On Absentmindedness—My Own and in General

Thursday morning at work, I prepared to fetch our building’s mail and discovered a crinkled sticky note in the drawer beside the mail key.  Curious, I picked it up and immediately recognized the handwriting.  It was my grocery list, which I had found in my coat pocket when I’d started to get the mail the day before, and which I had thought I’d thrown away!  I shared my amusement with my coworker, tossed it as I’d intended, and proceeded to carry a used printer cartridge and some outgoing letters to the Student Union, planning as I walked to take the bulky cartridge box down to the campus store first so I need not carry it farther than necessary—yet I made it past the stairs and down the hall toward the mailboxes before I realized I still had the cumbersome box in my arms!

These are hardly isolated incidents of absentmindedness, nor circumstances restricted to intellectual types like myself; I’ll wager everyone’s nearly put the cereal in the fridge and the milk on the shelf, or another such mix-up.  While insufficient attention may be due to sleepiness, illness, medication, or natural brain structure, the fault in cases like mine is more often distraction with extraneous thoughts, sights, and sounds--or hyperfocus on one task to the detriment others, including mindfulness of one's surroundings.  I theorize (based on personal observation rather than any more-comprehensive scientific method) that most of us go through a majority of the day on autopilot so as to free our brains for other ruminations: observations about the sparrows in the bushes, plans for dinner, speculation about plot developments in last night’s tv show, and of course, daydreams about saving the world (or a town, or a beau, or maybe just a cat) from certain destruction.  Now what was I originally writing about?  Oh, yes—absentmindedness.

Most people can do two complementary activities competently, such as washing dishes and talking, or listening and taking notes (though someone with a learning disability may only be able to do one at a time), and in this division of thought, one or the other may get shortchanged, resulting in mental slips or “crossed wires.”  For instance, we may eat more than we intended because our minds have focused on what we’re reading or watching, or we may write what we overhear someone say instead of what our minds planned to write.

I feel I must sidetrack here to make a distinction: Complementary activities differ somewhat from multitasking, which is when a person quickly alternates between multiple tasks that each requires most that person’s cognition and attention.  For example, one might be scripting in a computer language while following the plot of a tv show and maintaining an IM conversation and an occasional face-to-face conversation.  The complementary example of washing dishes and talking truly can be done simultaneously because one action—typically the physical task—happens automatically, guided by muscle memory and subconscious thought, while the other task takes up the bulk of the person’s conscious thoughts.  However, in this multitasking example, the brain can only focus on one at a time and must restart and refocus on each separate task—sometimes so quickly they seem simultaneous, but that is not the case, and the brain may refocus incompletely so that, in the end, all tasks take longer to complete and are prone to confusion and error.  This is why we’re advised not to text or talk on cell phones when we drive—because fiddling with the phone uses the mental energy that we expend to monitor our mental autopilot, thus decreasing our powers of observation and our reaction time and, conversely, increasing our chance of getting into accidents.  Complementary activities are likewise prone to error—particularly when our conscious mind stops monitoring our autopiloted actions.  Thus, mental abstraction from tasks results in our autopilot driving us to work when we wanted to go to the store or locking our keys in the house when we merely step out to check the mail.

Abstraction can certainly cause problems, but at certain times, it is a desirable state of mind, particularly during life’s inevitable moments of tedium such as may come during periods of waiting or repetition.  Regarding the latter, I will not here expound upon the benefits or detriments of following a routine, but we all know that despite how our daily details may vary, we do have routines--places we frequent, habitual gestures, methods of completing individual tasks from brushing teeth to shoveling snow, and so on.  Furthermore, our schedules tend to remain steady from day to day, week to week, or year to year.  Yet despite the human proclivity to develop habits and our preference for constancy—so comforting in their stability and familiarity—William Cowper said it well that “Variety’s the very spice of life / that gives it all its flavor” (from “The Task”).  The mind craves this variety to feed its creativity and sate its desire for mental stimulation to keep life from becoming stale to us.  Thus, if one’s routine and circumstances prevent much external diversity of occupation, the only remaining source of diversity is internal, and this source is by no means deficient, for one can never claim to be bored who has an intelligent, active mind; reason and imagination can supply both occupation and entertainment during every long delay and every tedious task.  While sitting still or laboring on a simple and familiar physical task, people can engage their mental autopilot, freeing their minds to think or their mouths to talk as they act—except for the small part of the conscious mind that observes one’s surroundings as a safety monitor and draws the conscious mind’s attention when something deviates from what it expects.

    Thus, absentmindedness is fun and relatively harmless excursion from reality--when permitted in a safe environment while the body performs safe and relatively unimportant tasks--but when careless errors may lose us our dignity, our safety, our job, or especially others’ lives, it’s better to keep our minds on the task at hand.