Automatic/autonomic
Young or old it happens to us all, we perform some repetitive task our hands/feet/fingers just do it without any conscious thought; or we carry out some action so often all instances blend into one and something interrupts us and we think am I doing this right, did I do this? I think the only difference between the ages is that the young get annoyed or shrug it off and the old worry about it.
Happened to me last night as my fingers flew over the alarm keypad without looking, I was about to hit the last key and stupidly looked at what I was doing and froze in thought - 'Did I get that right, should I trust I did and carry on or reset everything and start again?' I simply had no memory of what buttons I'd pressed. I trusted my instincts and carried on; it worked. Walking out the door, I thought about what had happened, does this happen more with age or do we just worry about it more, and how I'd pop this thought onto my blog. I got into my car drove off and then thought 'Did I lock the works door?' <sigh> Yes I had.
2 comments:
Yeah, habit is a good slave but a poor master. It has been said that the mark of progress, intellectually speaking, is not what you think about but what you no longer need to think about: counting to ten, hitting the right keys to write a message, signalling before you pull out. And we have this automatic error-detection mechanism that every so often just says "hey, something's not right here".
Now all we need is some error-detection for the error-detection.
I'm not sure about the intellectual progress it seems more akin to instinct, simple pattern matching - when in this situation you perform this action. Sometimes it seems you're just pressing the Go button and your body takes over, with it being the case sometimes that you don't even realise you're hitting Go :-)
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