[tejtm]

My wife calls this "male refrigerator blindness".

But we all have it.

Paraphrasing a theory I read ... somewhere; it comes from when we were furtive subterranean critters, where entering and leaving burrows resulted in the invalidation of whatever threat just was, (example: birds outside, snakes underground) and that clearing the decks to more efficiently deal with different threats in the new context included dumping short term memory.

[Loughla]

I like that theory. I don't think we give evolution and our animal past enough credit for many of the psychological things we encounter in our lives.

That's actually what was most interesting to me about the ringworld series. Just an open conversation about how evolution has impacted action (however hokey it might be in the books, and ignoring the rishathra).