You might be inclined to write off these kinds of mistakes as simple errors or to blame them on things like stress or lack of time. The fact is, however, sometimes the brain drain is the problem. And it’s inevitable. However, understanding how it can happen can help you to deal with it, so that you can take good care of yourself and your family, stay safe, and feel like you have a grip on your life. For example, you might find yourself terrified of flying on a plane because you can immediately think of several tragic, high-profile plane crashes. In reality, traveling by air is actually much safer than traveling by car, but because your brain is using a mental shortcut known as the availability heuristic, you are fooled into believing that flying is much more dangerous than it really is. Knowing this won’t keep you safer but it should certainly keep you saner during the flight. Another is the confirmation bias, which can lead you to place greater emphasis or even seek out things that confirm what you already believe while at the same time ignoring or discounting anything that opposes your existing ideas. Such cognitive biases can prevent you from thinking clearly and making accurate decisions—about your finances, your health, and even the ways in which you interact in the world. For example, after a day out at the beach, you find you’ve gotten badly sunburned. You may decide the sunscreen you were using was defective, rather than owning up to the fact that you never got around to reapplying it. Why do we engage in this blame game? Researchers believe that many of our attributional biases function as a way to protect our self-esteem and guard us against the fear of failure. According to this way of thinking, bad things happen to you because of things outside of your control. On the other hand—and there’s nothing unhealthy about this as long as it’s true)—your successes are the result of your traits, skills, efforts, and other internal characteristics. Researchers think a few things may be going on when this kind of thing happens. If you’re busy concentrating on one thing, you simply have to tune out huge amounts of other information that your brain cannot deal with at that time. Expectations also can play an important role. Would you expect a person to suddenly transform into somebody else while you were talking to them? Of course not—so it’s not so surprising you might miss a major shift in your situation or environment. For example, research shows it’s surprisingly easy to make someone have false memories of events that did not really occur. In one study, scientists found watching a video of other people do something actually led participants to believe that they had performed the task themselves. We also tend to forget enormous amounts of information, from trivial details we run into every day to important information that we need. Memory expert Elizabeth Loftus suggests that there are a few major reasons behind these memory failures. Failing to retrieve the information from memory, falling victim to competing memories, failing to store information in memory, and purposely forgetting painful memories are just a few of the possible underlying causes of forgetfulness. There’s no way to avoid all of these potential problems, but being aware of some of the biases, perceptual shortcomings, and memory tricks that your brain is susceptible to can help.
