Roughly forty toddlers die each year when they are left in child car seats. In the vast majority of cases, these tragedies were not the result of a parent or caretaker who was reckless, or incapable, or unreliable. They resulted instead from an insidious "fault" that is essentially "wired" into the human brain.
The brain has been described as a jury-rigged structure, because it is to a large extent a "compound" structure that has been developed over millions of years. The base of the brain is the basal ganglia. This, the most unevolved structure of our brain, is to a large extent the "lizard brain." It has been preserved down through evolving species from the time when reptiles first evolved, and is little changed from the brains of reptiles that exist today.
It is this structure that is in charge of our voluntary, but mostly unconscious, actions. It acts as a sort of "autopilot", carrying out the simple, repetetive tasks we perfom each day, like driving a car. These are the acts that do not require a lot of attentive thought.
The most developed part of the brain is the frontal cortex, which is the "executive" brain - the place where all of our conscious thinking takes place. This is the most flexible and accomplished part of our brains. It is where we plan out our day, think about different alternatives for the things we must do and achieve.
The second important brain structure is the hippocampus, where our short-term memories are managed. This portion of our brains has a restricted capacity - usually considered to be somewhere around 5 - 9 items at any one time. It is in this part of the brain that the realization that a child is in the car with you is stored.
This is the concealed "bomb" that has caused so many terrible losses of children's lives. The hippocampus has a limited capacity. When the load of information our brain is trying to handle outstrips that capacity - it can, and does, break down.
The list of concerns that can lead to this breakdown is long. For example:
Relationship problems
Health problems
Mental or physical fatigue
Job worries
Financial worries
Traffic problems
These concerns, and many others, pile into the hippocampus as we are doing things like driving a car - and when the overload point is reached, some of those thoughts and memories have to be thrown overboard. The trouble is that the part of the brain that manages that "load reduction" is the basal ganglia - and that part of the brain is unable to evaluate the memories that are crowding the hippocampus on the basis of importance. So, to the "lizard brain", the task "pickup drycleaning on the way home" is no more or less important than the task "remove child from car seat when we arrive."
This, then, is why those tragedies occur. Through no culpability of their own, a parent's or caretaker's memory gets "cllobbered" by the basal ganglia, and the memory that a child is in the seat behind them is literally "wiped away". They reach the end of their errand and walk away from the car, where the child is sleeping quietly, and never look back. At that point in time, it is as though the child never existed.
Again, this can happen to anyone at any time. Looking at the past occurrences, it has happened to:
People across all economic levels
A clergyman
Babysitters A social worker
A policeman
Mothers, and Fathers
A paralegal
An electrician
A rabbi
A rocket scientist
And many, many others. No one is immune to this, no matter how much they love their child - because it has absolutely nothing to do with love, or caring - it is simply basic neuroscience.
The only way to avoid these tragedies once this memory fault has manifested itself, is to have some sort of outside system that can act as an "reset alarm", that can "reboot" the memory and redirect the driver's attention to the child behind them. A device that will do this is the Child reMINDer™, a large plastic tag that is transferred from the car seat to a driver's ignition key when the child is buckled into the seat.
The presence of this tag becomes immediately apparent to the driver when the keys are removed from the ignition, and if the driver has become preoccupied during the trip, it acts to refocus the driver's attention on the child, averting what would otherwise have been a tragic outcome. It is a simple, yet efficient way to guard against this stealthy type of "brain flaw".
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