Did you know…?
Doorways make you forget.
Everyone has done it—you walk into a room with the intent purpose of doing or getting something, but once in there, you completely forget what you were doing. Why does this happen? According to scientists, the doorway you walked through made you forget.
Our brains use a technique called mental event boundaries to help organize our thoughts and our memories. Your brain is constantly evaluating what is relevant now and what needs to be stored away, and event boundaries provide that structure. Just like the ending of a scene in a movie, our memories use doorways as a way of separating and cataloguing our activity. Therefore, being able to remember a decision or action that happened in the kitchen becomes a challenge when you pass through the doorway into the living room, because the kitchen activity has already been filed away.
In order to find out whether it is crossing a threshold or simply being in a different environment that causes memory lapses, researchers at the University of Notre Dame put two groups through a series of memory tests. In one test, they put two objects on tables in a number of different rooms. They had one group of participants take an object from a table and exchange it for one in another room, and go back to the first room, passing through several doorways as they did so. They then had a second group of people switch objects that were on tables the same distance apart as the first group, but all in the same room. The people in the first group were two to three times more likely than the second group to forget where they put objects. Neuroscientists have also started imaging the brains of people going through event boundaries and have found that different areas of the brain light up when using boundaries such as doorways.
So, what can we do about these doorway-induced memory lapses? Lead researcher Gabriel Radavasky had this piece of cheeky advice: “Doorways are bad. Avoid them at all costs.”
Did you also know…?
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- Doorways make you forget.
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