Concept · Cognitive Bias: Memory biases and distortions
Absent-mindedness
Origin: Schacter, 1999/2001
Biological Parallel
Foraging animals track high-value resources while filtering routine details—a squirrel remembers where acorns cluster, not every step taken. Attention is metabolically expensive; allocating it to familiar tasks wastes energy better spent on threat detection and opportunity scanning. Absent-mindedness is adaptive inattention: the brain correctly predicts routine outcomes and reallocates awareness to uncertainty.