Why can our brains just blank and completely forget something we were just thinking about?
In: Biology
Brains are only really good at focusing at one thing at a time, people can “multitask” but that’s not really focusing on two things at the same time, that’s quickly switching your focus back and forth between two things quickly.
Hitting a blank like that usually happens because something has distracted you and taken your focus for maybe just a split second, but has completely interrupted your brains train of thought
This is most likely related to [working memory](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Working_memory), which is the small set of things that you can keep in mind at one time.
If you’re disrupted at just the right time, then you lose the contents of your working memory. It’s like your mental scratchpad just got wiped out. (Or if you’re a computer nerd, the contents of your L1 cache just got cleared and you need to re-fetch everything from disk.)
While this can happen from external distractions like somebody interrupting you, it can also happen from internal distractions like your own thoughts or body sensations (e.g. you just noticed that you’re hungry).
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