So why then, a parent is able to forget the thing they value the most in life? What makes a parent to complete lose contact with the physical world to a point of absolute forgetfulness of the thing they love the most? Here understand, we are not talking about deliberate actions, we are talking about devoted parents that love their child and yet, in a split of a moment their awareness was not oriented to the physical environment.
According to the National Safety Council in the US:
Nearly 70% of children left in vehicles are left by a caretaker. Maybe it’s an overworked parent who forgets to drop off their child at daycare.
The National Safety Council placed the word "Overworked" that implies that stress and pressure, that is directly related to our survival, may be one of the most dominant factor that influence the parent to lose their awareness, to the extent of forgetting their child one values the most in life. If we take it one step forward, our failing economic system drives one to extreme mental and physical stress that leads to fatal consequences such as a death of a child that is left unprotected in a car due to their parents forgetfulness.
There are many attempts to explain this phenomena of memory failure that leads to fatal consequences. For instance:
Failures of prospective memory typically occur when we form an intention to do something later, become engaged with various other tasks, and lose focus on the thing we originally intended to do. Despite the name, prospective memory actually depends on several cognitive processes, including planning, attention, and task management. Common in everyday life, these memory lapses are mostly annoying, but can have tragic consequences. “Every summer several infants die in hot cars when parents leave the car, forgetting the child is sleeping quietly in the back seat,” Dismukes points out.
Diamond says that in situations involving familiar, routine motor skills, the human animal presses the basal ganglia into service as a sort of autopilot. When our prefrontal cortex and hippocampus are planning our day on the way to work, the ignorant basal ganglia is operating the car; that’s why you’ll sometimes find yourself having driven from point A to point B without a clear recollection of the route you took, the turns you made, or the scenery you saw.
Ordinarily, says Diamond, this delegation of duty “works beautifully, like a symphony.” But sudden or chronic stress can weaken the brain’s higher-functioning centers, making them more susceptible to bullying from the basal ganglia. He’s seen that pattern in cases he’s followed involving infant deaths in cars.
“The quality of prior parental care seems to be irrelevant,” he said. “The important factors that keep showing up involve a combination of stress, emotion, lack of sleep, and change in routine, where the basal ganglia is trying to do what it’s supposed to do, and the conscious mind is too weakened to resist. What happens is that the memory circuits in a vulnerable hippocampus literally get overwritten, like with a computer program. Unless the memory circuit is rebooted—such as if the child cries, or, you know, if the wife mentions the child in the back—it can entirely disappear.”
From <http://theweek.com/article/index/94741/the-last-word-forgotten-baby-syndrome#>
Mitchell explained that our short-term memory only holds about seven items of information at a time. If we keep trying to put more information into our short-term memory, some items will be forgotten.
"And if you can picture a glass, my short term memory is a glass. And I pour my seven items in there. And in order for me to add more, some has to come out." Mitchell explained.
He said things like being distracted can actually create false memories.
"In the short-term memory [is] the check list, if you will, of the things that we have to do," Mitchell explained. "If we are going through our mental check list and something distracts us, then our check list, we may have actually gone through and checked off something we haven't done."
From <http://www.cbn.com/cbnnews/healthscience/2012/july/wheres-the-baby-forgotten-in-the-hot-car/>
As you can see, all of the above are examples to justify one's abdication of self-responsibility of being aware of one's physical environment within every moment of every breath. There is no scientific research done to show that one can change the limitation one has accepted as oneself but to the contrary, research proved that in essence, memory cannot be trusted if the memory can shift according to one's dynamic environment; and yet, none of us can read between the lines because if we would have realized that memory cannot be trusted, we may have already change the value we give to memory and accordingly, start our process of valuing the Principle of the Physical breath as the directive principle through which we live our lives.
We will continue with more on this in the next blog.
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