Professor Smith recently persuaded 35 people, 23 of them women, to keep a diary of all their absent-minded actions for a fortnight. When he came to analyse their embarrassing lapses in a scientific report, he was surprised to find that nearly all of them fell into a few groupings. Nor did the lapses appear to be entirely random.
史密斯教授最近说服了35个人，其中23人是女性，在两周内把他们所有心不在焉的行为都记下来。当他在一份科学报告中分析他们令人尴尬的失误时，他惊讶地发现，几乎所有的失误都可以划分为几种类型，并且这些失误似乎也不是完全随机的。
One of the women, for instance, on leaving her house for work one morning threw her dog her earrings and tried to fix a dog biscuit on her ear. “the explanation for this is that the brain is like a computer,” explains the professor. “People programme themselves to do certain activities regularly. It was the woman’s custom every morning to throw her dog two biscuits and then put on her earrings. But somehow the action got reversed in the programme,” About one in twenty of the incidents the volunteers reported were these “programme assembly failures.”
例如，一天早上，其中一名妇女离开家去上班时，把耳环扔给了她的狗，并试图把一块狗饼干粘在她的耳朵上。教授解释道：“对此的解释是，大脑就像一台电脑。人们计划自己定期参加某些活动。每天早上，这名妇女的习惯是给她的狗扔两块饼干，然后戴上耳环。但不知何故，这一行为在计划中发生了逆转。”志愿者报告的事件中，约有二十分之一是“计划组合错误”。
Altogether the volunteers logged 433 unintentional actions that they found themselves doing—an average of twelve each, There appear to be peak periods in the day when we are at our zaniest. These are two hours some time between eight a.m. and noon, between four and six p.m. with a smaller peak between eight and ten p.m. “Among men the peak seems to be when a changeover in brain ‘programmes’ occurs, as for instance between going to and from work.” Women on average reported slightly more lapses—12.5 compared with 10.9 for men—probably because they were more reliable reporters.
志愿者们总共记录了433个他们发现自己在做的无意行为，平均每个人12个。在一天中，当我们最愚蠢的时候，似乎会有高峰期。从早上八点到中午，从下午四点到六点有两小时，在晚上八点到十点之间有一个较小的高峰。“女性平均报告的失误略多，为12.5次，而男性为10.9次，这可能是因为她们的记录更可靠。
A startling finding of the research is that the absent-minded activity is a hazard of doing things in which we are skilled. Normally, you would expect that skill reduces the number of errors we make. But trying to avoid silly slips by concentrating more could make things a lot worse—even dangerous.
这项研究的一个惊人发现是，心不在焉的活动是做我们擅长的事情的危险。通常情况下，你会期望这种技能可以减少我们犯的错误数量。但是，通过集中注意力来避免愚蠢的失误可能会让事情变得更糟，甚至是危险的。
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