A senior moment in depth

A senior moment which took place while drying the breakfast dishes this morning, it now being early evening.

I am facing the kitchen window, looking out vaguely at the patio and back garden beyond, drying up a wine glass from the night before. I go to put it on the shelf above the hatchway to my left – hatchways between the kitchen and dining room being a feature of suburban houses of a certain age – when actually the glass in question belongs in the glass cupboard in the extension out the back. The shelf above the hatchway, to be fair, is for glassware of various shapes and sizes, including drinking water tumblers, but nothing which is much used for alcoholic beverages. On this occasion, I stop myself as I turn to the left and the right hand – holding the wine glass – is reaching towards the shelf. Maybe less than a foot away.

So what is happening here?

I offer below what I think is a plausible story.

I am doing the drying up, without much thinking about it. I am probably having a fairly low key conversation – or perhaps ‘interchange’ would better describe the activity – with BH, who is doing the washing up piece. Maybe about the chances of it raining during the day to come.

But the subconscious knows that drying up is associated with putting away and wants to be helpful. So, on the side, it is casting about for somewhere suitable to put the item in hand.

It uses a generalised process for the purpose, a process which scans the visual field, looking for an object which is associated, in some way or other, any old how, with the phrase ‘putting away’. It may even go so far as to move the head about a bit to widen the search area, while being careful to stay in the background, for the activity to be subconscious.

When it gets a match, it does two things in parallel, the brain having plenty of capacity for parallelism.

First, it initiates more careful checking and second it initiates motor action, so as to have things in hand should the checks come through OK. That is to say that it sets off the complicated train of neural activity which results in a cunning sequence of signals being sent to the muscles of my right arm. See reference 1 for a previous excursion down this road.

A setting up which certainly does not involve setting up the program from scratch – one does that sort of thing as a baby – but which might include moving chunks of program which had been used in the past in the same or similar activities to a holding area for final assembly there. Assembly then dispatch. An inclusion which will involve some kind of a search or searches through the motor program library.

Motor activity is quite slow so, at least in a younger person, there is plenty of time to do the checks and abort the action should that prove necessary, abort the action before it makes it to consciousness.

The more careful checking might include checking what is already on the shelf for similarities with the glass in hand. Or thinking about other candidates, other places around the kitchen, around the house at large, where glasses might be kept.

Checking which would no doubt include a quick virtual visit to the roof-space, where various heaps of old glasses (mostly brilliant bargains picked up from car boot sales) wait for disposal, as they have been for years, but heaps which the subconscious can put aside quite quickly. No match there with washing up, for breakfast, lunch or tea.

But checks which, in the older person, might be quite slow. Motor actions have become fast relative to mental actions; maybe ageing has hit the mental areas harder than the motor areas. Maybe the cerebellum gets off lightly. In any event, the synchronisation process which used to look after things, does so no longer. And the checks may well get even slower as the still unconscious motor activity gets under way and vision systems are engaged in close support of the motor systems. One needs to pay at least some attention to the movement of one’s arm and hand.

With the result that by the time that I have worked out that the shelf above the hatch is the wrong place, the hand is already on the move, and has been on the moved plenty long enough to be clocked consciously.

No doubt, had I been thirty or forty years younger than I actually am, I could have spent happy days devising cunning experiments to explore all this sort of thing, to sort out fact from fiction.

In the meantime, I am reasonably sure that the framework is right. Motor action is initiated before we are sure that we have got the right action. Most of the time, certainly in young people, this works fine, works most of the time. Old people not so good.

Reference 1: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2015/03/senior-to-elephantine-moments.html.

Reference 2: http://www.clearcutcrystal.co.uk/ - the owners of the illustration.