The Twenty Miles You Just Drove and Cannot Remember Were Never Recorded

You come back to yourself near the exit, and there is a blank where the driving should be. The merges, the truck you passed, the curve. The car is in the right lane at the right speed, a safe distance off the bumper ahead. You did all of it and remember none of it.

For forty years the explanation was that the road had hypnotized you. Monotony, a steady drone, a fixed bright point to stare at — the ingredients a stage hypnotist uses. In 1963 a researcher named G. W. Williams gave it the name that stuck, arguing in a hypnosis journal that some highway crashes were a kind of naturally occurring trance.

Nobody was entranced. Driving, practiced ten thousand times, sinks out of conscious attention and into the circuits that run procedural memory — the same handoff that lets you tie a shoe without looking. On a straight, familiar road there is nothing left for the front of your mind to do, so it leaves.

And the conscious mind is the part that writes recallable memory. It was busy composing a grocery list.

You didn’t forget those miles. Nothing ever recorded them.