What Happens When Our Brain Suddenly Decides to Autopilot?

Illustration: CollegeDegrees360 - Flickr

You know that feeling when you're studying for an upcoming exam and after reading the whole page you realize that you do not remember a single word of you read — but you're sure that you made it from the top to the bottom of the page, line by line?

Three Types of Memory

It turns out that this is an extremely common, yet very understudied phenomenon in cognitive psychology, called mind-wandering.

In order to take a closer look at this, we have to take a look at how information is stored in our brains. Memory is divided into three categories: short-term memory, long-term memory and working memory. The first two are obvious from their names: short-term memory lasts only about 6 seconds, while long-term memory is there so we can remember things longer than 10 seconds.

Storing Memories Permanently

Working memory is the interesting one: it's what allows memories to be processed from short-term to long-term memory. For something to be stored in the long-term memory, it has to first enter the short-term memories. If you're concentrated enough, your brain will invoke the working memory which is help the information get stored in long-term memory.

Illustration: Fe Ilya - Flickr

If your mind becomes preoccupied with something else (such as daydreaming) while you're trying to read, your working memory focuses on processing your daydream into long-term memory. Thus, the stuff you're reading will be stored only in short-term memory, because there's no working memory to store it permanently. This is precisely why you will keep reading — you will always remember few previous words, giving you a false sense of context.

As you can see, this is nothing to worry about. A lot of times it happens and you don't even realize, because it might happen for only a few seconds, so you don't realize that information was stored only in short-term memory. For example, you might forget what an abbreviation means — your brain just flew over that part in the text. Maybe something similar happened to you while reading this article?

Description: Learn what happens in your brain when you realize you don't remember the paragraph you just read.