Featured Article  Memories of dry cleaning, hot irons, etc.
Share this Content  I basically called myself OCD on the air
today.  I copped to our guest, Christopher Pittenger of Yale,
that I sometimes go upstairs five times to check and make sure
the iron's off.  Maybe that's an exaggeration - it might be more
like four.  Either way, our conversation about memory, and why
we forget to do some things that aren't "automatic" was pretty
interesting.  He's obviously concerned about curing serious
mental illness and addiction.    While this is important work,
I'm personally really fascinated about what he calls the "dry
cleaning effect" - why you don't remember to pick up your dry
cleaning on the way home.  He suggests that we spend a lot of
our day on "auto pilot" and that scares me....  I'm also kicking
myself for not asking about another phenomenon - why is it that
a group of 3 to 4 people, when given a question they all know
the answer to, all "blank out" and forget at the same time.  I'm
pretty sure there's a