Jeffrey Zidder has carefully thought out the robbery plan. He made a plan for the New Year and dressed up as Santa Claus: under a fur coat you could hide a weapon, under a beard and a wig - a face, and in a large sack you could take out the loot.
Entering the bank, Geoffrey pulled out a machine gun from under the floor, patted his pockets, and ran away. Jumping out the street, he tried to hide in an old "Ford", but got stuck in a traffic jam and was seized by the police.
What was the reason for such a hasty flight? It turns out that Zidder, dumb from birth, preparing for the robbery, recorded on a tape recorder from a detective on TV the raider's remark “This is a robbery! Everyone lie on the floor and don't move! All the cash - in my bag! But I forgot to take the cassette with me: as evidence, they found it at the would-be gangster's house during a search. Absent-mindedness played such a cruel joke on him.
We are all in one way or another scattered. In adults, absent-mindedness is manifested as a result of overwork or exhaustion of the nervous system. However, there is another type of absent-mindedness that occurs when a person is too focused on one thing and therefore does not notice anything around. Such absent-mindedness is characteristic of people who are enthusiastic, headlong into their own business: scientists, writers, artists.
For example, they say that Mendeleev, entering the tram, often took off his galoshes. And only thanks to the tutelage of students the galoshes were returned to the owner.
A well-known scientist in the field of chemistry and physics, professor Ivan Alekseevich Kablukov in the last century, served Marshak as a prototype of "a man scattered from Basseinaya street." The scientist often gave out such pearls as "chemist" and "physics", signed by Kabluk Ivanov, and Mendeleev and Menshutkin, confused, called Mendelshutkin.
The French physicist André Ampere was also famous for his weirdness. Once, having dined with a friend, he was dissatisfied with the quality of the dishes and told the cook that she was fired, as he was sure that he was at home.
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Composer Alexander Borodin, on the contrary, forgot that he was in his own house: having put on a coat, he began to say goodbye to the guests who had sat down with him, saying that it was time for him to go home.
The French writer La Fontaine once came to visit a friend at whose funeral he gave a speech a month ago. To the astonishment of a relative of the deceased, he caught himself: “Oh, yes - I remember my speech literally. You know, I have a great memory."
Absent-mindedness is inherent not only to geniuses and talents: ordinary people also sin with it. As a result of a survey of two thousand taxi drivers in 11 largest cities in the world, it turned out that the most scattered are Londoners: in just six months they forgot 54.9 thousand mobile phones, 4, 8 thousand PDAs and 3.2 thousand laptops in the back seats of their cars. They are followed by the residents of Bombay, Sydney, Washington and Berlin.
But, it is one thing when a person suffers from his own absent-mindedness, and another - from the absent-mindedness of the one who serves him. Here again the residents of Foggy Albion distinguished themselves: according to research, British Airways topped the list of airlines that most often lose passengers' luggage.
For every thousand pieces of baggage transported, 23 items are lost, and only 85% of them are within 48 hours. And it happens that they are not at all. In second place is German Lufthansa, third is French Air France, and fourth is Italian Alitalia..
In general, one gets the impression that in terms of absent-mindedness, Great Britain is ahead of the rest of the planet. For example, another study on energy consumption revealed that due to the absent-mindedness of employees who forget to turn off computers at night, British enterprises lose up to two hundred million dollars annually.
True, sometimes pleasant surprises also happen. For example, 57-year-old Cornwall resident Derek Ladner absent-mindedly bought two tickets with the same face value for the same drawing of the national lottery Camelot, and won more than 479 thousand pounds each. Moreover, the Briton remembered about the second ticket only a week after he received the prize on the first one.
If your absent-mindedness does not give you anything but inconvenience, do not be upset - many ways have been invented to overcome it. The easiest and most reliable way to remember where you put the desired item is to hold your gaze on it for 10 seconds. During this time, the brain will fix the connection between the place and the object. In which case, it will be enough just to imagine the necessary object in your imagination, and you will immediately remember where it lies.
For those who do not help, a special device has been created that works as follows: miniature electronic bugs are attached to the things that you usually lose. All that remains is to turn on the device and indicate what to look for. He will detect the loss if it is within a radius of 15 meters.
Medicine also does not stand still. Specialists of the Institute of Clinical and Experimental Lymphology of the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Medical Sciences have improved the method used abroad to activate blood cells, lymphocytes, in patients with multiple sclerosis. This is currently one of the most effective ways to combat forgetfulness.
If it does not work, do not despair anyway: in the end, forgetfulness can be simply forgotten. Remember only Hemingway's statement that happiness is good health combined with a bad memory. So being absent-minded is not so bad!
Irina ZHARNOVA
