Goines On: ​Was this what was going on?

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On the drive home from his endocrinologist, Goines surmised a possible reason for his “memory loss” earlier that morning. It wasn​​’t so much memory loss as divided attention, or neglecting to give full attention to the task at hand: pouring hot water into the already soapy coffee carafe and then pouring most of it over the dishes in the sink.
    The resulting lapse, he guessed, was that he was attending more to narrating to himself what he was doing than attending to what he was doing, rather like an editor paying more attention to how someone had phrased the sentence he or she was reading than to what the sentence was saying.
    With a start that caused Goines to take his hands off the steering wheel for a moment, he realized that much of his thinking was carried on with the same attention to how his thinking was phrased, and he preferred to think that way – or, rather, that was his habitual way of thinking, as though he were narrating his thoughts for publication somewhere.
     But it was just so much more fun to think that way! And even more fun when it led to difficulties he could then puzzle over in the same manner….
    But he really did need to start opening the garage door before climbing into the car….

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