Automatized

Driving, for most of us, is what psychologists call an ‘overlearned’ activity. It is something we’re so well practiced at that we’re able to do it without much conscious thought. That makes life easier, and it’s how we become good at things. Think of an expert tennis player. A serve is a complex maneuver with many different components, but the better we become at it, the less we think of each individual step. —Tom Vanderbilt, Traffic

I deny, in an elevated number of instances, the successive; I deny, in an elevated number of instances, the contemporary as well. The lover who thinks “While I was so happy, thinking of the fidelity of my love, she was deceiving me” deceives himself: if every state we experience is absolute, such happiness was not contemporary to the betrayal; the discovery of that betrayal is another state, which cannot modify the ‘previous’ ones, though it can modify their recollection. —Borges, “A New Refutation of Time”