I am often amazed by my own Web and email activity. I suspect that this is a widely shared condition.
I will often think “Oh, I just visited that Web page a little while ago, or I just saw that email a few minutes back.” And then I will look and it will turn out that I’ve been to 30 different sites and have fielded 20 other emails since then.
When I stop and think about it, I remember all that activity. But the weird thing is that I don’t notice it at all while it is happening.
I guess this counts as “expert knowledge”. When you do something often enough, over a long enough period of time, it starts to become an unconscious act.
A positive way to look at it is that this is our brain’s way of protecting us. If we were truly aware of just how much incoming stuff we need to field in a given hour, we might go nuts.
And it’s also nice to know that we are all experts at something. 🙂