action slips

We've all done it: used the wrong name when we know the right one perfectly well. And we all know when it's most likely to happen. But here's a study come to reassure us that it's okay, this is just how we roll.

The study, based on five separate surveys of more than 1,700 respondents, finds that these naming errors (when you call someone you know very well by the wrong name) follow a particular pattern that tells us something about how our memory is organized.

I reported recently on how easily and quickly we can get derailed from a chain of thought (or action). In similar vein, here’s another study that shows how easy it is to omit important steps in an emergency, even when you’re an expert — which is why I’m a great fan of checklists.

In my book on remembering intentions, I spoke of how quickly and easily your thoughts can be derailed, leading to ‘action slips’ and, in the wrong circumstances, catastrophic mistakes. A new study shows how a 3-second interruption while doing a task doubled the rate of sequence errors, while a 4s one tripled it.

There are a number of ways experts think differently from novices (in their area of expertise). A new study involving 72 college-age typists with about 12 years of typing experience and typing speeds comparable to professional typists indicates that our idea that highly skilled activities operate at an unconscious level is a little more complex than we thought.

I’m not at all sure why the researcher says they were “stunned” by these findings, since it doesn’t surprise me in the least, but a series of experiments into the role of imagination in creating false memories has revealed that people who had watched a video of someone else doing a simple action often remembered doing the action themselves two weeks later.

As we all know, being interrupted during a task greatly increases the chance we’ll go off-kilter (I discuss the worst circumstances and how you can minimize the risk of mistakes in my book Planning to remember). Medication errors occur as often as once per patient per day in some settings, and around one-third of harmful medication errors are thought to occur during medication administration.