The Collaborative International Dictionary
Absent-minded \Ab`sent-mind"ed\, a. Absent in mind; abstracted; preoccupied. -- Ab`sent-mind"ed*ness, n. -- Ab`sent-mind"ed*ly, adv.
Wiktionary
n. The characteristic or state of being easily distracted or preoccupied. (First attested in the late 19th century.)(R:SOED5: page=9)
Wikipedia
Absent-mindedness is where a person shows inattentive or forgetful behaviour. It can have three different causes:
- a low level of attention ("blanking" or "zoning out")
- intense attention to a single object of focus ( hyperfocus) that makes a person oblivious to events around him or her;
- unwarranted distraction of attention from the object of focus by irrelevant thoughts or environmental events.
Absent-mindedness is a mental condition in which the subject experiences low levels of attention and frequent distraction. Absent-mindedness is not a diagnosed condition but rather a symptom of boredom and sleepiness which people experience in their daily lives. When suffering from absent-mindedness, people tend to show signs of memory lapse and weak recollection of recently occurring events. This can usually be a result of a variety of other conditions often diagnosed by clinicians such as attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and depression. In addition to absent-mindedness leading to an array of consequences affecting daily life, it can have as more severe, long-term problems.
Usage examples of "absent-mindedness".
She laughed at my absent-mindedness, and told me to sit down on a chair by her bedside.
To extricate himself from them he stepped back, directly in front of a moving trolley-car--no place for absent-mindedness, but Bibbs was still absorbed in thoughts concerned with what he had been saying to his father.
I think there were literary models then of pure scientists and their absent-mindedness, and jokes about the absent-minded professor and all that, and many scientists gladly fell into this stereotype of absent-mindedness and indifference, including indifference as to what became of their discoveries.
They had been laid out, and a truer phrase was never used, by the renowned or at least notorious landscape gardener and all round inventor 'Bloody Stupid' Johnson, whose absent-mindedness and blindness to elementary mathematics made every step a walk with danger.