Skip to the content of the web site.


Locations of visitors to this page

OOPS! Now, why did I do that?

Did you want to report an attention lapse?
Choose a setting:

Welcome!

OOPS! is a web site dedicated to discovering the absent and wandering mind and some of its consequences.

In this site we provide examples, often entertaining, of mind-wandering and its consequences, some essays on inattention, and an opportunity to contribute to our understanding of the causes and consequences of mind-wandering.


The Daily Oops!

Some time after resigning his post as Archbishop of Dublin in 1884, Richard Trench and his wife were invited by his successor to revisit the bishop's palace - Trench's former home - for dinner. Upset at the mediocre quality of the meal, Trench, forgetting that he was no longer the host, suddenly called to his wife at the other end of the table: "My dear," he declared, "you must count this cook as one of your failures!"

- Anecdotage.com

There are a number of ways you can contribute to OOPS!:

Do you have any interesting anecdotes about your own or other’s absent-mindedness? If so you can tell us about them here.
We also have a number of questionnaires and behavioral assessments of attention and its failures as well as a number of related measures. You can help us by participating in our research here.