Professor Smith recently persuaded 35 people, 23 of them women, to keep a diary of all their absent-minded actions for a fortnight. When he came to analyse their embarrassing lapses ( ) in a scientific report, he was surprised to find that nearly all of them fell into a few groupings, nor did the lapses appear to be entirely random  .               One of the women, for instance, on leaving her house for work one morning threw her dog her earrings and tried to fix a dog biscuit on her ear. "the explanation for this is that the brain is like a computer," explains the professor. "People programme themselves to do certain activities regularly. It was the woman's custom every morning to throw her dog two biscuits and then put on her earrings. But somehow the action got reversed in the programme," About one in twenty of the incidents the volunteers reported were these "programme assembly failures," Altogether the volunteers logged 433 unintentional actions that they found themselves doing -- an average of twelve each, There appear to be peak periods in the day when we are at our zaniest  . These are two hours some time between eight a.m. and noon, between four and six p.m. with a smaller peak between eight and ten p.m. "Among men the peak seems to be when a changeover in brain 'programmes' occurs, for instance between going to and from work." Women on average reported slightly more lapses- 12.5 compared with 10.9 for men probably because they were more reliable reporters.                  A startling finding of the research is that the absent-minded activity is a hazar of doing things in which we are skilled. Normally, you would expect that skill reduces the number of errors we make. But trying to avoid silly lapses by concentrating more could make things a lot worse or even dangerous. In his study Professor Smith asked the subjects_.
to keep track of people who tend to forget things to report their embarrassing lapses at random to analyse their awkward experiences scientifically to keep a record of what they did unintentionally