The machine doesn't wait for you to notice

Have you ever spent half an hour trying to remember someone's name? You know you know it. You remember what the person looks like, where you met, maybe even what they were wearing. But the name? Gone. You try running through the alphabet, thinking of other people who were there, picturing the person's face, but nothing. Eventually, you give up and go do something else.

Three hours later, you're putting dishes in the dishwasher and suddenly, there it is. Margaret! Well, that's interesting. You weren't thinking about Margaret. You weren't even thinking about names. You were trying to figure out why the dishwasher is always full when you need to put something in it. So what happened?

Or how about when you've been trying to solve a problem all afternoon? You've gone over the possibilities, tried different approaches, and finally decided you're getting nowhere. You put it aside, go for a walk, take a shower, or go to bed. The next morning, the answer suddenly occurs to you. Where did that come from?

And then there's the music. You're standing in line at Costco, minding your own business, when suddenly you're singing I will always love you and remembering your high school prom. You didn't decide to remember it. You didn't even know you remembered it. But apparently your brain has been storing the entire chorus for the past thirty years, just waiting for the right moment to interrupt your shopping. Now you're stuck with it for the rest of the afternoon.

We usually don't give these little incidents much thought. We say things like, "Oh, I just remembered!" or "It suddenly came to me!" or "I have no idea why that song is in my head." And then we move on.

But think about what those expressions are actually describing. Something became available to you that wasn't available a moment earlier. You noticed the result, but you didn't necessarily observe the process that produced it. That's one way to see your Overreaction Machine at work.

It's not sitting quietly until you have an important decision to make. It's constantly receiving information, recognizing patterns, retrieving memories, making connections, anticipating possibilities, and adjusting to whatever is happening around you. Some of that activity becomes part of your conscious thinking. Much of it doesn't.

Sometimes you can follow along. You can hear yourself reasoning through a problem, comparing possibilities, or trying to remember something. You can deliberately direct your attention toward a question and spend hours working on it. But even then, you're not observing everything.

When you're considering two possibilities, how did those particular possibilities become the ones you considered? Why did one memory come to mind instead of another? Why did you suddenly recognize a connection that wasn't obvious five minutes earlier? You might be able to explain some of it. Other parts just seem to appear.

And sometimes you aren't consciously trying to accomplish anything at all. You're folding laundry, driving to the grocery store, or brushing your teeth when an idea, a memory, or an entirely unnecessary song shows up. The machine doesn't begin operating when you notice it. You just occasionally notice what it's producing.