Aspects of the unity of consciousness and everyday memory failures.
Consciousness and Cognition June 1, 2006 Rocco J Gennaro, Douglas J Herrmann, Michael Sarapata
Everyday memory failures, such as forgetting to put on a tie for a formal meeting, can be understood through the concept of the "unity of consciousness." The authors argue that perfect unity among mental states is rare and that minor breakdowns in this unity cause common memory lapses. After reviewing philosophical ideas about unity of consciousness and functionalism, they propose a "unity model" of memory failure, which explains how disruptions lead to inappropriate behavior. They distinguish these failures from slips of action and other cognitive failures, and contend that their model is preferable to alternatives like Absentmindedness or Multimodal models and is consistent with experimental results.