We've all done it before. We're doing something we've done a million times, like drive home from work, when all of a sudden, our attention fades and we come to. We might be at home, we might be at a favorite bar, we might be at a mate's house - bottom line is, we have no idea how we got there.
This is a phenomenon known as the cognitive failure, or more specifically an attentional lapse, and there are a lot of ways to interpret what that means. It has been used to refer to the failure mentioned above, where your brain recognizes an oft-repeated pattern and (anthropomorphically) goes, "well, I don't need to pay attention anymore." It can also be used to describe the moment during an oft-repeated pattern where your higher cognitive function (i.e., your frontal lobe) tunes back in. A great example of this is when a professional baseball player suddenly fails to field a very standard ground ball. Suddenly, rather than just sitting back and leaving the long-programmed response to its own devices, his frontal lobe is attempting to break down and analyze the process, leading to the kind of fielding errors he'd have made in the early days of Little League. In sports, it's also common to see the moment after an attentional lapse occurs and the athlete panics and tries to catch up. A good example of this is when you see a basketball player instinctively reach for a ball and commit a silly foul. Finally, there is also one of the more severe examples of the attentional lapse seen in the instinctive drowning response. In the last few moments before someone drowns, they stop moving their legs, press their arms down into the water to hold themselves upright, and instinctively gulp air when their noses and mouths are above water and hold their breath when under water. This might sound normal, except when you take into account what this actually looks like: rather than panicking and thrashing about and screaming, the victim silently bobs up and down in the water with a blank facial expression and will not respond to ropes or other rescue devices thrown to them. This situation occurs when the victim's neural system has been so flooded with signals that it can actually no longer respond, which results in autonomic functions taking over.
So what ties all of these things together? All of these situations are marked by a battle or interaction between our higher cognitive function and our primitive lizard brain. It probably looks like this:
<insert picture of a lizard fighting a brain with like, a trident or something here. I'm sure you'll be able to find one on the internets.>
As much as we love to think of our brains as single seamlessly-running units, that is really not the case. Much of our behavior is regulated through the frontal lobe (in general), which is, among other things, in charge of inhibiting the limbic system, which is (also among many other things) our center for the three F's: Fucking Fighting! Fucking Flight-ing! And also fornicating. All jokes aside, the limbic system also regulates essential autonomic functions like breathing and heart rate and generally preventing us from becoming ex-humans. Because these are essential functions for the alive-making, the brain has a general preference for keeping that system functioning even if it doesn't have the energy to expend on the others. That means the frontal lobe, our human-y center of human-y functions like decision-making, planning, expression of emotions, directed motor functions, and information analysis (again, among others) might get the shaft when we're in various states. These states could be dire, such as when we're at risk of drowning, panicked, such as when we're committing silly fouls in basketball, or bored, such as when we end up somewhere we can't remember heading to or make silly fielding errors. In all of these situations, the "prime" function shifts back and forth between the higher cognitive functions of the frontal lobe and the primitive functions of the limbic system.
So why is all that relevant? Well, it sort of underscores a point about the fallibility of our neural function as it relates to attention and everyday activities (and well...non-everyday activities in terms of the drowning) and the idea of self-control. As much as it becomes a defense in murder cases, we are often NOT in total control of our actions, and sometimes we just have to live (or...not live) with that.
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