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Comment by thomas536 | Hacker News Reader

Turning your brain off is usually a defense mechanism to protect yourself against something bad. dissociate during trauma etc. lighter dissociation points to the interaction trending toward badness, not goodness. Seems like the mind and body is telling us something that we shouldn't ignore

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No, it's usually an instinctive power-saving mechanism, and it happens incredibly frequently.

For example, the average driving commuter is not "zoning out" because of some bad experience with roads or cars, but because the route is extremely familiar.

I assume you're not saying it is but I just wanna call out that zoning out behind the wheel isn't a good thing. Drivers should be attentive at all times regardless of whether the route is familiar. So maybe something is going wrong there, even if it's not trauma?

One can still drive attentively but be on a route so familiar that unless something unusual happens, the brain does not bother recording any specific memory of it.

Even at work, I can spend a week on developing something, implement it, and once it's done will have almost no memory of it a month later because it was just one more feature in a long series of features that are all pretty much the same.

The human brain is a filter that seeks novelty. All the repetitious junk gets compressed down to something like key frames. This is why things like alert fatigue are so dangerous. Any signal that only very occasionally means danger will eventually be ignored.

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