The 3 Differences Between Mental Absence and Temporary Lagoon

We are absorbed, worried about a report that we have not finished, and we start eating from the bag of snacks that we had next to the computer, and then we are not sure what or when exactly we have done it. We leave our house and arrive at the workplace, and although we know that we have gone there, we are not aware of how we got there.

We are not talking about some type of amnesia, since we really do know what we were doing. We were simply not paying attention to what we were doing: we have experienced a mental absence in the first case, and a temporary gap in the second. They are similar phenomena, but it is advisable not to confuse them. Let’s see what they consist of.

The attention

Defining and delimiting the concept of attention is relatively complex, given its close connection with other mental abilities such as consciousness and memory. In general, we understand attention to be that capacity that allows us to be able to select, orient ourselves, focus and unfocus our cognitive resources in such a way that they allow us to obtain information about the environment and about our own behavior, so that we can adapt to the environment.

It also allows us filter the stimuli we perceive and focus on the most important elements, avoiding distractions and not dedicating mental resources to unnecessary details. Our attentional capacity varies based on different circumstances such as level of activation, motivation, emotion and cognition, as well as other environmental and even biological variables.

In some cases our attention capacity can be altered, presenting phenomena such as mental absence and temporary lacuna.

Mental absence as an alteration of attention

Mental absence is called the phenomenon through which our attentional capacity is fully focused and concentrated on our own thoughts or on a specific stimulus or task, in such a way that stimuli outside of them are neglected. So, No we process information from the medium as we normally would despite the fact that the capacity to do so remains intact, acting automatically.

It’s what happens when we stay absorbed in looking and thinking about something, even though we may be doing other tasks. In fact, it can be related to the concept of “Flow state” used by psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi to define the mental state we enter when performing tasks that we are passionate about and that present the right degree of difficulty.

The mental absence makes it difficult for us to respond adaptively to outside stimulation. However, this absence is broken if the subject is made to disconnect from his thoughts or the element on which he is fully concentrated, causing the external stimulation to increase, such as if someone calls us or an unexpected noise or light appears.

The temporary gap

A phenomenon that at first may seem similar to the previous one and that is also an alteration of attention is the temporal gap. However, these are different phenomena.

The temporary gap relies heavily on the automation of tasks that we carry out: a temporary gap is considered to be that phenomenon that occurs when we are carrying out some type of more or less automated activity (especially if it is repetitive, easy or does not motivate and arouse emotion in us) without notable stimuli appearing during its performance that They mobilize our attention and can help us record time.

On the other hand, the temporary gap ends when we have to process information again actively. The absence of something that marks time means that we are subsequently unable to remember what exactly happened during the elapsed time. For example, if we work in a factory or drive home we do everything so automatically that at a certain point we don’t know what we have done.

Differences between temporary lacuna and mental absence

Both concepts may seem very similar, but in reality These are different mental disorders. The main similarity is that in both cases the subject loses information due to attentional alterations, specifically derived from this understood as the ability to concentrate.

But The differences between mental absence and temporary lacuna are also perceptible. Regarding mental absence, it occurs when we are paying maximum attention to something and we lose information unrelated to it, but if we are asked, we do know what we were paying attention to. We are more aware of what we have done.

In the temporary lagoon you have a feeling of memory loss (although it must be remembered that it is not an amnesia but a phenomenon related to attention), not being able to directly determine what has happened during a period of time (the gap itself). It does not have to be the cause of failures in the functioning of brain structures involved in memory, such as the hippocampus.

Thus, the differences between mental absence and temporary lacuna are:

1. Focusing or not on the stimulus

In mental absence, the alteration occurs because we direct all our attention to a very specific type of information, neglecting the rest. In the temporary gap there is no this type of focusing.

2. The degree of automation

The temporary gap occurs when we perform simple and repetitive actions, or those that do not require us to concentrate on them. For example, walking to our usual workplace.

The opposite occurs in the case of mental absence, based on our way of concentrating on an interesting and complex task.

3. The feeling of memory loss

In mental absence there is no sensation of not remembering relevant aspects, but this usually occurs in the temporary gap.

Context of appearance: is it pathological?

Although they can be considered and are classified as anomalies or alterations of attention, neither mental absence nor the temporal gap are in themselves a pathological phenomenon.

Despite this, they can appear more frequently in different disorders or conditions, especially in the case of mental absence. It appears in disorders such as epilepsy, some food poisoning or psychoactive substances or after strokes or head injuries in which neuronal damage occurs in the nuclei that govern attention.

Some mental disorders in which they can frequently appear are ADHD, autism or other disorders such as depression or OCD. Also in disorders such as epilepsy and dementia and in situations such as sleep deprivation, alterations in consciousness or intense hunger.