Cool Brain "Moments"

So I'm using this page to document the times my brain has surprised me and not worked the way that I had expected. These moments are about unexpected behavior not mental failure. Most of these deal with the autonomous brain functions -- the ability of the brain to schedule some activity and have it not be managed by our consciousness.

Newer entries are earlier in the list.

• [20221222] Had another emacs event the other day. I was searching through a large log file using control-s. I was evaluating each search hit to see if the log entries were the ones that I was looking for and my conscious brain was evaluating each match. At some point moving to the next search entry my conscious brain was wondering why I was pressing control-s 3 times so slowed my key-presses down to make sure I wasn't skipping over matches. No, my hands were doing the right thing. The first control-s to bring up the search dialog, the second to repeat the previous search again, and the third because I had moved up in the file to do the evaluation so I needed to move to the next match in the log. Again my autonomous motor memory was operating correctly even though my conscious brain wasn't sure.
• [20080320] Similar to the next entry, I just went to do a query on google for 'cvs dental tape' to lookup some dental floss that I like from CVS, a pharmacy I visit. Instead of typing cvs I type in [sadly] svn showing how cross wired svn/cvs. Sigh.
• [20060721] So the thing that happened this morning which generated this document was my typing of the command 'cvs'. At work we use 'svn' to store our source code while at home I use 'cvs'. They do similar functions and have similar arguments. When I started using svn at work I had to continually correct 'cvs diff' to 'svn diff'. This morning I was working at home and three times told my fingers to type 'cvs' and it came out 'svn'. I finally had to look down at the keyboard and force my fingers to spell out C V S. This shows the power of our autonomous mental functions.
• There have been many times when I told my mouth to say something that it then did not say. Either I said a different word that was semi-appropriate or not appropriate in the context at all. Why wife would then say "you just said X" and I would argue that I didn't. There was one time that I remember scheduling my mouth to say something and then I heard it say something else. Doh! Nothing bad of course but just strange.
• My favorite brain moment happened maybe around ~2000. I was writing into my Palm Pilot PDA using their graffiti script. One of the problems with graffiti was that I could think at lot faster than I could write. One time I was writing the phrase "then he went over" or something and as I watched my hands with my conscious brain, I noticed that I was crossing the T in the words 'then' and 'went'. In graffiti, all letters are a single stroke so the crossing of the T was wrong and I stopped writing. But when I then did it more slowly I figured out that I was not crossing the T but putting in a space. My autonomous brain was driving my hands correctly but my conscious brain didn't know it. How cool is that.
• So I use emacs to edit text files (like this one). It is an editor that uses the control key a lot to move the cursor around -- you press control-p to move to the previous line for example. I am continually amazed that my conscious brain will ask the cursor to be moved to a spot in the buffer and my fingers will just take it there. My conscious brain does not have to say control-p, control-p, control-p, meta-f, meta-f, meta-f, control-b. It just says move THERE and the rest happens automagically.
• If I am preoccupied with some problem at work, I will often find myself pulling into my house with little to no recollection of the last 15 minutes of driving. If I retrace my steps I had to handle this stop, sign, this blinking light, and this left hand turn cross traffic. One of the reasons why I think it is important to develop good driving instinct is that we drive so often by relying on the autonomous parts of our brains. If you don't have hard-wired that red is stop then if you are talking on your cell phone, you'll run the red light. Not good.

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