Our Autopilot

Old cavalrymen often told the story of how horses in the corral would form up and go through the maneuvers indicated by the calls of a bugler who was practicing those calls.

“The horses must have been pretty smart to remember all those calls and how they were supposed to respond to them,” I said.

The person who was telling me this story smiled. “I don’t know about that,” he said. “Doing all that unnecessary work doesn’t seem too smart to me.”

What we do frequently resembles what those horses were doing. We practice or perform tasks until our actions become automatic. In some ways this conditioning resembles an autopilot. It is what allows us to do more than one thing at the same time; it is what allows us to simultaneously walk, chew gum, and think about that project we are struggling to complete. Even in this example of combining simple things, however, there is a fourth factor that can be problematic. If you are concentrating too much on that project, you might forget why you are walking, which is to say that you might forget where you are going. This is particularly true if where you are going has nothing to do with the project you are thinking about.

One Saturday morning I got up at the same time I normally got up to go to work. My family was having a get together at my sister’s house. The first freeway I had to take was the same one I took to get to my place of employment. My mind was on something I had been writing the night before. I was half way to work before I realized that I had missed the transition to another freeway I had to take to get to my sister’s place.

Another time I found myself walking down a hallway of the firm I worked for. My mind was very much on a project I was trying to complete, and I forgot where I was going. I had to stop and think about it. On that occasion a full bladder reminded me that I had left my office to go to the men’s room. When I was leaving the men’s room a female attorney emerging from the lady’s room almost bumped into me. She was still reading a pleading she had taken into the rest room.

“Damn, you can’t go anywhere without working,” I said.

“True, too true.” She glanced down at her wristwatch. “I must have lost track of time. I can’t believe I was in there for over a half an hour.”

“You know what they say about the passage of time when you’re having fun” sprang to my mind but went unspoken. I was afraid she might not take kindly to the implications of that comment. It raises some questions about what she was doing in the restroom. In all likelihood she was just peeing. Peeing is something we frequently do. It does not require a lot of thought. Reading the pleading and forming a response to it, on the other hand, are tasks that require a conscious effort. It is easy for me to understand why she might have forgotten that she was sitting on the pot. It was because her attention was focused on what she was reading.

One hot, summer day I kicked off my shoes and let them fall beneath my desk. An hour later my phone rang. It was my secretary. She called to remind me of a meeting I was supposed to attend a few minutes later. Since I did not normally take my shoes off at work I forgot that I had done it. My response to the reminder was automatic. I grabbed a note pad and marched off to the conference room where the meeting being held. No one seemed to notice my lack of shoes until the meeting was over. As I stood up to leave the person sitting next to me asked where my shoes were, much to the amusement of the other attendees. Such lapses of memory usually inspire a bit of ribbing from my fellow workers. I was prepared to hear about this for quite some time. Fortunately, a female attorney did something even funnier a few weeks later. She had two pairs of shoes under her desk. When it was time for her to leave her office for a meeting she slipped on two shoes without looking. She arrived at the meeting wearing one red shoe and one black shoe. It was quite a fashion statement, even if it was inadvertent.

Most people would not consider the examples I have given as multi-tasking. They would say that remembering where you are going, where you are at, and that you have taken off your shoes does not require any thought, but they are wrong. Those mundane things we all take for granted still demand some of our attention. The autopilot simply relieves us of the burden of thinking about each motion that is necessary in order to walk or put on our shoes.

Attorneys work long hours. What they do also requires them to concentrate on every detail of the task at hand. They say that the less sleep you get the more automatic and mechanical your motions become and the more you have to concentrate on each individual task. That sounds like the excuse I have been looking for. I am going to take a nap now.

First published in macsbackporch.foxtail-farms.com on Aug 3, 2010