What is this kind of amnesia called?

[ernesto]

I was wondering if there is a specific type of word or psychological syndrome for this type of amnesia.

Yesterday I was going to work and I was in a hurry and I arrived at work after driving and I said “Wow I was so busy thinking of something else, while I was driving, I don’t remember driving here. I wonder if I stopped at all the lights and stop signs.”

I honestly couldn’t remember if I did that. I’m sure it’s happened to other people is there a word for this? And no I wasn’t drinking or using drugs or on any meds

[Fatwater_Fewl]

@ernesto

I was wondering if there is a specific type of word or psychological syndrome for this type of amnesia.

Yesterday I was going to work and I was in a hurry and I arrived at work after driving and I said “Wow I was so busy thinking of something else, while I was driving, I don’t remember driving here. I wonder if I stopped at all the lights and stop signs.”

I honestly couldn’t remember if I did that. I’m sure it’s happened to other people is there a word for this? And no I wasn’t drinking or using drugs or on any meds

What you’re describing is not really amnesia, I think, but what neurologist V. S. Ramachandran calls “blindsight.”

@Ramachandran

Imagine you are driving your car and having a lively animated intimate conversation with your friend sitting next to you. Your attention is entirely on the conversation, it’s what you’re conscious of. But in parallel you are negotiating traffic, avoiding the pavement, avoiding pedestrians, not running red lights and performing all these very complex elaborate computations without being really conscious of any of it unless something strange happens, like you see an actual zebra instead of just a zebra crossing! So in a sense you are not any different from GY all of you here, you have “blindsight” for driving and negotiating traffic. What we see in GY is simply an especially florid version of blindsight unmasked by disease, but his predicament is not fundamentally different from yours and mine.

.

In your case you weren’t talking but thinking. It’s the same idea, though. Ramachandran covered the topic in “Synapses and the Self,” his second lecture in the 2003 Reith Lectures, which you can read or listen to.

[Slypork]

@ernesto

I was wondering if there is a specific type of word or psychological syndrome for this type of amnesia.

Yesterday I was going to work and I was in a hurry and I arrived at work after driving and I said “Wow I was so busy thinking of something else, while I was driving, I don’t remember driving here. I wonder if I stopped at all the lights and stop signs.”

I honestly couldn’t remember if I did that. I’m sure it’s happened to other people is there a word for this? And no I wasn’t drinking or using drugs or on any meds

There is a word for this amnesia but I can’t remember what it’s called.