Reading this article was heartbreaking. Becoming a parent changes you, or at least it changed me. I can no longer imagine harm to a child---as conjured in a written article, on a television show, or in a discussion---in an abstract way as I once could. It is now intensely emotional, as if it were happening to my own child in front of my eyes.
This being HackerNews, I'm sure we're all thinking about fancy technological solutions to this problem. But there's a low-tech solution. I'm going to go out into my car right now and train myself to always visually scan the back seats before I leave the vehicle. If you do something enough, it becomes ingrained. I don't think about putting on my seat belt anymore; it just magically happens.
The memory expert interviewed in the article explains that this problem happens when the "low level" basal ganglia has the brain on autopilot, compensating for higher-level functionality that's compromised by stress, emotion, and distraction.
So teach the basal ganglia how to look in the back seat before stepping out of the car. Every time.
This being HackerNews, I'm sure we're all thinking about fancy technological solutions to this problem. But there's a low-tech solution. I'm going to go out into my car right now and train myself to always visually scan the back seats before I leave the vehicle. If you do something enough, it becomes ingrained. I don't think about putting on my seat belt anymore; it just magically happens.
The memory expert interviewed in the article explains that this problem happens when the "low level" basal ganglia has the brain on autopilot, compensating for higher-level functionality that's compromised by stress, emotion, and distraction.
So teach the basal ganglia how to look in the back seat before stepping out of the car. Every time.