Brain Fart

What is it?

• When your brain says one thing but your hands (or arms, legs, feet...) do another.
• When you know how to do something, but for some reason (frequently fatigue) you find yourself doing the wrong thing.

• http://catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/B/brain-fart.html

What examples of this phenomenon have WikiCitizens observed?

• In the past few days alone, I've tried to use my wallet to open my office door (because it has my travel smartcard in it) and tried to put my keys into a London Underground ticket gate, both of which seem related. And is there a more scholarly name for this? -- EarleMartin

• I use liquid body soap (it has scrubby beads) in the shower. Many is the morning when I've mixed the shampoo up with the soap and ended up with a gritty head. Also, setting the automatic coffee maker to 'brew now' rather than 'brew on alarm'. -- JoeWeaver

• DonaldNorman (TheDesignOfEverydayThings) had a favorite example: Doorbell rings, man picks up phone and says "hello?" -- LayneThomas

• A classic while preparing vegetables is to put the peas in the compost pile and the pods in the saucepan.

• Pouring ketchup instead of syrup on your pancakes. (or tabasco on your ice cream instead of chocolate)... Why would you want to pour tabasco on your chocolate?

• Worked in a call center, or what I liked to call hotel reservation hell, can I say that on here?!? There was of course a prescribed way of answering the phone (Thank you for calling {faceless hotel corporation}, this is {yours truly}. How can I help you today?). Since it was usually pretty boring, and since when a call came through the phone headset beeped once then you were live, it got to the point for most of us where we could rattle off the greeting without really putting much thought into things, often in the midst of an interrupted conversation with the person in the next cube. So it got to the point that I'd be engrossed in something at home, reach for the phone and instead of saying hello, I would launch into the work greeting, then have to apologize before the caller hung up and tell them they had in fact reached me at home. Worse, I have mentioned I fence. I'd be semi-distracted by something someone near me had said or done (yes, to my Wiki browsing coach, I know that's bad) when I was directing (refereeing) a bout and instead of saying "Ready, Fence", I'd start to launch into my spiel. Maybe those Zen, "be in the moment" folks have something, huh?

• And I frequently find myself coming home and trying to shove my car key into the security door then wondering what's wrong. I've also been known during busy times to go to change my clothes and either need to stop and think where I'm going now, or fail to think and start to get ready for bed when I meant to put on my exercise clothes. That last one's not a brain fart - it's your subconscious mind telling you to do the RightThing. ;)

What does it tell me?

It is an interrupt, and you are invited to service it in any of the usual ways. You've done something bizarre enough to notice that you aren't quite with it. This is similar to having someone tell you what state you're in. ("You look zonked, what have you been doing?" "Oh, I installed nethack last night.")

[Following on from hotel call center person above], the BrainFart is a demonstration to yourself that you were not practising "BeMindful" at the time. This in itself is normal - as far as I can make out it takes years of practice before one can BeMindful full time. The important thing for me is whether I can notice the event, figure out what might have caused it and perhaps learn something about my internal state.

• It's telling me that I'm preoccupied. e.g. I'm reaching to put the milk back in the cereal cupboard instead of the fridge, then smile and realise that my mind was chasing around some thing that had been bothering me for a while. I have been reminded that this thing still bothers me - I have an opportunity to try ThinkingOutOfTheBox instead of chasing around the same rut, because I've been reminded that I am in the box.

• It's telling me that I'm tired. Tired seems to come in many flavours. Figuring out which is troubling you is most likely the fastest route to fixing yourself.
  • SugarLag
  • loss of enthusiasm for the task at hand
  • loss of hope for positive solution
  • lack of sleep or worse (CaffeineBonk)
  • excess physical exercise
  • ...? But I digress.

• It also says I'm sufficiently "with it" to notice the BrainFart. If I find the milk in the cereal cupboard the next day and wonder "which nutter put that there?", I know there's something wrong. Probably best to address that before something worse happens.

Tricks to avoid them

There are some useful habits that may help reduce some types of absentmindedness. Strengthening good habits while your brain is firing on all twelve cylinders *g* will make it easier to cope gracefully when it goes phut.

• Don't answer the phone on the first ring. Take a moment to breath, and know that you are breathing. Remind yourself that the phone is ringing and then choose to pick it up, rather than picking it up out of habit. Tricky if the phone beep is telling you that you are now 'live', but presumably it's acceptable to draw breath before spouting the company line?
• Choose a few places (e.g. front doors of your house and office) or classes of place (e.g. stairs) and make an effort to BeMindful as you pass these places. I see this as a way to break up a day which may otherwise blur into one headlong rush towards, erm, wherever it is I'm rushing.
• When choosing new passwords, encode in them some reminder of whatever you think is important to you at the time. This works well with the method of password generation that takes the initial letters (or other representative symbols) for an eight word sentence. Picking a heavy-handed example to avoid hinting at my own passwords, >h0t4k+s is a reminder to go home on time, for the kids and spouse. A small reminder that LifesTooShort 80% of the times you unlock the terminal, a solution to the dull problem of remembering password and fairly secure too.

Bigger picture

The hints above are, in a very small way, a crash course in MeditationTechniques. Learning more about these will surely be beneficial, but as with any other of the SelfImprovementPatterns the best way seems to be a little and often.

To regard the BrainFart as an internal "service outage" interrupt is a form of FeedbackIsControl. It won't give you control of your brain all the time but it can help.

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I'm grateful to the friends who are teaching and encouraging me to meditate. Most of the specific hints in my contribution to this page have come from them. -- MatthewAstley