Absent-mindedness

Absent-mindedness is where a person shows inattentive or forgetful behaviour. It can have three different causes:

Absent-mindedness is a mental condition in which the subject experiences low levels of attention and frequent distraction. Absent-mindedness is not a diagnosed condition but rather a symptom of boredom and sleepiness which people experience in their daily lives. When suffering from absent-mindedness, people tend to show signs of memory lapse and weak recollection of recently occurring events. This can usually be a result of a variety of other conditions often diagnosed by clinicians such as attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and depression. In addition to absent-mindedness leading to an array of consequences affecting daily life, it can have as more severe, long-term problems.

Absent-mindedness seemingly consists of lapses of concentration or "zoning out". This can result in lapses of short or long term memory, depending on when the person in question was in a state of absent-mindedness. Absent-mindedness also relates directly to lapses in attention. Schachter and Dodsen say, that in the context of memory, “absent-mindedness entails inattentive or shallow processing that contributes to weak memories of ongoing events or forgetting to do things in the future”. This is common among teenagers and seniors.

Though absent-mindedness is a frequent occurrence, there has been little progress made on what the direct causes of absent-mindedness are. However, it tends to co-occur with ill health, preoccupation, and distraction.

Lapses of attention are clearly a part of everyone’s life. Some are merely inconvenient, such as missing a familiar turn-off on the highway, while some are extremely serious, such as failures of attention that cause accidents, injury, or loss of life. Beyond the obvious costs of accidents arising from lapses in attention, there are lost time; ; personal productivity; and quality of life. These can also occur in the lapse and recapture of awareness and attention to everyday tasks. Individuals for whom intervals between lapses are very short are typically viewed as impaired. Given the prevalence of attentional failures in everyday life, and the ubiquitous and sometimes disastrous consequences of such failures, it is rather surprising that relatively little work has been done to directly measure individual differences in everyday errors arising from propensities for failures of attention. Absent-mindedness can also lead to bad grades at school, boredom, and depression

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Wikipedia