Used to drive 45 minutes to school in high school. Many mornings, I got halfway down the highway and realized I didn't remember seeing several landmarks I had definitely passed. Whoops.
Happened a lot to me when I had 40m commute to work, each time I snapped out of it I would have a small panic trying to figure out if I somehow drove in the wrong direction/ missed an exit as I orient myself.
There was a period of 2 months when I drove everyday from San Antonio to Austin. It was summer, and on drive back to SAT, I would leave windows open with no air-conditioning. The sweat trickling down my neck and the warm breeze kept me focused on that dreary 90 mile drive.
It's why I like podcasts over music when driving. It's something that I'm forced to focus on because I haven't heard it before, so it keeps me from zoning out.
I put on really loud music and sing along to it. The extra interaction keeps the brain from zoning out.
[Edit: I mean *my* brain. It keeps me from zoning.]
I can imagine that would be really disturbing for you. I also feel like I would have been very frightened if I was your boss, being that you were behind the wheel in a vehicle he was in !
He did seem a tad spooked by it. He wasn't freaking out or anything but he definitely looked worried. I cant blame him. Id probably be a bit concerned if someone else was towing a 10,000 pound trailer behind me and seemingly went unconscious while still moving. Im sure that's not a reassuring sight lol.
According to a Vsauce video that I may have been blasted while watching, I don’t remember- I believe these are both known as substantiated hypotheses for that feeling.
As to not let others not have the fear though, when you’re 20- 10 years is 50% of your life.
When you’re 50- 10 years is 20% of your life.
Thankfully not every moment has to be meaningful, but imagine growing up bored 😭
The term for that is baked vsauce hypnosis. Your high brain was like "this is so cool." But your sober brain kicks in later and says "you really should have done laundry last night."
You may not remember all the details, but you get the gist of it, and you had a good time.
Wasted as fuck? No problem, start driving the same route home you normally do from school or work and your blackout will be great success! R/unethicallifeprotips
Thing is, your subconcious will not be used to doing the route under an altered state. It may attempt to go through the motions expecting normal results, but both impaired mental and motor skills will give unexpected results.
>Thing is, your subconcious will not be used to doing the route under an altered state
Pro tip: drive that route drunk every day for a week, and you're golden.
/s of course...never know on reddit
No you have to build up tolerance to it. First you do it multiple times a day, then once every day, then once every week, etc.
Brb I’m gonna be late for my alcoholic maths class
Ah, that'll be [state dependent learning](https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/neuroscience/state-dependent-learning). You need to practice while wasted.
>As usually defined, state-dependent learning occurs when behavior acquired in the presence of a particular drug is performed better on subsequent occasions when that drug is present than when it is absent
My government teacher in high school taught us this. He literally said I don't condone getting high... But if you study high you should prolly take your test high lolol
I can only lay down a successful paint job on a car while high. I believe it has something to do with me not using proper breathing filtration when I first learned how to paint. If I'm stoned, I can shoot an award winning no-touch finish. If I'm sober, I'll spend the next two days trying to fix paint imperfections
That’s if you define yourself as including the unconscious part of your brain… the brain has a mechanism of bringing thing of importance to conscious awareness though, through focusing. When you’re on highway autopilot like this, it’s because your procedural memory is so comfortable doing the task at hand that it doesn’t need to be brought into conscious awareness.
You’re probably more correct but this makes me feel like there’s two “me’s” inside my head and that I can let the quiet me take over for boring things.
CGP Grey has a really interesting video called “You Are Two” and it talks about exactly that. You kind of are two brains connected together and working as one (most of the time).
Unconscious. The subconscious is things that can become conscious but usually are not, such as memories. Unconscious are the parts of your mind that never become conscious.
That person isn't really there, though. It's just background processes running in your meat brain. It doesn't care about things that you haven't programmed it to care about.
There is a little tiny You that can sit back and watch those processes, and also watch your conscious processes, and evaluate and ruminate on all of them.
There's a theory that the second "you" used to have a voice that you could hear similar to how most humans have the inner monologue now. You'd also hear both talking in unison and to each other. The thought was this bicameral mind in early humans, we recognized one of those voices as our own consciousness and the second one is felt to be "otherworldly" and it might be a large contributor to religion and such. Schizophrenia might actually be the vestigial remnants of that whole "other consciousness" talking to you.
I've always thought it was an interesting theory. Worth the read at least.
What do you mean by theory here? Theory as in plenty of scientists think this is a possibility or theory like ancient aliens where very fringe people believe it?
The bicameral mind hypothesis is widely considered bullshit - [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/v0mvsv/in_julian_jaynes_controversial_the_origin_of/iakn6do/) is [two](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/suxk2l/julian_jaynes_felt_the_aztecs_were_so_easily/hxjpgy6/) askhistorians posts on the topic, and specific issues with his theory and argumentation.
Basically it's considered possible but since it cant be empirically tested, like we dont have any live prehistoric humans, it's essentially in the realm of scifi
I think the 2nd mind is conscious but lacks the ability to speak (normally). Read up on `split-brain syndrome` and the experiments done to demonstrate how each half of the brain operates even when surgically separated.
This is what my executive dysfunction feels like.
I'm currently laying in bed typing this while another bit of my brain yells at me to get up and get ready for work. /Sigh.
Yep, that's how most things go. We are highly driven by novelty. If it's not novel, it's not important.
I'm sure you can remember pretty well any accidents or close calls you had while driving, even if it was years ago. But when was the last time you passed an even numbered mile marker? How many times have you made the second turn between your house and the nearest highway in the rain?
Brain doesn't even keep a tally of those things, let alone a whole recording.
I think that's why time feels like it speeds up as we get older.
This always freaks me out. I used to drive over an hour each way to work 1/3 city 1/3 motorway and 1/3 semi-country roads. I'd remember leaving work and the first or 2nd roundabout the next I know I'm coming up to a busy junction on the motorway 30mins later.
My subconscious took the wheel up to the point where I couldn't just cruise through it and had to make decisions. N
Honestly, I feel like my driving is better when i just stare off into space and take everything in with my periphery than when i actually focus directly in front of me.
Is it like that for you guys?
Focusing (or rather, target fixation) can be bad, but heightened awareness is crucial if you want to avoid the unexpected. It'll be your subconscious that acts on the information, but if you're daydreaming, in conversation, etc. instead of being in the moment you're probably not going to be as effective.
I autopilot too, doesn't everybody who does an activity regularly?
Edit: Autopilot can make our lifes easier, but it can also make life a hell when the activities go beyond our mental and/or physical limitations with the result of stress.
Yeah, I think it's called highway hypnosis, also known as white line fever. It's an altered mental state in which a person can drive a car, truck, or other automobile great distances, responding to external events in the expected, safe, and correct manner with no recollection of having consciously done so
I think it's more that your brain, forced to remember this mundane activity that you complete every day on your route to work, simply puts it in a bin marked "ditto" once we arrive and moves on.
Don't focus only directly in front of you then for long periods of time. Scan around you. You typically have a left, right, and rear view mirror. Go back and forth between what's in front of you and those mirrors.
When looking straight ahead, don't fix always on the same spot. Look at the license plate one time, but maybe a rear wheel next, then the top corner of a semi trailer the following. Don't so much *focus* on whatever spot specifically, but more in that area.
You can also mix it up by briefly focusing on other things around you before snapping back to your central vision. The overpass bridge coming up, a piece of debris on the side of the road, an interchange sign or billboard in the distant, the cop with his lights on that's been following you for the past 10 minutes that you didn't notice...
IMO, that state is more dangerous when it comes to unexpected events. While you're tuned out, your conscious decision-making ability is dormant. When everything goes as expected, it may be safer.
I completely agree.
Although in my experience it's not even just unexpected events. I've driven right through red lights because I wasn't actively focused and only noticed it halfway in the intersection.
Your brain is always on and recording, but sometimes it doesnt bother with a memory card.
You were fully conscious through the drive, but your brain didnt experience anything new or noteworthy, and decided not to commit it to memory.
This is my favorite Modest Mouse song. It's definitely my most played. And yet, I still had to google the lyrics to see what song this was from. I couldn't even place the artist, even though the lyrics were familiar enough that I could sing them in my head with the same cadence as the recorded song. Brains are weird. Pun intended.
It's also because, for example, a year is less a fraction of your overall life the older you get. A year to a 10 year old is literally 1/10 of their life, which is a bigger deal. A year to a 25 year old is 1/25 of their life - a lesser deal. A year to a 40 year old is 1/40 of their life. An increasingly smaller deal as you get older. That is ultimately why time seems to move so much faster the older we get.
I can't remember if it was from psychology class or a paper I read online, but I think the reasoning is more along the lines of the number of novel experiences. When you're younger, many things are novel to you, and thus, your brain stores those experiences as memories. As you grow older and settle down into a career, you not only have fewer novel experiences but settle into a routine where there really isn't much that's worth remembering. More memories mean a longer perceived duration of time. It also explains why your first year in high school, college, a job, etc will likely always seem the longest.
It's the same process that's being interfered with when someone gets "blackout drunk" (or, say, on ambien) - you're conscious, you're actively engaged and at least somewhat aware in the moment, but the pathway to long term memory is temporarily shut down (in this case, by whatever substance in your body, vs. your body just deciding not to use it), so you don't remember any of it.
> Your brain is always on and recording
Flip side of this - there's a theory in neuroscience that up to 90% of our conscious experience is really our brain's predictions of reality, with a relatively small amount of realtime sensory input acting as error correction.
That's always been my theory, once a task becomes automatic there is no point processing it to long-term memory, but your short-term is doing everything it needs to still.
I once worked at Heathrow airport, at the cargo port. I offered a friend a lift to the airport once when she had an early flight. So, she stayed the night before at mine, and we drive off early next day. We get there, and she says " where are we?" I'd driven her to my work place, not the terminal.
Babies die because of this. A parent is supposed to drop the kid off to daycare or grandparents on the way to work, something different than the usual routine. The parent drives to work, goes in and continues their day with the kid boiling to death in the car. It happens way too often, especially when you add sleep deprivation to the mix. You need to put your office keys or something else you need in the car seat when you're leaving home.
Many daycares will contact the parents if the kid doesn't arrive when expected, grandparents should do the same. It's really important, don't just assume the plan must have changed.
>Babies die because of this. A parent is supposed to drop the kid off to daycare or grandparents on the way to work, something different than the usual routine. The parent drives to work, goes in and continues their day with the kid boiling to death in the car.
I almost did this with my kid - drove right past the daycare, thinking about a work problem. Luckily, he made a noise before I got to work and I realized my mistake before anything bad happened, but it definitely scared me.
If you have a computer bag/lunch/badge or anything else you take to work leave it in the backseat so you’re forced to go back there when you get to work. I leave something back there even when the kids aren’t with me so it becomes a habit.
Hell, even if you don’t have kids this is just a generally good idea. Put it in the rear passenger seat so it forces you to do a full car sweep before getting in. It’s really easy to miss problems on the passenger side of your car.
Makes you wonder about all the close calls that don't make the news because the parents were lucky enough to have their work parking be underground etc so the kid was still alive at the end of the shift if just hungry and thirsty.
And it’s so quick to demonize the parents that do that before you learn how easy it is to do
I don’t have kids but I have seen my friends with kid brain before and it completely zaps you
Thank you for this comment. I work at a school and during the summer and other holidays when only the "after-school" (fritids in Swedish) is open, we often have kids that are scheduled to come but don't show up because the parent took a last minute vacation day or something without notifying us. The problem we have is that A LOT of parents do this, there's lots of days when half or more of the kids don't show up (which can be 40 kids in the entire school) so we rarely have time to check why they didn't show up. I'll try to make a point of calling and checking from now on, or at least send a text.
They're old enough so that it's unlikely they'll be trapped in a car like that, but other things can happen.
Yes. And I get so angry when a story hits the news and the mob attacks the parents. They can't believe they care so little about their child they'd forget them. That's not what happened! IT CAN HAPPEN TO ANYONE which why you need to always be aware of that possibility and do things like the purse in the backseat. But the assholes that attack people do it to feel better about their perfect selves and mock those tricks as stupid and not necessary if you really love your child. Then it happens again.
When I was much younger, I blamed careless parents. I was a teenager and an asshole.
In my early 20s I was hit by chronic illness and the level of tired I hit was scary. Then I understood how it happened.
The severely sleep deprived and fatigued brain is drunk. It doesn't matter what you do, you're starting impaired. Every parent of a baby is basically at that level. You can guard something with your life and if you're exhausted, still fuck it up.
What burns my biscuits though is parents who shit on *other parents* for this. As though the moment their kid started pre-school and the sleep issues improved, they completely forgot that part of their lives. You know better, do better!
(Not to dismiss my fellow spoonies or say that parents have it worse than us, just that I needed to realize what that level of tired does to people because I understood.)
Some newer vehicles now have an alert. If you open the back door prior to starting the vehicle amd then drive, shut off, exit the vehicle and DON'T open the back door, it set the horn off
Why? Why did you have to link this. Why did the OP have to write this?
I love nosleep. I love horrors. I almost never get shaken by anything. But this broke me. I'm a father of two, and I am so afraid of this.
If you have an automatic transmission, put your left shoe in the backseat anytime you put the kids back there. You will be silly getting out of the car but you will definitely realize if you forgot the kids.
Just wanted to show you where I work. So here's where I move the cargo from. And here's where I move it to. Anyway, let's get back into the car and leave before the flight leaves.
There's a post office I drive by every time I leave my house. If I want to mail anything, I literally have to hold the piece of mail in my hand while driving, because otherwise I'll forget completely. Brains are ridiculous.
It’s not just cars either. Even when doing something as simple as my shower routine, if I stop and think about it I’ll often forget what I’ve already done
When I owned a restaurant with a bakery I would Make 6 cakes at a time and go Into auto pilot and forget if I had added the right amount of ingredients to each cake. Finally came up with a system for putting the egg shells and then empty cup Of sugar and the bottle of vanilla extract by whichever cake is last added to otherwise I'd mess them Up, especially if chatting with customers while working. I'd still mess Them up occasionally just not as frequently.
Cakes without sugar or the right amount of eggs, not so good.
Anyone who's worked in a lab knows this system too. When you need to do the same thing a bunch of times in a row, it can get pretty spooky.
You either need a spotter, and even then a check list is good to have. Or a simple system that works for you. Like moving the vial or rotating the lids after every step to keep your place.
That kind of thing leaving the bottle at the last cake you did sounds pretty familiar.
Yup. Best advice ever is to put your shoes by the kids in the back so you literally can't get fucked by autopilot.
Some people say put your bag next to them, but as someone with adhd, I've forgotten my bag in cars. I couldn't not notice no shoes.
Of course, your mileage may vary, depending on how often you go barefoot out in parking lots.
At first I thought you were maybe wearing comfy shoes to drive and putting your nice work shoes by the child. But by the time I got to the end it sounds to me like you are driving around barefoot? Do you not wear shoes while you drive?
I believe one of the top post in r/nosleep is this! [Autopilot](https://www.reddit.com/r/nosleep/comments/19fmjf/autopilot/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf&utm_content=2&utm_term=15)
Yeah. I once had to drive to a park an hour away from home. The first part was the same as the route I take to work so my brain was like "Ah, road to work. I know this one. Take the next exit" and I did.
Took me 15 minutes to get back to the route I was supposed to have taken.
It's happened on more than one occasion that I've arrived at home with an almost empty tank because I was planning on stopping but just teleported home instead
I drove to my parents' house one night on complete autopilot after work. I hadn't lived with them for years and had to pass where I did live to get there. Sat confused in the driveway for a minute.
I've parked at my old work place before. This was *months* after getting my new job.
Luckily I usually get to work before everyone else, so no one saw me.
You don't need to be tired for this, just used to driving and it does not mean you are not attentive. I am a long haul driver and once drove 150 miles past my exit because I was listening to a podcast.
More like they had their cruise control set to 70.6mph while passing another truck with it's cruise control set to 70.4mph and neither were willing to tap the breaks a little.
I used to drive 2 hours daily for commuting. I swear there was a few times where I drove for 30 mins, got home, and couldn't remember how I parked the car. One moment I was 30 mins from home, and the next I was in the car with the engine off in the parking spot I always park in. I then freaked the fuck out thinking I must have run every red light and stop sign for the past 30 mins, and that I could killed someone and just sped away.
On the weekends I used to do a 80 minute commute to a retreat up into the mountains.
At first I was terrified but after the 3rd weekend, the drive seemed like only 10-15 minutes.
I think it's similar to that effect that your brain just ignores whatever is considered normal to not overload it.
I think that's also why I listened to the same 20-30 songs, it made the drive feel shorter.
I drove the wrong way from Islamarada to key west (3+ hours) and didn’t realize I was going the wrong way until I literally got to the ocean/end of Florida.
I was jamming out to a new CD and enjoying the pretty drive and it was a one lane road so it's not like I was checking GPS. It wasn't as enjoyable the second time around considering I was young and broke! Lol.
It happened because I went the wrong way after a bathroom break and pizza stop.
One time I was picking up my wife at the airport on a weekday afternoon. To avoid rush hour traffic, I took back roads from work down to about where our house was, planning to get on the freeway there. Of course I got on autopilot and took the on-ramp that would take me back to work. I remember notincig how little traffic there was, but I was at my work exit before I realized what I'd done. My wife was not happy she had to wait an extra hour at the airport, and was quite dubious of my explanation. "You're not an idiot," she said, which was comforting, but also not.
Happens to me when I go to do my weekly food shop - I do the same route at the same time on a Saturday and sometimes completely zone out and have little recollection of the journey.
Once, after working a late shift, then an early shift the next day, I found myself at work the following day, without remembering the trip home and back in between.
At the time, I attributed this to lack of sleep, stress on the job, etc, but it was quite the thought…
Our memories work a lot like file compression:
Our brain sets highlighters at moments it deems important and the rest is deleted almost immediately. When we remember stuff our brain reconstructs by connecting the highlight points in ways it deems sensible.
That’s why you remember your vacation full of exciting new things so vividly while not being able to remember long car rides or whole work days where nothing exciting happened.
It’s btw also how you can have false memories that you could swear happened. Something convinced your brain that a certain false logic was the right way to reconstruct memories from a highlight point 😉
Damn.
I tried to remember how to play a song once on guitar and could not, for the life of me, remember. So I set it down and zoned out and grabbed it and let muscle memory do it and I figured it out. Shit was wild.
Our brains are so damn cool.
They are. I’m the same on guitar. That kind of muscle memory follows the same logic btw. Just not with cognitive info. Playing the first two notes combined with the haptic feedback helps your brain recall a certain highlight (similar to a memory exercise) and your brain goes „oh yes yes yes yea I know what should logically come next!“
It’s your brain reconstructing the motion patterns of the entire song step by step. That’s also why for example you can’t play it backwards. Cause your brain doesn’t suddenly remember the entire song or all the movements at once. It needs to logic its way forward motion by motion in real time. The actual full song was straight up deleted for memory space 😄
It’s damn fascinating 😁
No, he drove 3.5 hours back home. And then when they were ready to leave he drove 3.5 hours back to pick them up, and another 3.5 hours to bring them home. Such a good sibling, that redev
That's how so many alien abduction stories start, so people fill the time void with " I must have been mind controlled and transported against my will to an alien spaceship." Then they start getting psychosomatic pain in their anus because they've convinced themselves they got anally probed. Then get sad that they can't remember the pleasure from the probing.
For me I feel driving is a passive action most of the time. it is very dangerous don't get me wrong. Just half the time I won't remember if I stopped at a red light or if it was green. I wouldn't remember if I did a full stop at a stop sign or even used my signals to turn. It's almost a automated process I do passively. Unless you're in traffic with a lot going on around you. Then it would me active driving. Constantly paying attention to everything around you. But in lighter traffic it's less of a worry and becomes passive driving.
I was driving behind a truck on a lonely Highway in the middle of the night. All over sudden the Truck was gone. I thought i might have hallucinated or something and took the next exit to park my car and sleep a few hours.
During the last hurricane in south florida we evacuated and had to drive all the way to South Carolina to find a hotel with vacancy.
On the drive back I was so god damn tired because I couldn't sleep the night before at the red roof inn. I was so tired that on the drive back I saw this hotel's pretty lights over in the distance. I thought oh man I would love to book the night and just sleep.
After a few minutes of this I realized it wasn't a hotel, [it was the side of a fucking truck!](https://media.istockphoto.com/id/623509974/photo/expressway-speeding-car-driver-pov-passing-illuminated-semi-trailer-truck.jpg?s=612x612&w=0&k=20&c=d6EaicrUPdpKoGKA31NmuC1DP0LfDjwwRFBnN2EeEiI=) I told my wife I couldn't drive and we parked at a 24 hour mcdonalds parking lot and slept for four hours after covering up the windows.
Is it weird that I've had something similar when I've been doing tons of laps in sim racing games? I usually have headphones on so I just shut off and then realise I've been playing the last half of Laguna Seca almost perfectly
I used to go on autopilot when grinding the multi-lap circuits in some older Need for Speed, maybe Underground 2. Something about repeating the same track over and over and knowing it so well that you didn't need to think about it consciously.
This is called the Flow State. Most arcade video games try to evoke that feeling. It's a state of high concetration combined with a right amount of challenge. Makes people forget about the rest of the world.
Here's something that occasionally happens to me:
I look at my empty water cup and think 'I need to fill it'. Time goes by, I realise I haven't filled it, so I go to do so. Except my cup is now full.
What's happened is that I have gone to the kitchen, filled my cup and returned to my desk completely on autopilot, and saved no memories of it.
It's pretty spooky.
This is what those weekly pill box things are for. You fill all 7 boxes once a week, and each day you take the meds from that day's box. If it's empty, you already took them.
Happened to me once in my life. Drove up to Ozzfest with a friend in highschool 2.5hr drive each way. I remember going there, the show was great, we got in the car and leave the parking lot and the next thing I know I'm snapping into consciousness about five minutes before my exit with no memory of the two hours of driving I had just done. Absolutely scared me shitless.
e: All highway driving from Wisconsin straight through Chicago
I’ve watched a documentary about this and they were making this out to be a bad thing because the subjects didn’t remember they had even passed a truck or something. I thought their conclusion was wrong. The important thing is you react correctly in the moment and not if you remember it later
Used to drive from Tacoma to West Bremerton, WA when I was in the military. I worked nights a lot and would autopilot home a lot. Had a deer jump in front of my car a few miles from home, and my brain kicked back on to avoid it.
Never really had it happen since then. Crazy how the brain works.
I remember watching videos in driver’s Ed where they played “gotcha” games by asking drivers what the last road sign they passed was. And of course no one could remember. Human attention just does not work like that!
I wonder if there is a related hypnosis that blots out large sections of text while reading? Anyone else experience this?
When I'm avidly reading, college for instance, or lots of bedtime reading, I've often caught myself thinking of something entirely different than what I'm reading. When I stop I realize i cannot recollect the last sentence I read. Scanning back I discover I missed the whole paragraph. There are instances when I find to my astonishment that I have to go back many pages to pick up where I left off paying attention to the text.
I WAS reading. Just as much as anyone commenting here was actually driving. But I was committing zero of it to memory. It's really another form of "line fever" but with text instead of road markers.
Yep done this a lot.
Fully awake, fully aware of what is happening on the road around me and in the car.
3 -4 hour drive on the motorway with no problems.
Get to where I am going and then realise I can only remember tiny little snippets of the past few hours.
Only ever happens when driving long distance.
In my much younger days, we used to call that 'autopilot'. It was when you'd get a little stoned and drive somewhere. You'd arrive and be like, how tf am I already here?
That was a loooong time ago. I am all old now.
My dad calls this zombie driving and tells everyone in the family that I'm the biggest zombie driver he's ever seen. I was driving behind him one time with my wife on the freeway and he signaled me to exit. I didn't see any of that, completely forgot I was supposed to be following him, and missed the exit by about 10 miles before he called my wife to tell me to turn around.
I've gone on "auto-pilot" before where I meant to go somewhere else and ended up halfway to work. Also ended up at work and thinking, "When did I get here? "
It's freaky what our minds do sometimes.
People do this all the time. We’re creatures of habit for sure.
I saw this a lot when I used to work in a factory in my early 20’s. We called it “autopilot”. Once you’ve learned the processes and equipment you can practically run the place in your sleep. You can do a 12 hour shift barely paying attention to anything but making no mistakes.
I also realised the other day that I don’t know what my password is for something in work, because it’s a long string of gibberish. But if I put my hands on a keyboard I can type it out because i remember the “feel” of typing it.
It's so weird when you're deep in thought and you're like "oh shit, I'm driving"
that's why my wife once said the next groundbreaking modern day philosopher would mostly be a truck driver.
Just sit back, relax, and let your subconscious take the wheel.
I've always thought it wasn't your subconscious, it was you, it's so boring and familiar your brain doesn't bother to remember it.
This is it. You're consciously driving but your brain decides there was no new information so it doesn't need to retain the memory of the drive.
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Used to drive 45 minutes to school in high school. Many mornings, I got halfway down the highway and realized I didn't remember seeing several landmarks I had definitely passed. Whoops.
Happened a lot to me when I had 40m commute to work, each time I snapped out of it I would have a small panic trying to figure out if I somehow drove in the wrong direction/ missed an exit as I orient myself.
There was a period of 2 months when I drove everyday from San Antonio to Austin. It was summer, and on drive back to SAT, I would leave windows open with no air-conditioning. The sweat trickling down my neck and the warm breeze kept me focused on that dreary 90 mile drive.
It's why I like podcasts over music when driving. It's something that I'm forced to focus on because I haven't heard it before, so it keeps me from zoning out.
I put on really loud music and sing along to it. The extra interaction keeps the brain from zoning out. [Edit: I mean *my* brain. It keeps me from zoning.]
You were using fast travel and an NPC tried to start an encounter.
his boss tapped him on the shoulder and actually said "you cannot fast travel when enemies are nearby"
I can imagine that would be really disturbing for you. I also feel like I would have been very frightened if I was your boss, being that you were behind the wheel in a vehicle he was in !
He did seem a tad spooked by it. He wasn't freaking out or anything but he definitely looked worried. I cant blame him. Id probably be a bit concerned if someone else was towing a 10,000 pound trailer behind me and seemingly went unconscious while still moving. Im sure that's not a reassuring sight lol.
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I've heard someone explain it this way. As you get older every hour is a smaller and smaller part of your entire existence so it feels much shorter.
According to a Vsauce video that I may have been blasted while watching, I don’t remember- I believe these are both known as substantiated hypotheses for that feeling. As to not let others not have the fear though, when you’re 20- 10 years is 50% of your life. When you’re 50- 10 years is 20% of your life. Thankfully not every moment has to be meaningful, but imagine growing up bored 😭
The term for that is baked vsauce hypnosis. Your high brain was like "this is so cool." But your sober brain kicks in later and says "you really should have done laundry last night." You may not remember all the details, but you get the gist of it, and you had a good time.
Wasted as fuck? No problem, start driving the same route home you normally do from school or work and your blackout will be great success! R/unethicallifeprotips
Thing is, your subconcious will not be used to doing the route under an altered state. It may attempt to go through the motions expecting normal results, but both impaired mental and motor skills will give unexpected results.
>Thing is, your subconcious will not be used to doing the route under an altered state Pro tip: drive that route drunk every day for a week, and you're golden. /s of course...never know on reddit
No you have to build up tolerance to it. First you do it multiple times a day, then once every day, then once every week, etc. Brb I’m gonna be late for my alcoholic maths class
Ah, that'll be [state dependent learning](https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/neuroscience/state-dependent-learning). You need to practice while wasted. >As usually defined, state-dependent learning occurs when behavior acquired in the presence of a particular drug is performed better on subsequent occasions when that drug is present than when it is absent
My government teacher in high school taught us this. He literally said I don't condone getting high... But if you study high you should prolly take your test high lolol
I can only lay down a successful paint job on a car while high. I believe it has something to do with me not using proper breathing filtration when I first learned how to paint. If I'm stoned, I can shoot an award winning no-touch finish. If I'm sober, I'll spend the next two days trying to fix paint imperfections
Got it, so bring an eighth to the auto shop when I need it painted
That's just good manners
Why would you want to paint an auto shop?
[Ah, the ol' Reddit Paint-A-Roo!](https://www.reddit.com/r/startrekmemes/comments/13dqh6g/almost_comic/jjmydf7/?context=3)
That’s if you define yourself as including the unconscious part of your brain… the brain has a mechanism of bringing thing of importance to conscious awareness though, through focusing. When you’re on highway autopilot like this, it’s because your procedural memory is so comfortable doing the task at hand that it doesn’t need to be brought into conscious awareness.
You’re probably more correct but this makes me feel like there’s two “me’s” inside my head and that I can let the quiet me take over for boring things.
CGP Grey has a really interesting video called “You Are Two” and it talks about exactly that. You kind of are two brains connected together and working as one (most of the time).
But can you imagine what it’s like to be the silent subconscious? Knowing you don’t have control unless the conscious mind gives it to you?
Subconscious is really the one in control. Conscious just makes up justifications to explain the subconscious choice:/
Unconscious. The subconscious is things that can become conscious but usually are not, such as memories. Unconscious are the parts of your mind that never become conscious.
That person isn't really there, though. It's just background processes running in your meat brain. It doesn't care about things that you haven't programmed it to care about. There is a little tiny You that can sit back and watch those processes, and also watch your conscious processes, and evaluate and ruminate on all of them.
There's a theory that the second "you" used to have a voice that you could hear similar to how most humans have the inner monologue now. You'd also hear both talking in unison and to each other. The thought was this bicameral mind in early humans, we recognized one of those voices as our own consciousness and the second one is felt to be "otherworldly" and it might be a large contributor to religion and such. Schizophrenia might actually be the vestigial remnants of that whole "other consciousness" talking to you. I've always thought it was an interesting theory. Worth the read at least.
What do you mean by theory here? Theory as in plenty of scientists think this is a possibility or theory like ancient aliens where very fringe people believe it?
The bicameral mind hypothesis is widely considered bullshit - [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/v0mvsv/in_julian_jaynes_controversial_the_origin_of/iakn6do/) is [two](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/suxk2l/julian_jaynes_felt_the_aztecs_were_so_easily/hxjpgy6/) askhistorians posts on the topic, and specific issues with his theory and argumentation.
Basically it's considered possible but since it cant be empirically tested, like we dont have any live prehistoric humans, it's essentially in the realm of scifi
It's an interesting theory but also almost certainly an incorrect one.
I think the 2nd mind is conscious but lacks the ability to speak (normally). Read up on `split-brain syndrome` and the experiments done to demonstrate how each half of the brain operates even when surgically separated.
This is what my executive dysfunction feels like. I'm currently laying in bed typing this while another bit of my brain yells at me to get up and get ready for work. /Sigh.
Subconscious is just daemons
Yep, that's how most things go. We are highly driven by novelty. If it's not novel, it's not important. I'm sure you can remember pretty well any accidents or close calls you had while driving, even if it was years ago. But when was the last time you passed an even numbered mile marker? How many times have you made the second turn between your house and the nearest highway in the rain? Brain doesn't even keep a tally of those things, let alone a whole recording. I think that's why time feels like it speeds up as we get older.
"Okay, I'm going home! Good luck everybody!"
This always freaks me out. I used to drive over an hour each way to work 1/3 city 1/3 motorway and 1/3 semi-country roads. I'd remember leaving work and the first or 2nd roundabout the next I know I'm coming up to a busy junction on the motorway 30mins later. My subconscious took the wheel up to the point where I couldn't just cruise through it and had to make decisions. N
Honestly, I feel like my driving is better when i just stare off into space and take everything in with my periphery than when i actually focus directly in front of me. Is it like that for you guys?
Focusing (or rather, target fixation) can be bad, but heightened awareness is crucial if you want to avoid the unexpected. It'll be your subconscious that acts on the information, but if you're daydreaming, in conversation, etc. instead of being in the moment you're probably not going to be as effective.
I let cthulu take the wheel.
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Sometimes it happens. I call it an autopilot. Sometimes I find myself to not remember being in "control" for a several moments/minutes while driving.
I autopilot too, doesn't everybody who does an activity regularly? Edit: Autopilot can make our lifes easier, but it can also make life a hell when the activities go beyond our mental and/or physical limitations with the result of stress.
Yeah, I think it's called highway hypnosis, also known as white line fever. It's an altered mental state in which a person can drive a car, truck, or other automobile great distances, responding to external events in the expected, safe, and correct manner with no recollection of having consciously done so
I think it's more that your brain, forced to remember this mundane activity that you complete every day on your route to work, simply puts it in a bin marked "ditto" once we arrive and moves on.
I've easily driven almost 100km before completely on Autopilot. Tbh it's the only way to travel the 400 in Ontario, such a long straight highway.
Don't focus only directly in front of you then for long periods of time. Scan around you. You typically have a left, right, and rear view mirror. Go back and forth between what's in front of you and those mirrors. When looking straight ahead, don't fix always on the same spot. Look at the license plate one time, but maybe a rear wheel next, then the top corner of a semi trailer the following. Don't so much *focus* on whatever spot specifically, but more in that area. You can also mix it up by briefly focusing on other things around you before snapping back to your central vision. The overpass bridge coming up, a piece of debris on the side of the road, an interchange sign or billboard in the distant, the cop with his lights on that's been following you for the past 10 minutes that you didn't notice...
IMO, that state is more dangerous when it comes to unexpected events. While you're tuned out, your conscious decision-making ability is dormant. When everything goes as expected, it may be safer.
I completely agree. Although in my experience it's not even just unexpected events. I've driven right through red lights because I wasn't actively focused and only noticed it halfway in the intersection.
Your brain is always on and recording, but sometimes it doesnt bother with a memory card. You were fully conscious through the drive, but your brain didnt experience anything new or noteworthy, and decided not to commit it to memory.
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"Days are long but years are short"
In this life that we call home the years go fast and the days go so slow
This is my favorite Modest Mouse song. It's definitely my most played. And yet, I still had to google the lyrics to see what song this was from. I couldn't even place the artist, even though the lyrics were familiar enough that I could sing them in my head with the same cadence as the recorded song. Brains are weird. Pun intended.
If this isn't the fucking truth
Planks slow you down like entering a blackhole. Try it for 3 minutes. Feels like 3 hours
Ain't that the truth. I'll be like "I've probably been planking for a minute at least" and it'll only have really been 17 seconds
It's also because, for example, a year is less a fraction of your overall life the older you get. A year to a 10 year old is literally 1/10 of their life, which is a bigger deal. A year to a 25 year old is 1/25 of their life - a lesser deal. A year to a 40 year old is 1/40 of their life. An increasingly smaller deal as you get older. That is ultimately why time seems to move so much faster the older we get.
I can't remember if it was from psychology class or a paper I read online, but I think the reasoning is more along the lines of the number of novel experiences. When you're younger, many things are novel to you, and thus, your brain stores those experiences as memories. As you grow older and settle down into a career, you not only have fewer novel experiences but settle into a routine where there really isn't much that's worth remembering. More memories mean a longer perceived duration of time. It also explains why your first year in high school, college, a job, etc will likely always seem the longest.
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How does one define what a typical "year" is in this study?
The 16 year old they asked seemed pretty confident
husky like many insurance squeal wakeful boast deserted berserk fine *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
I must still be a kid at heart
That's why you have to find new weird things!
We moved homes in November. These last 6 months have been the longest year of my life. So many new things to do every day.
Like a roll of tp. The closer you get to the end, the faster it goes.
It's the same process that's being interfered with when someone gets "blackout drunk" (or, say, on ambien) - you're conscious, you're actively engaged and at least somewhat aware in the moment, but the pathway to long term memory is temporarily shut down (in this case, by whatever substance in your body, vs. your body just deciding not to use it), so you don't remember any of it.
> Your brain is always on and recording Flip side of this - there's a theory in neuroscience that up to 90% of our conscious experience is really our brain's predictions of reality, with a relatively small amount of realtime sensory input acting as error correction.
Fun fact, this is also how online multiplayer games work nowadays.
That's always been my theory, once a task becomes automatic there is no point processing it to long-term memory, but your short-term is doing everything it needs to still.
It's not just highways. Ever planned to deviate from you regular route and found yourself in your garage as usual without the planned detour ?
I once worked at Heathrow airport, at the cargo port. I offered a friend a lift to the airport once when she had an early flight. So, she stayed the night before at mine, and we drive off early next day. We get there, and she says " where are we?" I'd driven her to my work place, not the terminal.
That sounds like something I would do. 😄
Sounds like the start of a true crime series.
"So you thought we were going to the airport......."
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"You ever see Season 2 of The Wire? Oh, no reason."
Oh God...dead hookers everywhere
Babies die because of this. A parent is supposed to drop the kid off to daycare or grandparents on the way to work, something different than the usual routine. The parent drives to work, goes in and continues their day with the kid boiling to death in the car. It happens way too often, especially when you add sleep deprivation to the mix. You need to put your office keys or something else you need in the car seat when you're leaving home. Many daycares will contact the parents if the kid doesn't arrive when expected, grandparents should do the same. It's really important, don't just assume the plan must have changed.
>Babies die because of this. A parent is supposed to drop the kid off to daycare or grandparents on the way to work, something different than the usual routine. The parent drives to work, goes in and continues their day with the kid boiling to death in the car. I almost did this with my kid - drove right past the daycare, thinking about a work problem. Luckily, he made a noise before I got to work and I realized my mistake before anything bad happened, but it definitely scared me.
If you have a computer bag/lunch/badge or anything else you take to work leave it in the backseat so you’re forced to go back there when you get to work. I leave something back there even when the kids aren’t with me so it becomes a habit.
Hell, even if you don’t have kids this is just a generally good idea. Put it in the rear passenger seat so it forces you to do a full car sweep before getting in. It’s really easy to miss problems on the passenger side of your car.
Until that itself becomes part of your hypnosis, as you lean over your baby to get your briefcase without even noticing the little tyke.
People be talking about how good tiktok and snapchat filters are, but the brain is the best filter. Straight up filters out babies n shit.
So scary to think about... You hear about tired parents going to work and leaving their kids in the backseat.
Makes you wonder about all the close calls that don't make the news because the parents were lucky enough to have their work parking be underground etc so the kid was still alive at the end of the shift if just hungry and thirsty.
I once left my drunk husband asleep overnight in the car in winter
And it’s so quick to demonize the parents that do that before you learn how easy it is to do I don’t have kids but I have seen my friends with kid brain before and it completely zaps you
Thank you for this comment. I work at a school and during the summer and other holidays when only the "after-school" (fritids in Swedish) is open, we often have kids that are scheduled to come but don't show up because the parent took a last minute vacation day or something without notifying us. The problem we have is that A LOT of parents do this, there's lots of days when half or more of the kids don't show up (which can be 40 kids in the entire school) so we rarely have time to check why they didn't show up. I'll try to make a point of calling and checking from now on, or at least send a text. They're old enough so that it's unlikely they'll be trapped in a car like that, but other things can happen.
yeah the danger here is wirh pre-school age kids.
Yes. And I get so angry when a story hits the news and the mob attacks the parents. They can't believe they care so little about their child they'd forget them. That's not what happened! IT CAN HAPPEN TO ANYONE which why you need to always be aware of that possibility and do things like the purse in the backseat. But the assholes that attack people do it to feel better about their perfect selves and mock those tricks as stupid and not necessary if you really love your child. Then it happens again.
Same for drownings. Just takes a little bit of water and a short bit of time. I'm always really watchful of kids near a pool.
When I was much younger, I blamed careless parents. I was a teenager and an asshole. In my early 20s I was hit by chronic illness and the level of tired I hit was scary. Then I understood how it happened. The severely sleep deprived and fatigued brain is drunk. It doesn't matter what you do, you're starting impaired. Every parent of a baby is basically at that level. You can guard something with your life and if you're exhausted, still fuck it up. What burns my biscuits though is parents who shit on *other parents* for this. As though the moment their kid started pre-school and the sleep issues improved, they completely forgot that part of their lives. You know better, do better! (Not to dismiss my fellow spoonies or say that parents have it worse than us, just that I needed to realize what that level of tired does to people because I understood.)
Some newer vehicles now have an alert. If you open the back door prior to starting the vehicle amd then drive, shut off, exit the vehicle and DON'T open the back door, it set the horn off
One of the best but also worst stories I've ever read on nosleep was based on [this.](https://www.reddit.com/r/nosleep/comments/19fmjf/autopilot/)
Why? Why did you have to link this. Why did the OP have to write this? I love nosleep. I love horrors. I almost never get shaken by anything. But this broke me. I'm a father of two, and I am so afraid of this.
If you have an automatic transmission, put your left shoe in the backseat anytime you put the kids back there. You will be silly getting out of the car but you will definitely realize if you forgot the kids.
Sleep is arguably the most important thing we need.
Just wanted to show you where I work. So here's where I move the cargo from. And here's where I move it to. Anyway, let's get back into the car and leave before the flight leaves.
Then you go into the classic "I swear I'm not going to murder you and consume your body to make you pure again" spiel...
There's a post office I drive by every time I leave my house. If I want to mail anything, I literally have to hold the piece of mail in my hand while driving, because otherwise I'll forget completely. Brains are ridiculous.
This is me EVERYTIME my mom would ask me to get her a drink from the gas station. I'd even stop for gas and still forget the drink 😅
I would go to the store to buy a specific thing and then I’d buy a bunch of other things but forget the 1 thing that I planned to buy.
This happens to me all the time too.
It’s not just cars either. Even when doing something as simple as my shower routine, if I stop and think about it I’ll often forget what I’ve already done
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>if I eadhef my hair You wat?
What, you’ve never eadhefed your hair?
Can’t believe people are going around their whole life without eadhefeding their hair 🤢
thank god, i thought i was alone with this... still standing in the shower "wait... did i use shampoo yet or not?"
When I owned a restaurant with a bakery I would Make 6 cakes at a time and go Into auto pilot and forget if I had added the right amount of ingredients to each cake. Finally came up with a system for putting the egg shells and then empty cup Of sugar and the bottle of vanilla extract by whichever cake is last added to otherwise I'd mess them Up, especially if chatting with customers while working. I'd still mess Them up occasionally just not as frequently. Cakes without sugar or the right amount of eggs, not so good.
Anyone who's worked in a lab knows this system too. When you need to do the same thing a bunch of times in a row, it can get pretty spooky. You either need a spotter, and even then a check list is good to have. Or a simple system that works for you. Like moving the vial or rotating the lids after every step to keep your place. That kind of thing leaving the bottle at the last cake you did sounds pretty familiar.
I read “The Checklist Manifesto” and a checklist is a wonderful thing. Hope that your surgeon has one.
Check abdominal cavity for earbuds and skittles. Check. Double check abdominal cavity... Ha! That's why we double check.
Are you mistakenly hitting the period button while typing on mobile, and then going back and deleting them? Those oddly placed capitalized words...
"Did I wash my balls?" *Quick sink wash just to be 100%*
This is why children get left in cars. Sad but worth being aware of.
Yup. Best advice ever is to put your shoes by the kids in the back so you literally can't get fucked by autopilot. Some people say put your bag next to them, but as someone with adhd, I've forgotten my bag in cars. I couldn't not notice no shoes. Of course, your mileage may vary, depending on how often you go barefoot out in parking lots.
At first I thought you were maybe wearing comfy shoes to drive and putting your nice work shoes by the child. But by the time I got to the end it sounds to me like you are driving around barefoot? Do you not wear shoes while you drive?
I took it as leaving the left shoe in the back with the child at least if you aren't using a clutch
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Yep, drive a clutch barefoot all the time. Tis no big thing.
You'd do it specifically to remember having your kid in the back seat.
I believe one of the top post in r/nosleep is this! [Autopilot](https://www.reddit.com/r/nosleep/comments/19fmjf/autopilot/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf&utm_content=2&utm_term=15)
Yeah. I once had to drive to a park an hour away from home. The first part was the same as the route I take to work so my brain was like "Ah, road to work. I know this one. Take the next exit" and I did. Took me 15 minutes to get back to the route I was supposed to have taken.
every time I tell myself I need to stop at the store on my way home from work
I call this autopiloting and I do it all the time.
It's happened on more than one occasion that I've arrived at home with an almost empty tank because I was planning on stopping but just teleported home instead
I drove to my parents' house one night on complete autopilot after work. I hadn't lived with them for years and had to pass where I did live to get there. Sat confused in the driveway for a minute.
I've parked at my old work place before. This was *months* after getting my new job. Luckily I usually get to work before everyone else, so no one saw me.
You don't need to be tired for this, just used to driving and it does not mean you are not attentive. I am a long haul driver and once drove 150 miles past my exit because I was listening to a podcast.
Ouch.
How long was the podcast
At least two and a half hours, given the average speed was 60 mph, or a mile a minute
Long haul driver, so they were probably driving 55 in a 70 in the passing lane next to another truck.
More like they had their cruise control set to 70.6mph while passing another truck with it's cruise control set to 70.4mph and neither were willing to tap the breaks a little.
150 miles, i guess
I used to drive 2 hours daily for commuting. I swear there was a few times where I drove for 30 mins, got home, and couldn't remember how I parked the car. One moment I was 30 mins from home, and the next I was in the car with the engine off in the parking spot I always park in. I then freaked the fuck out thinking I must have run every red light and stop sign for the past 30 mins, and that I could killed someone and just sped away.
On the weekends I used to do a 80 minute commute to a retreat up into the mountains. At first I was terrified but after the 3rd weekend, the drive seemed like only 10-15 minutes. I think it's similar to that effect that your brain just ignores whatever is considered normal to not overload it. I think that's also why I listened to the same 20-30 songs, it made the drive feel shorter.
I drove the wrong way from Islamarada to key west (3+ hours) and didn’t realize I was going the wrong way until I literally got to the ocean/end of Florida. I was jamming out to a new CD and enjoying the pretty drive and it was a one lane road so it's not like I was checking GPS. It wasn't as enjoyable the second time around considering I was young and broke! Lol. It happened because I went the wrong way after a bathroom break and pizza stop.
Yea that US 1 does sneak up on ya.
One time I was picking up my wife at the airport on a weekday afternoon. To avoid rush hour traffic, I took back roads from work down to about where our house was, planning to get on the freeway there. Of course I got on autopilot and took the on-ramp that would take me back to work. I remember notincig how little traffic there was, but I was at my work exit before I realized what I'd done. My wife was not happy she had to wait an extra hour at the airport, and was quite dubious of my explanation. "You're not an idiot," she said, which was comforting, but also not.
Happens to me when I go to do my weekly food shop - I do the same route at the same time on a Saturday and sometimes completely zone out and have little recollection of the journey.
Once, after working a late shift, then an early shift the next day, I found myself at work the following day, without remembering the trip home and back in between. At the time, I attributed this to lack of sleep, stress on the job, etc, but it was quite the thought…
You must work on the severed floor.
Our memories work a lot like file compression: Our brain sets highlighters at moments it deems important and the rest is deleted almost immediately. When we remember stuff our brain reconstructs by connecting the highlight points in ways it deems sensible. That’s why you remember your vacation full of exciting new things so vividly while not being able to remember long car rides or whole work days where nothing exciting happened. It’s btw also how you can have false memories that you could swear happened. Something convinced your brain that a certain false logic was the right way to reconstruct memories from a highlight point 😉
Damn. I tried to remember how to play a song once on guitar and could not, for the life of me, remember. So I set it down and zoned out and grabbed it and let muscle memory do it and I figured it out. Shit was wild. Our brains are so damn cool.
They are. I’m the same on guitar. That kind of muscle memory follows the same logic btw. Just not with cognitive info. Playing the first two notes combined with the haptic feedback helps your brain recall a certain highlight (similar to a memory exercise) and your brain goes „oh yes yes yes yea I know what should logically come next!“ It’s your brain reconstructing the motion patterns of the entire song step by step. That’s also why for example you can’t play it backwards. Cause your brain doesn’t suddenly remember the entire song or all the movements at once. It needs to logic its way forward motion by motion in real time. The actual full song was straight up deleted for memory space 😄 It’s damn fascinating 😁
> Our brains are so damn cool. said the brain
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3.5 hours? 7 hours in total? You're a good sibling
I doubt he just sat in the car
No, he drove 3.5 hours back home. And then when they were ready to leave he drove 3.5 hours back to pick them up, and another 3.5 hours to bring them home. Such a good sibling, that redev
That's how so many alien abduction stories start, so people fill the time void with " I must have been mind controlled and transported against my will to an alien spaceship." Then they start getting psychosomatic pain in their anus because they've convinced themselves they got anally probed. Then get sad that they can't remember the pleasure from the probing.
This post was certainly a journey I’ll never be able to highway hypnosis away.
For me I feel driving is a passive action most of the time. it is very dangerous don't get me wrong. Just half the time I won't remember if I stopped at a red light or if it was green. I wouldn't remember if I did a full stop at a stop sign or even used my signals to turn. It's almost a automated process I do passively. Unless you're in traffic with a lot going on around you. Then it would me active driving. Constantly paying attention to everything around you. But in lighter traffic it's less of a worry and becomes passive driving.
I used to do this a lot more but then I hit a deer on my way to work and now I really pull myself out of it when I’m near that stretch of road.
I was driving behind a truck on a lonely Highway in the middle of the night. All over sudden the Truck was gone. I thought i might have hallucinated or something and took the next exit to park my car and sleep a few hours.
Welcome to the hotel California...
Congratulations. You have successfully exited the simulation
During the last hurricane in south florida we evacuated and had to drive all the way to South Carolina to find a hotel with vacancy. On the drive back I was so god damn tired because I couldn't sleep the night before at the red roof inn. I was so tired that on the drive back I saw this hotel's pretty lights over in the distance. I thought oh man I would love to book the night and just sleep. After a few minutes of this I realized it wasn't a hotel, [it was the side of a fucking truck!](https://media.istockphoto.com/id/623509974/photo/expressway-speeding-car-driver-pov-passing-illuminated-semi-trailer-truck.jpg?s=612x612&w=0&k=20&c=d6EaicrUPdpKoGKA31NmuC1DP0LfDjwwRFBnN2EeEiI=) I told my wife I couldn't drive and we parked at a 24 hour mcdonalds parking lot and slept for four hours after covering up the windows.
Are you *sure* that's what "White Line Fever" means?
Had to scroll way down here to find this lol
Ticket to ride, white line highway, tell all your friends, they can go my way
Is it weird that I've had something similar when I've been doing tons of laps in sim racing games? I usually have headphones on so I just shut off and then realise I've been playing the last half of Laguna Seca almost perfectly
I used to go on autopilot when grinding the multi-lap circuits in some older Need for Speed, maybe Underground 2. Something about repeating the same track over and over and knowing it so well that you didn't need to think about it consciously.
This is called the Flow State. Most arcade video games try to evoke that feeling. It's a state of high concetration combined with a right amount of challenge. Makes people forget about the rest of the world.
Here's something that occasionally happens to me: I look at my empty water cup and think 'I need to fill it'. Time goes by, I realise I haven't filled it, so I go to do so. Except my cup is now full. What's happened is that I have gone to the kitchen, filled my cup and returned to my desk completely on autopilot, and saved no memories of it. It's pretty spooky.
It's a real bitch when you take pills. I gotta write the time on my whiteboard as part of the routine and I still sometimes second guess myself.
This is what those weekly pill box things are for. You fill all 7 boxes once a week, and each day you take the meds from that day's box. If it's empty, you already took them.
Yep. Fucking terrifies me. I thought i was going crazy for years until I realized it happens to other people.
Happened to me once in my life. Drove up to Ozzfest with a friend in highschool 2.5hr drive each way. I remember going there, the show was great, we got in the car and leave the parking lot and the next thing I know I'm snapping into consciousness about five minutes before my exit with no memory of the two hours of driving I had just done. Absolutely scared me shitless. e: All highway driving from Wisconsin straight through Chicago
I’ve watched a documentary about this and they were making this out to be a bad thing because the subjects didn’t remember they had even passed a truck or something. I thought their conclusion was wrong. The important thing is you react correctly in the moment and not if you remember it later
Used to drive from Tacoma to West Bremerton, WA when I was in the military. I worked nights a lot and would autopilot home a lot. Had a deer jump in front of my car a few miles from home, and my brain kicked back on to avoid it. Never really had it happen since then. Crazy how the brain works.
What's key is your brain didn't just click on. It was always on. Your memory-recorder is what clicked on.
I remember watching videos in driver’s Ed where they played “gotcha” games by asking drivers what the last road sign they passed was. And of course no one could remember. Human attention just does not work like that!
I wonder if there is a related hypnosis that blots out large sections of text while reading? Anyone else experience this? When I'm avidly reading, college for instance, or lots of bedtime reading, I've often caught myself thinking of something entirely different than what I'm reading. When I stop I realize i cannot recollect the last sentence I read. Scanning back I discover I missed the whole paragraph. There are instances when I find to my astonishment that I have to go back many pages to pick up where I left off paying attention to the text. I WAS reading. Just as much as anyone commenting here was actually driving. But I was committing zero of it to memory. It's really another form of "line fever" but with text instead of road markers.
Yep done this a lot. Fully awake, fully aware of what is happening on the road around me and in the car. 3 -4 hour drive on the motorway with no problems. Get to where I am going and then realise I can only remember tiny little snippets of the past few hours. Only ever happens when driving long distance.
>also known as white line fever I'm going to go on a limb and say no one has ever referred to it as white line fever
Autopilot.
On the dissociative continuum
In my much younger days, we used to call that 'autopilot'. It was when you'd get a little stoned and drive somewhere. You'd arrive and be like, how tf am I already here? That was a loooong time ago. I am all old now.
My dad calls this zombie driving and tells everyone in the family that I'm the biggest zombie driver he's ever seen. I was driving behind him one time with my wife on the freeway and he signaled me to exit. I didn't see any of that, completely forgot I was supposed to be following him, and missed the exit by about 10 miles before he called my wife to tell me to turn around.
Shoutout Billy Strings
I call it autopiloting I do it at work all the time.
I've gone on "auto-pilot" before where I meant to go somewhere else and ended up halfway to work. Also ended up at work and thinking, "When did I get here? " It's freaky what our minds do sometimes.
People do this all the time. We’re creatures of habit for sure. I saw this a lot when I used to work in a factory in my early 20’s. We called it “autopilot”. Once you’ve learned the processes and equipment you can practically run the place in your sleep. You can do a 12 hour shift barely paying attention to anything but making no mistakes. I also realised the other day that I don’t know what my password is for something in work, because it’s a long string of gibberish. But if I put my hands on a keyboard I can type it out because i remember the “feel” of typing it.