/26/absent-mindedness-no-you-are-not-a-good-multitasker/

 

 https://www.eachbrainmatters.org/post/absent-mindedness

 

https://www.sambarecovery.com/rehab-blog/average-human-attention-span-statistics

 

https://www.believeinmind.com/personality/what-causes-absent-mindedness/

 

https://neurolaunch.com/absent-mindedness-psychology/

 

Picture from https://me.me/t/uninterested