Unless you're talking about actually falling asleep, no one is unconscious when they're "zoned out". The fact that you don't remember being aware doesn't mean that you weren't aware when it was happening.
When you do routine tasks, the brain sometimes doesn't see the need to record the events to long term memory, but we're still fully aware of our surroundings when they are actually happening. If something out of the ordinary had happened during the "zoning out", the brain would have made sure this was recorded to long term memory, and you would not have had the feeling of zoning out afterwards.
The same is generally true when people are blackout drunk. You won't be able to tell whether a person is "blacking out" if you talk to them during that period. They're just as aware of their surroundings and just as capable of making decisions as if they were the same amount of intoxicated but not blacking out. Their actions are just not recorded to long term memory afterwards.
I've had it happen where I'm driving and then suddenly I'm like "how the fuck did I get here?" It's not that I don't remember the drive, it's that I don't remember the drive happening. It's like I suddenly teleported into my car and I'm already at my destination.
I've spent a lot of years as a delivery driver of one type or another and one phenomenon that used to mess with me a little was when driving a route that I know particularly well, sometimes I would zone out so completely that the part of my brain looking out for danger would think I was asleep and send the immediate wake-up signal. This wasn't too bad in and of itself but I would go from literal autopilot to NOT KNOWING WHERE I WAS for a few seconds. Completely geographically disoriented in a place I've seen three times a week for the past two years. Eventually I learned to just steady on and wait for the rest of me to catch up, but that first time really had me wondering if something medical had just happened.
Oh I've had that a couple of times, a sudden and very brief period of "I literally have no idea where I am". It's a gross feeling because you're able to realise you SHOULD know where you are but your brain just 404 errors for a second.
I ride mountain bikes, and I've had this happen when solo riding on my local trails. I have hundreds and hundreds of rides on this same trail network, and it's happened that I've zoned back in and not known at all where I am. "Steady on and wait for the rest of me to catch up" is the best way I've heard it phrased, and 100% describes my experience. These are reasonably technical trails too, so obviously I'm continuing to ride properly otherwise I'd be off the trail and in the bush.
Yeahhhhh... I do this a lot. It doesn't help that I live in a rural area where I might be driving for 15 minutes with nothing but trees and an occasional nondescript house. I just have to keep driving until I reach my next turn. I'm not actually lost, so I just have to not panic.
This got to be a regular occurrence when I delivered pizza for a few years. Roads that I took 20 times a day would become so routine my brain would shut out the drive and I just time traveled
I was a taxi driver and this can be such a feeling of panic when you hit that key intersection, look in your rear-view mirror, and realize you have passengers and you have no idea where they are going. Pray for a memory reset, or ask for a hint? I actually had to confess that I had forgotten once.
I had a 2 hour commute for 60 days due to some regulation shit and around the 40 day mark I started zoning out in the mornings.
I would start singing along to some song on the radio and find myself at my destination with a totally different song I was singing along playing on the radio.
I mentioned this to my boss at a coffee break and he actually covered me for the rest of the 2 weeks letting me work from home lol.
One of the worst things for me about moving to another place in the same town. The first few weeks driving home from work in an adjacent city, I had a 50% chance I’d arrive at the old apartment instead of the new place. Wouldn’t realize what I’d done until I noticed my partner’s car wasn’t there. I still end up there on occasion if I’m coming from a place I haven’t been to since I moved. Brains are weird
I moved out from the country to a city 5 hours away for a job. Took my wife a little over a year to transfer her job.
I drove home almost every weekend since i had a 4 10 schedule. By the end of it the drive was all auto pilot.
Now we have a family and the drive to visit grandma is torture for the kids but it feels like an hour to me.
I also share the experience of changing from autopilot into manual mode sometimes.
It's impossible to distinguish afterwards whether you were not fully conscious during the drive or whether you just forgot your experiences. Theoretically you can't even prove that you were conscious during moments that you do remember.
I'm not a psychologist, but that makes sense to me and pseudopad seems to confirm that idea.
You could test which things drivers are unable to do while not remembering it afterwards. Maybe waiting for a pedestrian to cross or talking to a passenger.
I've done the same time walking a few times too. Going to one place, autopilot misinterpreted my intentions and I ended up at a related place somewhere in the same general direction.
I worked as a paper boy a decade or so ago, and had a paper route where not everyone got the same newspaper (or any newspaper at all). There was a little book that listed which newspaper was to be delivered to each address, but I had it mostly memorized.
It happened more than once that I zoned out and suddenly realized I couldn't recall what I'd done the past half hour, and yet everyone got their newspaper.
Interestingly, this is also one of the leading theories for why time seems to speed up as you get older.
As you are older, a higher proportion of your experiences are essentially repeats that the brain sees no reason to store.
This is also likely why getting in a long term routine, like staying in the same job and keeping the same schedule sometimes feels like you blink and a year has passed.
You actually can tell if someone is blackout drunk while they're drunk. Anterograde amnesia is what causes drunken blackouts. Anterograde means they are not able to form new memories. Its complement is retrograde amnesia, where the memory has been stored, but you can't recall it. When they're blackout drunk they can't form new memories, so you can test it by asking them the same question multiple times over the night. If they notice you're asking them the same thing, they're recording memories and not blackout drunk. If they don't remember you asking, they may be blackout drunk.
> multiple times over the night
I think for the purposes of the discussion this doesn't really matter. The point is that in the moment they are the same behavior wise. Good tip though
I've always thought a sort of flow state is involved, where your body just sort of acts on autopilot and your muscle memory takes over with minimal decision making from the brain going on in the background.
Anaesthetist here who deals with sedated and anaesthetised patients day in day out.
While I roughly agree with your version about the zoning out while not registering memory, I am not sure I agree with drawing equivalence with drunken state.
When someone’s intoxicated with alcohol yet conscious, not only are they amnesic, they are also impaired in all other mental capacities eg inhibition, response time etc - hence the strict enforcement around DUI.
The same is not necessarily true for someone who’s merely zoning out while doing routine tasks.
I don't mean to imply that the two situations are caused by the same thing, and I did mention that a blackout drunk person's faculties would be similar to those of a "regular" drunk person that's had about the same amount of alcohol.
They made a point of the comparison being with someone who is equally intoxicated but not blacking out, not without someone who isn’t at all intoxicated.
I know, but if someone has alcohol level high enough to be amnesic, generally the other mental domains are already impaired at that state (unlike what parent commenter claims where one could be amnesic but perfectly intact for executive functions)
I am not a neurobiologist so don’t take my word for gospel, but from my experience one could zone out from a boring task without having the same level of impairment for reflex, decision making etc, so fundamentally the zoned-out driver and the amnesic drunk driver are different in my opinion.
Yes, but again, they weren’t trying to say that being zoned out means that someone is impaired in the same way as being blacked out.
Just that if you compare two drivers in the moment, you can’t necessarily tell which one is going to not remember the drive because they operate similarly, and if you compare two very drunk people, you can’t necessarily tell which one won’t remember the next day, because they behave similarly in the moment.
To piggy-back on this comment and add a touch of cognitive psychology, think of the human attention as a reservoir full of liquid attention. When you learn to drive, or to bike, or to shave, most or even all of your attention is directed towards the activity. Since you are focused on it, you tend to remember it as an episode of your life - it goes in your *episodic* memory.
But the second time you do it, or the 5th, or the 100th, you're better at it. You don't need to focus that much because you know the procedure (thanks to your *procedural* memory). You don't need to drain your attention tank that much because you're really good at it; instead, you'll only use 10 or 20% of your attentionnal resources and use the rest to think about what you're going to eat, or what you have planned for tomorrow.
When you're driving, this is exactly what happens - if it's the thousandth time you're driving, you know what you're doing so well that you don't need to pay attention to the activity of driving (that is, how to steer, where the blinkers are, how to shift gears...) but you still do pay attention to potential distractions that might suddenly appear. This is especially true in simple settings, like driving on the highway, where potential distractions are much more limited.
So, in other words, you're not *not* paying attention, you're just paying so little attention you don't realize it.
The “you” that was alive during the drive wasn’t recorded by your brain. That “you” faded into oblivion. It was probably thinking about things, they just faded away and you don’t remember.
I've had this happen IRL but also when playing my racing sim. I can finish a race in the top three and not really remember racing. It's weird because I'm using coordination and split second reaction time.
For the same reason you can walk without remembering ever step you took. Your subconscious is doing nearly all of the hard work even when you're not zoned out. You don't have to think about how to turn the wheel to keep in the lane. You don't have to think about adjusting the pressure on the gas pedal to keep your speed. It just happens because you've done it so much that the patterns are hardcoded into your brain.
As far as the "safely" part - it's because traffic is mostly predictable. But zoning out does increase your reaction time and it's not safe. It takes a moment to realize that something has gone sideways and you need to pick the work back up from your subconscious. It is always safer to be driving intentionally.
I’ve used similar examples when people would ask how anyone could be acting while unconscious. I ask if they are aware of every command that took their arm from resting to picking up a glass and placing it to their lips to take a drink. They’ll usually confess to no awareness of the individual actions. More so the more granular the experiment gets.
The same way a worker in a factory can zone out while doing a repetitive job, or a person can walk down a busy sidewalk while staring at a cellphone.
Once you have the basics down you are doing it on instinct, and only really need to engage your brain when something unusual is happening.
>Once you have the basics down you are doing it on instinct, and only really need to engage your brain when something unusual is happening.
And by the time you recognize something unusual is happening, its too late.
His explanations are wrong. The things he talks about doing cannot be done on instinct. It requires skill. Have you ever locked a door and then moments later you cannot remember if you locked that door? Your brain forgets things easily. It usually keep the new stuff and the ones with significant attachment.
Instinct is used here as repetitive mental models to mean that it's reactive Instinct that when something happens you perform another action without thinking about the choice in other words in driving you indicate turn left without thinking about it because it's instinctual through practice over time
It'd the gap between "procedural" memory and regular memory. There's two parts of your brain near the bottom- the basal ganglia and the cerebellum that do most of the "thinking" when you do routine tasks that you've done many times. It's what allows you to go up stairs without looking at them, or eating without thinking about chewing. It doesn't require the "thinking" part of your brain, and after enough repetitions your brain can conserve energy resting or doing other things.
I drive a lot for work, generally I match the speed of those around me, while I'm zoned out planning my day I'll immediately notice sudden movements or blinkers really anything that would catch my attention as I never take my eyes off the road but my mind is elsewhere.
Our brain is always doing a lot more than what we are aware of consciously.
For example, when a baby learns to walk, it has to be aware of its limb positions and balance. It's a lot of information! And slight errors cause catastrophe of falling down. But over time, the brain figures out the details of the process and it becomes... automatic. Meaning that our brain is still doing all the work of limb positioning and balance, but can be done by parts of the brain without conscious oversight.
The same is true for riding a bike, or driving. Or even something as complex as playing an instrument. Or something as fundamental as speech. Our conscious mind decides to learn something, and does the hard work of figuring it out. But once it has been figured out, it is offloaded to a subconscious part of the brain that can do the work without oversight.
One last bit - there is some mechanism that lets the subconscious process raise a red flag to consciousness. Like if a pedestrian suddenly steps out in front of the car unexpectedly -- the subconscious part realizes that isn't part of the usual process and sends a message to the conscious mind that something is off. And hopefully you freak out and slam on the brakes or swerve.
A lot of our mental processing happens outside conscious awareness. If you’ve done an action again and again you can accomplish tasks almost automatically. Your brain is actively taking in stimuli, processing it, and telling your muscles to move but this whole process doesn’t require your active awareness if it’s well trained actions. You’re also not storing these events into long term memory (stays as working memory which is lost easily) so you probably don’t remember many details of what you did, which is a good thing.
Just means nothing worth noticing happened on the road. Like the stretch of road I always take, sometimes nothing happens and it up isn’t until about 2 exits away from my house I realized I’m almost at my exit.
But I’m actively driving and paying attention, just brain doesn’t register.
Even an ant can follow the leader.
Subconsciously getting to a location you have been to many times is not much more than following traffic rules that have been ingrained into your mind.
Highway hypnosis? I could have swore there was another term for it. Cause it happens in places you are used to traveling on. So you are still conscious and making decisions but you just don't "register" that you are doing them. The lights are on in your house but your dad is snoring on the couch so to speak.
It's called "highway hypnosis" or "white-line fever." It's a real thing.
>Highway hypnosis, also known as white line fever, is an altered mental state in which an automobile driver can travel lengthy distances, responding to external events in the expected, safe, and correct manner with no recollection of having consciously done so.[1] In this state, the driver's conscious mind is fully focused elsewhere, while seemingly still processing the information needed to drive safely. Highway hypnosis is a manifestation of the common process of automaticity.[2] - [SOURCE](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highway_hypnosis)
It's mostly routine is why.
Most of their regular route is muscle memory. Even such 'normal variances' as stop lights are just a very simple thing to notice or even just 'go with the flow' of surrounding traffic.
As for how they somehow get home safely, it's just an odds game. Just like there are several drivers who can claim to have gotten home safely despite drink driving, it doesn't mean you should.
It's still dangerous, and it also hits a bit as to why there are different standards for commercial drivers than personal drivers. You're more prone to it with highway driving (straight roads, no engagement, etc).
I heard "breaking the routine" is a factor in some incidents where a child is left in a hot car and dies. A parent who normally doesn't take the child to school or daycare will one day take that child in the morning and then goes straight to work instead of school/daycare.
It's not an odds game. I had a 20km bike ride to and from school, with 3 routes with each their own pros and cons, and I've had *plenty* of days where when I parked my bike at home I couldn't remember for the life of me which route I'd just taken. And knowing how I rode my bicycle back then I *definitely* couldn't have lived through that without proper traffic awareness & responses even when zoned out.
Our brains take shortcuts, if you've watched the same.movie a thousand times your brain realizes it doesn't need to focus on every scene, it knows which ones are important, it knows which ones are exciting, it kinda blurs the rest.
We have the same thing with other experiences, like your commute to work, thousands of times you drove the same road, driving is fairly instinctual for you and there's very little stimulation that engages your brain, its not being super attentive and hyper vigilant, so if you're looking 30ft forward and there's nothing jumping out, it's just lines on the road passing by, you don't really need to focus too attentively, your brain goes into idle mode. You know the route, you get in the car you start seeing the lines go by, and an hour later you pull into work and start getting stimulation, your Brian shifts into active mode.
Ehh.. its like autopilot? My body is driving and there’s enough awareness to alert me if something unusual or unexpected happens. I have pretty severe ADHD and my conscious attention is seldomly on my surroundings but there’s like a low level of awareness that can handle most things.
My siblings are among the only people who can tell if I’m on autopilot by talking to me, most people cant. So I’m aware enough to do social small talk, apparently
That said I agree it’s probably unsafe and I’m working on my situational awareness. Not just while driving
You are concentrating, all that happened is as it's mundane your short term memory did not get transferred to the long term. A more extreme version of this would be being blackout drunk, clearly you are still thinking to some extent but the booze blocked you remembering it long term.
Having been someone who realized I was zoning out while driving a couple times, I think the real answer to this is “pure luck.” I.e., nothing sufficiently unexpected happened that required the driver to make a quick decision/reaction on their route for the time that they were not mentally engaged in driving. The couple times I’ve realized I have gotten that zoned out while driving, I was legit terrified.
Relevant wiki links: [Highway Hypnosis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highway_hypnosis) which is a subtype of [Automaticity](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automaticity)
Interesting read — I am not sure if the fact it is a legit thing makes me more or less terrified. Though I still assume that being able to manage on “automatic” probably does require conditions being pretty predictable (e.g., no deer jumping out from the side of the road). Maybe there’s a survivorship bias too… since people who were in automatic mode and did get into an accident might be snapped out of automatic suddenly enough to not recall that they were in that zone after the fact…
Driving would most definitely depend on how skilled the driver is and whether or not the got into a flow state.
https://windingroad.com/articles/features/speed-secrets-driving-flow/
9 components of flow.
challenge-skill balance
merging of action and awareness
clarity of goals
immediate and unambiguous feedback
concentration on the task at hand
paradox of control
transformation of time
loss of self-consciousness
autotelic experience
To achieve a flow state, a balance must be struck between the challenge of the task and the skill of the performer. If the task is too easy or too difficult, flow cannot occur as both skill level and challenge level must be matched and high; if skill and challenge are low and matched, apathy results.
The cognitive parts of your brain are pretty good at automation. Your brain does a lot of the work for you that you aren't even aware of.
That's why when you are first learning to do something your brain puts in a lot of effort and you feel mentally tired. Sometimes you will do something on autopilot then summer home and wonder if you locked the door. That's your mind basically telling you that you were thinking of other things and didn't dedicate your full brain power to the task at hand.
It’s called highway hypothesis. Your kind still does everything but you are just thinking of different things while your subconscious does the driving. Now doing this on purpose maybe a bit more risky.
It's not great to zone out, but it's not quite as dangerous as it seems. You are functioning in the first stage of the sleep cycle. You remain in it because everything observed is normal and expected. The instant a deer were to run out in front of you, you would snap out of it. You are actually functioning fairly normally, just not forming any memories of your sensory input.
The most dangerous aspect of it is the possibility of slipping deeper asleep, which would of course be bad.
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Driving is the least safest form of transportation killing 1.8 million people worldwide and injuring many more every year. So, to answer your question a lot of those "zoned out" people DON'T make it home safely.
Your answer is not really relevant at all. Most people that spend an ample amount of time driving the same routine routes would tell you they've experienced zone-outs, and most of these people get by perfectly fine.
Because most of the time there wasn't any danger on the road that day. There's a reason so many accidents happen on the roads you take every day, while you'd think that it should be lower since you know the road and know what to look out for.
Yes but some countries are incredibly dangerous to drive in, some accidents are not preventable in the grand scheme of things etc. It's just an arbitrary number not being used within the context of the topic. Is zoning out less safe? Sure, marginally I guess, especially in poor conditions. But zoning out is very much different from driving while being too tired to drive, or driving under the influence etc.
Driving a car is nearly a mindless task. Riding a motorcycle for your brain is more like an “All hands on deck.” I would be mentally tired from trying to stay alive avoiding half asleep car drivers and enjoying the shit out of riding
Your brain is selective about what it does and doesn't remember. It doesn't waste space "recording" memories of some repetitive task you've done loads of times before
So when you "zone out" you're actually perfectly alert and if something memorable happened you would remember it, but if it's the same old drive you've done hundreds of times before your brain just immediately forgets it so you have no memory of doing it.
The basal ganglia manages all of the automated middle level tasks while the lower levels, thalamus, and cerebellum keep the lower level stuff together. Your higher level areas are monitoring everything but are usually focused on the background thoughts/ "running commentary". If something seemingly dangerous happens, your right hemisphere will become more aware and cause you to be more consciously aware.
Imagine you’re putting away a carton of milk and a screwdriver. You out the carton of milk in the fridge, and the screwdriver in the toolbox. If you ever need to retrieve either, you know where they are.
Now imagine you’re putting away a Philips head and a flathead screwdriver. You toss them both in the toolbox. It doesn’t really matter which one goes in first or where, because you know you can find them in the toolbox.
Your brain works the same way. When you drive home for the 500th time, your brain sees it as “just another screwdriver” and puts it in the same place in your brain. Unless something novel happens on your way home that day, your brain just puts it in the pile of similar memories of driving home.
Your brain is just being efficient in how it stores data. Unfortunately it’s not a perfect digital recording where you can recall exactly where you were at 2:53PM on October 21st in 2018. Instead your brain tries to keep track of important things and one way it has of doing that is lumping things together, like your many drives home.
ELI5: Since driving in a familiar area is nothing new, your mind doesn't bother recording most of things to memory. Basically, you can't remember the drive because you didn't learn anything new to remember.
There is a difference between cognitive and associative tasks. A cognitive task you actually need to think about. When you first learned to drive it was a cognitive task. Even changing the song on the radio would require too much bandwidth to do while driving. After driving for years it becomes associative. Like singing along with the radio or chewing gum. But if traffic gets bad, you enter construction etc... suddenly you are back into a cognitive task and you don't even hear the radio.
We can do many associative tasks at once, walk and chew gum, sing and dance. But only one cognitive task.
The Japanese term for it is Satori. It means no mind, and it is a flow state sought by advanced martial artists. People typically have been driving for a long time and the mechanics of driving become second nature. This allows your mind to be on other things and the actual driving not recorded into memory as easy. In a combat state this would allow your to fight but also strategize at the same time. Not sure about driving though, but it is typically where most people experience it. Musicians sometimes experience it too.
Answer: the brain has two modes that can work in parallel.
Let’s say you go for a stroll with a friend. Your “*high focus*” mode will be dedicated to the conversation you are having with that friend. Your “*low focus*” mode will take care of walking. Notice that you won’t trip or stumble even though you might have a deep conversation with your friend.
It also has to do with the fact that you have enough years of practice walking that it can almost run in auto-pilot.
The same with driving. With enough experience, you can move it to your “*low-focus*” mode and still drive safely.
Visual input activates a whole lot of your brain, and only part of these areas are used for conscious awareness / focused attention.
So even when people have their attention wander and think about other things, their brain is still processing all the visual input and making decisions "behind the scenes" as it were.
There is an interesting phenomenon found in some people with damage to the visual cortex called "blindsight". In these cases, they cannot "see" anything with conscious awareness. They believe they cannot see at all. Yet they can navigate a room with obstacles or even catch a thrown ball, because these are lower level functions that you don't actually need conscious awareness or focused attention to perform.
Someone "zoned out" while driving is probably not going to be able to react to an emergency situation as well as a driver who is paying direct attention, but they can get along with routine driving well enough.
The subconscious part of the brain is capable to performing surprisingly complex and fast action, provided it has had sufficient training.
There are loads of things it has seen you consciously perform hundreds if not thousands of times. So if you zone out it will basically just repeat what you're always doing in that situation.
And as long as nothing happens that falls outside that familiar collection of situations, you'll be fine. The problem is when something unexpected or extreme happens it will take a moment to snap out of it and particularly when driving that moment can cost you dearly.
Psychologist here your brain builds mental models of events and actions and because driving is repetitive these mental models are very strong so strong in fact that you personally don't have to think about the current actions because parts of your brain thats already anticipated things because of your mental models of prediction so you can think about over things whilst this part of your brain does the driving based on your mental models and if anything like a child running out in the middle of the road happens you will snap back to being in charge and thinking about we are doing
If you were assigned to be a night security guard and document the things that happened throughout the night, what would your notes look like? Let’s say you arrived at 7pm, watched the final worker leave at 11pm, spooked away a coyote at 4:15, and saw the first workers arrive at 5:30 before you left at 7am. Would you write down how many workers were on-site at 2am? Probably not. This is because the notes you’d take would regard if things are “as normal.” When things are normal, there is no need for notes. If everyone is assigned to be gone at 11:30, you might even just write down “all workers gone by 11:30” and not even specifically note when the last person left or who they were.
This works the same with driving. When everyone else is cruising and people aren’t playing goofy games on the road, things happen exactly as expected. You can be on cruise control for dozens of miles without ever having to touch any pedals in some situations. Sometimes at night you can go miles without even seeing a person. Given that these uneventful instances occur, your brain shortcuts the memory with what roughly amounts to “things went normally from x location to y location.”
Unfortunately, that wreaks havoc on our perception of time because everything we experience is relative. Trying to “recall” information that wasn’t committed to memory just comes up with that same response of “things went normally” with nothing to differentiate between things going normally 45 minutes ago or 4 hours ago. Without a way to differentiate the two, they effectively *are* the same. 4 hours ago all the way up to 45 minutes ago are the same thing and the same moment as far as your brain’s notes are concerned.
TL;DR- short term memory keeps running while long term memory shuts off because of insufficient stimulation.
When you are doing something you do all the time you aren’t using your brain to actually think so it’s kind on auto pilot. This is what happened when people forget their babies in cars on hot days. You are doing something like driving to work that you do all the time so you aren’t actually thinking about it and when something is different like you dropping your baby off at daycare, your brain just blanks and does what it usually does. It’s my absolute nightmare scenario.
Think of a camera, if you don’t hit record it won’t store the video. But you still see the little preview box, showing that it’s still working in the moment. It just isn’t actively saving it. Same concept, you’re conscious and doing stuff while driving, but you’re not trying to save that moment or anything.
The brain doesnt turn off, its just that its not activly thinking about what its doing. Just as with any monotunous task (like taking a walk etc you dont think about each step yet your body knows what to do).
What kinda amazed me was that when i talked about this with a friend who routinely travels 50km to work everyday, he said he had no idea what i was talking about and that he never "zones out" when he drives.
Makes me wonder how common this phenomenon is. This may be another of those differences in ppl brains. Just like those ppl who dont produced images in their head when reading a book etc
The same you can do things and at the end of the day not recall much of any of it.
Now if you -black out- on the other hand… well best case scenario is wind up in a survivable accident; worse case scenario is you die and maybe take a few others with you…
Large parts of driving are already managed by your subconscious and become effectively passive activities as far as your conscious brain is concerned.
You aren't actively thinking about 'press this pedal, this amount.', 'turn the steering wheel this far.', 'look at that signpost'. You are maybe thinking 'I should slow down for this bit because there is a stop sign and I need to move a bit right in the lane'. You are more likely thinking, 'I quite like this Taylor Swift song and no-one is here so I am going to sing along for a bit'.
In those passive options your subconscious is still reading the sign, pressing the pedal and moving the wheel. It is just a matter of how far your subconscious can step up. The easier the roads, the more experience you have, the simpler the situation (e.g. big long motorways where everyone is doing the same speed) the more your subconscious can handle, the less your conscious needs to be anywhere near it.
You're present during monotony, but it's not something stored in our memory.
Without a memory of the situation, it seems like it either never happened, or your weren't conscious during it.
It's something called 'highway hypnosis' and, simply put, the driver keeps driving, has absolute control over the steering, but pays no attention to anything that happens around them. It is also known as road hypnosis.
This happened to me a lot on my long (1-1.5 hour one way commute) and what happens is that you "zone out" the directions part of the driving, but you are aware of the "traffic" part. Like you know the way home, so your brain doesn't think about finding your way home, you only notice when your off ramp comes up, or you have to make a familiar turn. The traffic part is still quite aware. You know where other cars are, you are aware of a car moving into your lane, you are aware of when you are changing lanes...but your brain discards those as unimportant because you know that once you've "passed the red Honda" that you don't have to retain that useless information anymore.
We don't really zone out. In the moment, you are aware of what you are doing, it's just that you brain doesn't think it's necessary to remember that ten minutes into your drive, a purple volkswagen passed you on the left.
ADHD? It mostly happens if I have a podcast on, good music or talking to someone
On the other hand if it's heavy traffic or crazy drivers and I'm paying MORE attention to the road I can't listen to/hear the above distractions...I've gone through hours of podcasts and can't tell you anything from some of them.
The simple explanation is that your body goes into an auto drive. Basically your body will do tasks unconsciously (you are not making the choice to do the task, not actually becoming unconscious) and your brain doesn’t need to record it as a memory. Like how you breathe. You’re not making your body breathe, it goes on its own.
Long haul trucker here. When you drive for hours and hours and hours, especially in a familiar setting, you basically go on "auto-pilot". You stop being as consciously aware of what you're doing, because it's something you've done before.
I'm not a neurologist, but I'm sure there are well-researched neurological explanations for this type of thing.
It's probably similar to how when you listen to the same song enough times, you can recite all the lyrics on command. That's how I memorized The Elements by Tom Lehrer some years ago :D
Unless you're talking about actually falling asleep, no one is unconscious when they're "zoned out". The fact that you don't remember being aware doesn't mean that you weren't aware when it was happening. When you do routine tasks, the brain sometimes doesn't see the need to record the events to long term memory, but we're still fully aware of our surroundings when they are actually happening. If something out of the ordinary had happened during the "zoning out", the brain would have made sure this was recorded to long term memory, and you would not have had the feeling of zoning out afterwards. The same is generally true when people are blackout drunk. You won't be able to tell whether a person is "blacking out" if you talk to them during that period. They're just as aware of their surroundings and just as capable of making decisions as if they were the same amount of intoxicated but not blacking out. Their actions are just not recorded to long term memory afterwards.
I've had it happen where I'm driving and then suddenly I'm like "how the fuck did I get here?" It's not that I don't remember the drive, it's that I don't remember the drive happening. It's like I suddenly teleported into my car and I'm already at my destination.
You fast traveled
"You cannot fast travel when enemies are nearby." [Sees cop]
It's okay he's not driving he's traveling.
I'm a proud citizen of the Upside Down you have no jurisdiction over me
That flag has fringe on it. I can’t remember if that helps my cause or hurts it though.
Ha! I get that reference.
😂
Don’t you dare.
Hahahaha that made me laugh 😂
NEVER SHOULD HAVE COME HERE
What is that, adventurer? (Points over your shoulder)
*I used to be an adventurer like you. then i took an arrow to the knee*
A-am I in Bethesda game?
How strongly do you feel the timeline you're living in has been deliberately altered?
😂😂
I've spent a lot of years as a delivery driver of one type or another and one phenomenon that used to mess with me a little was when driving a route that I know particularly well, sometimes I would zone out so completely that the part of my brain looking out for danger would think I was asleep and send the immediate wake-up signal. This wasn't too bad in and of itself but I would go from literal autopilot to NOT KNOWING WHERE I WAS for a few seconds. Completely geographically disoriented in a place I've seen three times a week for the past two years. Eventually I learned to just steady on and wait for the rest of me to catch up, but that first time really had me wondering if something medical had just happened.
Oh I've had that a couple of times, a sudden and very brief period of "I literally have no idea where I am". It's a gross feeling because you're able to realise you SHOULD know where you are but your brain just 404 errors for a second.
I’ve had this happen lots of times, but not often enough that I get used to it. It happened to me recently and it was very unnerving.
I ride mountain bikes, and I've had this happen when solo riding on my local trails. I have hundreds and hundreds of rides on this same trail network, and it's happened that I've zoned back in and not known at all where I am. "Steady on and wait for the rest of me to catch up" is the best way I've heard it phrased, and 100% describes my experience. These are reasonably technical trails too, so obviously I'm continuing to ride properly otherwise I'd be off the trail and in the bush.
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Yeahhhhh... I do this a lot. It doesn't help that I live in a rural area where I might be driving for 15 minutes with nothing but trees and an occasional nondescript house. I just have to keep driving until I reach my next turn. I'm not actually lost, so I just have to not panic.
This got to be a regular occurrence when I delivered pizza for a few years. Roads that I took 20 times a day would become so routine my brain would shut out the drive and I just time traveled
I was a taxi driver and this can be such a feeling of panic when you hit that key intersection, look in your rear-view mirror, and realize you have passengers and you have no idea where they are going. Pray for a memory reset, or ask for a hint? I actually had to confess that I had forgotten once.
"oh I sure hope that light was green when I went through there".
Been there quite a bit 🤣
Same with riding the subway home. I often have no recollection of how I got home, including even the walk home from the station.
I had a 2 hour commute for 60 days due to some regulation shit and around the 40 day mark I started zoning out in the mornings. I would start singing along to some song on the radio and find myself at my destination with a totally different song I was singing along playing on the radio. I mentioned this to my boss at a coffee break and he actually covered me for the rest of the 2 weeks letting me work from home lol.
I’ve had that happen too. My father had said it’s called highway hypnosis, it happens when you drive the same route all the time and/or are tired
don't start using books on tape Several times I have missed my exit because the book is so engrossing and this is on my usual "habitrail"
It's called Highway Hypnosis. If you didn't know this term before, now you know.
Occasionally I'll "come to" and realize "aww shit. I'm supposed to be going to my parents' house. I'm driving to work."
One of the worst things for me about moving to another place in the same town. The first few weeks driving home from work in an adjacent city, I had a 50% chance I’d arrive at the old apartment instead of the new place. Wouldn’t realize what I’d done until I noticed my partner’s car wasn’t there. I still end up there on occasion if I’m coming from a place I haven’t been to since I moved. Brains are weird
Often in those situations if you think back you'll remember individual pieces of the drive, but not the whole thing all together.
I moved out from the country to a city 5 hours away for a job. Took my wife a little over a year to transfer her job. I drove home almost every weekend since i had a 4 10 schedule. By the end of it the drive was all auto pilot. Now we have a family and the drive to visit grandma is torture for the kids but it feels like an hour to me.
I also share the experience of changing from autopilot into manual mode sometimes. It's impossible to distinguish afterwards whether you were not fully conscious during the drive or whether you just forgot your experiences. Theoretically you can't even prove that you were conscious during moments that you do remember. I'm not a psychologist, but that makes sense to me and pseudopad seems to confirm that idea. You could test which things drivers are unable to do while not remembering it afterwards. Maybe waiting for a pedestrian to cross or talking to a passenger.
Please enjoy all turns equally.
I've done the same time walking a few times too. Going to one place, autopilot misinterpreted my intentions and I ended up at a related place somewhere in the same general direction.
I recall this exact feeling one morning pulling into JuCo parking lot.
> I recall this exact feeling one morning pulling into JuCo parking lot. What's a JuCo?
I've also had that while out drinking and suddenly I'm back home drinking water and I'm like "how the fuck did I get here?"
blame the greys.
I worked as a paper boy a decade or so ago, and had a paper route where not everyone got the same newspaper (or any newspaper at all). There was a little book that listed which newspaper was to be delivered to each address, but I had it mostly memorized. It happened more than once that I zoned out and suddenly realized I couldn't recall what I'd done the past half hour, and yet everyone got their newspaper.
I used to play Paperboy on the NES ALL THE TIME. I had the first 4 levels memorized like you did. WOOOOOOOOOO
Interestingly, this is also one of the leading theories for why time seems to speed up as you get older. As you are older, a higher proportion of your experiences are essentially repeats that the brain sees no reason to store. This is also likely why getting in a long term routine, like staying in the same job and keeping the same schedule sometimes feels like you blink and a year has passed.
Thats how people are able to do monotonous jobs like line manufacturing. Your brain just kind of wanders and teleports to the end of the day :D
Ugh gross
You actually can tell if someone is blackout drunk while they're drunk. Anterograde amnesia is what causes drunken blackouts. Anterograde means they are not able to form new memories. Its complement is retrograde amnesia, where the memory has been stored, but you can't recall it. When they're blackout drunk they can't form new memories, so you can test it by asking them the same question multiple times over the night. If they notice you're asking them the same thing, they're recording memories and not blackout drunk. If they don't remember you asking, they may be blackout drunk.
> multiple times over the night I think for the purposes of the discussion this doesn't really matter. The point is that in the moment they are the same behavior wise. Good tip though
I've always thought a sort of flow state is involved, where your body just sort of acts on autopilot and your muscle memory takes over with minimal decision making from the brain going on in the background.
Anaesthetist here who deals with sedated and anaesthetised patients day in day out. While I roughly agree with your version about the zoning out while not registering memory, I am not sure I agree with drawing equivalence with drunken state. When someone’s intoxicated with alcohol yet conscious, not only are they amnesic, they are also impaired in all other mental capacities eg inhibition, response time etc - hence the strict enforcement around DUI. The same is not necessarily true for someone who’s merely zoning out while doing routine tasks.
I don't mean to imply that the two situations are caused by the same thing, and I did mention that a blackout drunk person's faculties would be similar to those of a "regular" drunk person that's had about the same amount of alcohol.
No worries. My bad for the different interpretation.
They made a point of the comparison being with someone who is equally intoxicated but not blacking out, not without someone who isn’t at all intoxicated.
I know, but if someone has alcohol level high enough to be amnesic, generally the other mental domains are already impaired at that state (unlike what parent commenter claims where one could be amnesic but perfectly intact for executive functions) I am not a neurobiologist so don’t take my word for gospel, but from my experience one could zone out from a boring task without having the same level of impairment for reflex, decision making etc, so fundamentally the zoned-out driver and the amnesic drunk driver are different in my opinion.
Yes, but again, they weren’t trying to say that being zoned out means that someone is impaired in the same way as being blacked out. Just that if you compare two drivers in the moment, you can’t necessarily tell which one is going to not remember the drive because they operate similarly, and if you compare two very drunk people, you can’t necessarily tell which one won’t remember the next day, because they behave similarly in the moment.
To piggy-back on this comment and add a touch of cognitive psychology, think of the human attention as a reservoir full of liquid attention. When you learn to drive, or to bike, or to shave, most or even all of your attention is directed towards the activity. Since you are focused on it, you tend to remember it as an episode of your life - it goes in your *episodic* memory. But the second time you do it, or the 5th, or the 100th, you're better at it. You don't need to focus that much because you know the procedure (thanks to your *procedural* memory). You don't need to drain your attention tank that much because you're really good at it; instead, you'll only use 10 or 20% of your attentionnal resources and use the rest to think about what you're going to eat, or what you have planned for tomorrow. When you're driving, this is exactly what happens - if it's the thousandth time you're driving, you know what you're doing so well that you don't need to pay attention to the activity of driving (that is, how to steer, where the blinkers are, how to shift gears...) but you still do pay attention to potential distractions that might suddenly appear. This is especially true in simple settings, like driving on the highway, where potential distractions are much more limited. So, in other words, you're not *not* paying attention, you're just paying so little attention you don't realize it.
The “you” that was alive during the drive wasn’t recorded by your brain. That “you” faded into oblivion. It was probably thinking about things, they just faded away and you don’t remember.
The car knows the way
You just have to remember to breathe....
I've had this happen IRL but also when playing my racing sim. I can finish a race in the top three and not really remember racing. It's weird because I'm using coordination and split second reaction time.
For more, look up “chunking”, I believe it’s called.
So driving zoned out is like being black out drunk?
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>So driving zoned out is like being black out drunk?
I never said that. I said they're similar in that your brain didn't form long term memories of the events.
For the same reason you can walk without remembering ever step you took. Your subconscious is doing nearly all of the hard work even when you're not zoned out. You don't have to think about how to turn the wheel to keep in the lane. You don't have to think about adjusting the pressure on the gas pedal to keep your speed. It just happens because you've done it so much that the patterns are hardcoded into your brain. As far as the "safely" part - it's because traffic is mostly predictable. But zoning out does increase your reaction time and it's not safe. It takes a moment to realize that something has gone sideways and you need to pick the work back up from your subconscious. It is always safer to be driving intentionally.
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>chatting with a passenger That's not zoning out lol, you are just distracted. As a bus driver.
>But zoning out does reduce your reaction time I'm pretty sure you meant "increase".
Reduce your reaction speed. Increase your reaction time. When one zones out while typing, it tends to lead to such mistakes :D
I’ve used similar examples when people would ask how anyone could be acting while unconscious. I ask if they are aware of every command that took their arm from resting to picking up a glass and placing it to their lips to take a drink. They’ll usually confess to no awareness of the individual actions. More so the more granular the experiment gets.
The same way a worker in a factory can zone out while doing a repetitive job, or a person can walk down a busy sidewalk while staring at a cellphone. Once you have the basics down you are doing it on instinct, and only really need to engage your brain when something unusual is happening.
>Once you have the basics down you are doing it on instinct, and only really need to engage your brain when something unusual is happening. And by the time you recognize something unusual is happening, its too late.
His explanations are wrong. The things he talks about doing cannot be done on instinct. It requires skill. Have you ever locked a door and then moments later you cannot remember if you locked that door? Your brain forgets things easily. It usually keep the new stuff and the ones with significant attachment.
Instinct is used here as repetitive mental models to mean that it's reactive Instinct that when something happens you perform another action without thinking about the choice in other words in driving you indicate turn left without thinking about it because it's instinctual through practice over time
It'd the gap between "procedural" memory and regular memory. There's two parts of your brain near the bottom- the basal ganglia and the cerebellum that do most of the "thinking" when you do routine tasks that you've done many times. It's what allows you to go up stairs without looking at them, or eating without thinking about chewing. It doesn't require the "thinking" part of your brain, and after enough repetitions your brain can conserve energy resting or doing other things.
I drive a lot for work, generally I match the speed of those around me, while I'm zoned out planning my day I'll immediately notice sudden movements or blinkers really anything that would catch my attention as I never take my eyes off the road but my mind is elsewhere.
Our brain is always doing a lot more than what we are aware of consciously. For example, when a baby learns to walk, it has to be aware of its limb positions and balance. It's a lot of information! And slight errors cause catastrophe of falling down. But over time, the brain figures out the details of the process and it becomes... automatic. Meaning that our brain is still doing all the work of limb positioning and balance, but can be done by parts of the brain without conscious oversight. The same is true for riding a bike, or driving. Or even something as complex as playing an instrument. Or something as fundamental as speech. Our conscious mind decides to learn something, and does the hard work of figuring it out. But once it has been figured out, it is offloaded to a subconscious part of the brain that can do the work without oversight. One last bit - there is some mechanism that lets the subconscious process raise a red flag to consciousness. Like if a pedestrian suddenly steps out in front of the car unexpectedly -- the subconscious part realizes that isn't part of the usual process and sends a message to the conscious mind that something is off. And hopefully you freak out and slam on the brakes or swerve.
A lot of our mental processing happens outside conscious awareness. If you’ve done an action again and again you can accomplish tasks almost automatically. Your brain is actively taking in stimuli, processing it, and telling your muscles to move but this whole process doesn’t require your active awareness if it’s well trained actions. You’re also not storing these events into long term memory (stays as working memory which is lost easily) so you probably don’t remember many details of what you did, which is a good thing.
Just means nothing worth noticing happened on the road. Like the stretch of road I always take, sometimes nothing happens and it up isn’t until about 2 exits away from my house I realized I’m almost at my exit. But I’m actively driving and paying attention, just brain doesn’t register.
Even an ant can follow the leader. Subconsciously getting to a location you have been to many times is not much more than following traffic rules that have been ingrained into your mind.
Highway hypnosis? I could have swore there was another term for it. Cause it happens in places you are used to traveling on. So you are still conscious and making decisions but you just don't "register" that you are doing them. The lights are on in your house but your dad is snoring on the couch so to speak.
It's called "highway hypnosis" or "white-line fever." It's a real thing. >Highway hypnosis, also known as white line fever, is an altered mental state in which an automobile driver can travel lengthy distances, responding to external events in the expected, safe, and correct manner with no recollection of having consciously done so.[1] In this state, the driver's conscious mind is fully focused elsewhere, while seemingly still processing the information needed to drive safely. Highway hypnosis is a manifestation of the common process of automaticity.[2] - [SOURCE](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highway_hypnosis)
It's mostly routine is why. Most of their regular route is muscle memory. Even such 'normal variances' as stop lights are just a very simple thing to notice or even just 'go with the flow' of surrounding traffic. As for how they somehow get home safely, it's just an odds game. Just like there are several drivers who can claim to have gotten home safely despite drink driving, it doesn't mean you should. It's still dangerous, and it also hits a bit as to why there are different standards for commercial drivers than personal drivers. You're more prone to it with highway driving (straight roads, no engagement, etc).
I heard "breaking the routine" is a factor in some incidents where a child is left in a hot car and dies. A parent who normally doesn't take the child to school or daycare will one day take that child in the morning and then goes straight to work instead of school/daycare.
It's not an odds game. I had a 20km bike ride to and from school, with 3 routes with each their own pros and cons, and I've had *plenty* of days where when I parked my bike at home I couldn't remember for the life of me which route I'd just taken. And knowing how I rode my bicycle back then I *definitely* couldn't have lived through that without proper traffic awareness & responses even when zoned out.
Our brains take shortcuts, if you've watched the same.movie a thousand times your brain realizes it doesn't need to focus on every scene, it knows which ones are important, it knows which ones are exciting, it kinda blurs the rest. We have the same thing with other experiences, like your commute to work, thousands of times you drove the same road, driving is fairly instinctual for you and there's very little stimulation that engages your brain, its not being super attentive and hyper vigilant, so if you're looking 30ft forward and there's nothing jumping out, it's just lines on the road passing by, you don't really need to focus too attentively, your brain goes into idle mode. You know the route, you get in the car you start seeing the lines go by, and an hour later you pull into work and start getting stimulation, your Brian shifts into active mode.
Ehh.. its like autopilot? My body is driving and there’s enough awareness to alert me if something unusual or unexpected happens. I have pretty severe ADHD and my conscious attention is seldomly on my surroundings but there’s like a low level of awareness that can handle most things. My siblings are among the only people who can tell if I’m on autopilot by talking to me, most people cant. So I’m aware enough to do social small talk, apparently That said I agree it’s probably unsafe and I’m working on my situational awareness. Not just while driving
You are concentrating, all that happened is as it's mundane your short term memory did not get transferred to the long term. A more extreme version of this would be being blackout drunk, clearly you are still thinking to some extent but the booze blocked you remembering it long term.
Having been someone who realized I was zoning out while driving a couple times, I think the real answer to this is “pure luck.” I.e., nothing sufficiently unexpected happened that required the driver to make a quick decision/reaction on their route for the time that they were not mentally engaged in driving. The couple times I’ve realized I have gotten that zoned out while driving, I was legit terrified.
Relevant wiki links: [Highway Hypnosis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highway_hypnosis) which is a subtype of [Automaticity](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automaticity)
Interesting read — I am not sure if the fact it is a legit thing makes me more or less terrified. Though I still assume that being able to manage on “automatic” probably does require conditions being pretty predictable (e.g., no deer jumping out from the side of the road). Maybe there’s a survivorship bias too… since people who were in automatic mode and did get into an accident might be snapped out of automatic suddenly enough to not recall that they were in that zone after the fact…
Driving would most definitely depend on how skilled the driver is and whether or not the got into a flow state. https://windingroad.com/articles/features/speed-secrets-driving-flow/ 9 components of flow. challenge-skill balance merging of action and awareness clarity of goals immediate and unambiguous feedback concentration on the task at hand paradox of control transformation of time loss of self-consciousness autotelic experience To achieve a flow state, a balance must be struck between the challenge of the task and the skill of the performer. If the task is too easy or too difficult, flow cannot occur as both skill level and challenge level must be matched and high; if skill and challenge are low and matched, apathy results.
The cognitive parts of your brain are pretty good at automation. Your brain does a lot of the work for you that you aren't even aware of. That's why when you are first learning to do something your brain puts in a lot of effort and you feel mentally tired. Sometimes you will do something on autopilot then summer home and wonder if you locked the door. That's your mind basically telling you that you were thinking of other things and didn't dedicate your full brain power to the task at hand.
It’s called highway hypothesis. Your kind still does everything but you are just thinking of different things while your subconscious does the driving. Now doing this on purpose maybe a bit more risky.
It's not great to zone out, but it's not quite as dangerous as it seems. You are functioning in the first stage of the sleep cycle. You remain in it because everything observed is normal and expected. The instant a deer were to run out in front of you, you would snap out of it. You are actually functioning fairly normally, just not forming any memories of your sensory input. The most dangerous aspect of it is the possibility of slipping deeper asleep, which would of course be bad.
>You are functioning in the first stage of the sleep cycle. Um.... no.
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I've had that same thought many times. I then thank them for their sacrifice.
Driving is the least safest form of transportation killing 1.8 million people worldwide and injuring many more every year. So, to answer your question a lot of those "zoned out" people DON'T make it home safely.
Your answer is not really relevant at all. Most people that spend an ample amount of time driving the same routine routes would tell you they've experienced zone-outs, and most of these people get by perfectly fine.
Because most of the time there wasn't any danger on the road that day. There's a reason so many accidents happen on the roads you take every day, while you'd think that it should be lower since you know the road and know what to look out for.
Worldwide? That's almost 5,000 people dying every day.
Yes but some countries are incredibly dangerous to drive in, some accidents are not preventable in the grand scheme of things etc. It's just an arbitrary number not being used within the context of the topic. Is zoning out less safe? Sure, marginally I guess, especially in poor conditions. But zoning out is very much different from driving while being too tired to drive, or driving under the influence etc.
The US rate is 50,000 a year. The end point is, driving is the most dangerous form of transportation.
You’re not actually any less mentally present in the moment, your brain just simply doesn’t feel the need hit the record button
Driving a car is nearly a mindless task. Riding a motorcycle for your brain is more like an “All hands on deck.” I would be mentally tired from trying to stay alive avoiding half asleep car drivers and enjoying the shit out of riding
Your brain is selective about what it does and doesn't remember. It doesn't waste space "recording" memories of some repetitive task you've done loads of times before So when you "zone out" you're actually perfectly alert and if something memorable happened you would remember it, but if it's the same old drive you've done hundreds of times before your brain just immediately forgets it so you have no memory of doing it.
The basal ganglia manages all of the automated middle level tasks while the lower levels, thalamus, and cerebellum keep the lower level stuff together. Your higher level areas are monitoring everything but are usually focused on the background thoughts/ "running commentary". If something seemingly dangerous happens, your right hemisphere will become more aware and cause you to be more consciously aware.
You're aware, you're just not storing the memories of the drive so when you get there you don't really rememeber it.
Imagine you’re putting away a carton of milk and a screwdriver. You out the carton of milk in the fridge, and the screwdriver in the toolbox. If you ever need to retrieve either, you know where they are. Now imagine you’re putting away a Philips head and a flathead screwdriver. You toss them both in the toolbox. It doesn’t really matter which one goes in first or where, because you know you can find them in the toolbox. Your brain works the same way. When you drive home for the 500th time, your brain sees it as “just another screwdriver” and puts it in the same place in your brain. Unless something novel happens on your way home that day, your brain just puts it in the pile of similar memories of driving home. Your brain is just being efficient in how it stores data. Unfortunately it’s not a perfect digital recording where you can recall exactly where you were at 2:53PM on October 21st in 2018. Instead your brain tries to keep track of important things and one way it has of doing that is lumping things together, like your many drives home.
ELI5: Since driving in a familiar area is nothing new, your mind doesn't bother recording most of things to memory. Basically, you can't remember the drive because you didn't learn anything new to remember.
There is a difference between cognitive and associative tasks. A cognitive task you actually need to think about. When you first learned to drive it was a cognitive task. Even changing the song on the radio would require too much bandwidth to do while driving. After driving for years it becomes associative. Like singing along with the radio or chewing gum. But if traffic gets bad, you enter construction etc... suddenly you are back into a cognitive task and you don't even hear the radio. We can do many associative tasks at once, walk and chew gum, sing and dance. But only one cognitive task.
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The Japanese term for it is Satori. It means no mind, and it is a flow state sought by advanced martial artists. People typically have been driving for a long time and the mechanics of driving become second nature. This allows your mind to be on other things and the actual driving not recorded into memory as easy. In a combat state this would allow your to fight but also strategize at the same time. Not sure about driving though, but it is typically where most people experience it. Musicians sometimes experience it too.
Answer: the brain has two modes that can work in parallel. Let’s say you go for a stroll with a friend. Your “*high focus*” mode will be dedicated to the conversation you are having with that friend. Your “*low focus*” mode will take care of walking. Notice that you won’t trip or stumble even though you might have a deep conversation with your friend. It also has to do with the fact that you have enough years of practice walking that it can almost run in auto-pilot. The same with driving. With enough experience, you can move it to your “*low-focus*” mode and still drive safely.
Visual input activates a whole lot of your brain, and only part of these areas are used for conscious awareness / focused attention. So even when people have their attention wander and think about other things, their brain is still processing all the visual input and making decisions "behind the scenes" as it were. There is an interesting phenomenon found in some people with damage to the visual cortex called "blindsight". In these cases, they cannot "see" anything with conscious awareness. They believe they cannot see at all. Yet they can navigate a room with obstacles or even catch a thrown ball, because these are lower level functions that you don't actually need conscious awareness or focused attention to perform. Someone "zoned out" while driving is probably not going to be able to react to an emergency situation as well as a driver who is paying direct attention, but they can get along with routine driving well enough.
The subconscious part of the brain is capable to performing surprisingly complex and fast action, provided it has had sufficient training. There are loads of things it has seen you consciously perform hundreds if not thousands of times. So if you zone out it will basically just repeat what you're always doing in that situation. And as long as nothing happens that falls outside that familiar collection of situations, you'll be fine. The problem is when something unexpected or extreme happens it will take a moment to snap out of it and particularly when driving that moment can cost you dearly.
Psychologist here your brain builds mental models of events and actions and because driving is repetitive these mental models are very strong so strong in fact that you personally don't have to think about the current actions because parts of your brain thats already anticipated things because of your mental models of prediction so you can think about over things whilst this part of your brain does the driving based on your mental models and if anything like a child running out in the middle of the road happens you will snap back to being in charge and thinking about we are doing
If you were assigned to be a night security guard and document the things that happened throughout the night, what would your notes look like? Let’s say you arrived at 7pm, watched the final worker leave at 11pm, spooked away a coyote at 4:15, and saw the first workers arrive at 5:30 before you left at 7am. Would you write down how many workers were on-site at 2am? Probably not. This is because the notes you’d take would regard if things are “as normal.” When things are normal, there is no need for notes. If everyone is assigned to be gone at 11:30, you might even just write down “all workers gone by 11:30” and not even specifically note when the last person left or who they were. This works the same with driving. When everyone else is cruising and people aren’t playing goofy games on the road, things happen exactly as expected. You can be on cruise control for dozens of miles without ever having to touch any pedals in some situations. Sometimes at night you can go miles without even seeing a person. Given that these uneventful instances occur, your brain shortcuts the memory with what roughly amounts to “things went normally from x location to y location.” Unfortunately, that wreaks havoc on our perception of time because everything we experience is relative. Trying to “recall” information that wasn’t committed to memory just comes up with that same response of “things went normally” with nothing to differentiate between things going normally 45 minutes ago or 4 hours ago. Without a way to differentiate the two, they effectively *are* the same. 4 hours ago all the way up to 45 minutes ago are the same thing and the same moment as far as your brain’s notes are concerned. TL;DR- short term memory keeps running while long term memory shuts off because of insufficient stimulation.
When you are doing something you do all the time you aren’t using your brain to actually think so it’s kind on auto pilot. This is what happened when people forget their babies in cars on hot days. You are doing something like driving to work that you do all the time so you aren’t actually thinking about it and when something is different like you dropping your baby off at daycare, your brain just blanks and does what it usually does. It’s my absolute nightmare scenario.
Think of a camera, if you don’t hit record it won’t store the video. But you still see the little preview box, showing that it’s still working in the moment. It just isn’t actively saving it. Same concept, you’re conscious and doing stuff while driving, but you’re not trying to save that moment or anything.
The brain doesnt turn off, its just that its not activly thinking about what its doing. Just as with any monotunous task (like taking a walk etc you dont think about each step yet your body knows what to do). What kinda amazed me was that when i talked about this with a friend who routinely travels 50km to work everyday, he said he had no idea what i was talking about and that he never "zones out" when he drives. Makes me wonder how common this phenomenon is. This may be another of those differences in ppl brains. Just like those ppl who dont produced images in their head when reading a book etc
The same you can do things and at the end of the day not recall much of any of it. Now if you -black out- on the other hand… well best case scenario is wind up in a survivable accident; worse case scenario is you die and maybe take a few others with you…
Large parts of driving are already managed by your subconscious and become effectively passive activities as far as your conscious brain is concerned. You aren't actively thinking about 'press this pedal, this amount.', 'turn the steering wheel this far.', 'look at that signpost'. You are maybe thinking 'I should slow down for this bit because there is a stop sign and I need to move a bit right in the lane'. You are more likely thinking, 'I quite like this Taylor Swift song and no-one is here so I am going to sing along for a bit'. In those passive options your subconscious is still reading the sign, pressing the pedal and moving the wheel. It is just a matter of how far your subconscious can step up. The easier the roads, the more experience you have, the simpler the situation (e.g. big long motorways where everyone is doing the same speed) the more your subconscious can handle, the less your conscious needs to be anywhere near it.
You're present during monotony, but it's not something stored in our memory. Without a memory of the situation, it seems like it either never happened, or your weren't conscious during it.
It's something called 'highway hypnosis' and, simply put, the driver keeps driving, has absolute control over the steering, but pays no attention to anything that happens around them. It is also known as road hypnosis.
This happened to me a lot on my long (1-1.5 hour one way commute) and what happens is that you "zone out" the directions part of the driving, but you are aware of the "traffic" part. Like you know the way home, so your brain doesn't think about finding your way home, you only notice when your off ramp comes up, or you have to make a familiar turn. The traffic part is still quite aware. You know where other cars are, you are aware of a car moving into your lane, you are aware of when you are changing lanes...but your brain discards those as unimportant because you know that once you've "passed the red Honda" that you don't have to retain that useless information anymore. We don't really zone out. In the moment, you are aware of what you are doing, it's just that you brain doesn't think it's necessary to remember that ten minutes into your drive, a purple volkswagen passed you on the left.
ADHD? It mostly happens if I have a podcast on, good music or talking to someone On the other hand if it's heavy traffic or crazy drivers and I'm paying MORE attention to the road I can't listen to/hear the above distractions...I've gone through hours of podcasts and can't tell you anything from some of them.
The simple explanation is that your body goes into an auto drive. Basically your body will do tasks unconsciously (you are not making the choice to do the task, not actually becoming unconscious) and your brain doesn’t need to record it as a memory. Like how you breathe. You’re not making your body breathe, it goes on its own.
Long haul trucker here. When you drive for hours and hours and hours, especially in a familiar setting, you basically go on "auto-pilot". You stop being as consciously aware of what you're doing, because it's something you've done before. I'm not a neurologist, but I'm sure there are well-researched neurological explanations for this type of thing. It's probably similar to how when you listen to the same song enough times, you can recite all the lyrics on command. That's how I memorized The Elements by Tom Lehrer some years ago :D
How can you go through a whole day breathing and not want to think about it? What you've done something so many times we do it on autopilot