They’re called bar stools smh

/jk

i have approximate knowledge of many things; accessing it without the right trigger may take a while though.

i know i know something but i have accepted that my brain will often only grant me access days later in a completely unrelated situation 🤷🏼‍♂️

You can actually train for this!

You can train yourself to become more attuned to your interoception. This will make it easier to identify internal prompts like anxiety or hunger. In fact, a friend of mine was studying to become a therapist and had me serve as a guinea pig for interoception interventions last year. In summary, if you find mindfulness practices that involve your body and your own thoughts, you’ll be more attuned to your interoception. Things like active meditations can help a lot. You can check out evidence-based and peer-reviewed programs like Healthy Minds.

You mention prompts. Prompts can be external and internal. If someone seems to not have prompts (because you can’t see them using stickies or something like that), it can mean that they’ve got something called an ‘action prompt’ or ‘internal prompts’. I’m using the language of Tiny Habits because it’s helpful in this context.

Tiny Habits can teach you how to create habits of all kinds. Tiny Habits prefers prompts that are actions (e.g. “After I put the toothbrush down then I will pick up the dental floss”). But internal prompts are perfectly viable (e.g. “When I feel the heat on my skin and the tension in my jaw, I will describe my inner emotions to myself as if I was listening to a good friend”). You can develop habits using these not-as-evident prompts.

You can understand cues and habits more in depth with contextual behavior analysis. CBA or a qualified professional can help us notice when we struggle to pay attention because of conditions like ADHD or anxiety. Something else that CBA can reveal is that, sometimes, we struggle to pay attention because we haven’t developed the mental information highways that can make our thoughts flow freely. Things like relational frame training can help build those highways faster. Another option is to learn to think visibly (Harvard’s Project Zero) about our everyday life, so that we build dense information highways that we can later use in daily life.

Of course, the fact is that plenty of humans use external prompts deliberately to help them coordinate and remember things. There’s a reason Scrum boards and Kanban are so popular. There’s a reason calendar apps and Getting Things Done are so popular. There’s a reason many societies have daily, weekly, or yearly rituals. You’re among friends :)

way to go attentive little league coach!

also wtf parents?

Also, apparently some people can’t consciously control the focus distance of their eyes.

This was a surprise for me as well as a child. I thought my eyes would change in how they look when I made them blurry, but yeah, you can’t see that.

Also, apparently some people can’t consciously control the focus distance of their eyes.

It’s a sailboat!

That's interesting, for most people the brain just substitutes in the image of where your eye moves to, so it feels instantaneous. (there's no noticeable blindness) But you can see throughout the full movement?

In a similar vein, I never understood having a "dominant eye". I honestly don't really understand the concept, I guess most people's brains will cancel out information from one eye?