It’s not because you’re having a “senior moment.” It’s not because you’re ditzy, distracted, unable to focus or anxious. It turns out that “now what was I going to do when I got here …?” bout of forgetfulness is exacerbated by walking through doorways.
You could be anxious or ditzy or distracted, though. I’m not a mind reader or a doctor or, uh, what was I going to say? I forget.
Anyway, you could be those things but that’s a separate issue. What scientists have learned is that the process of moving through a doorway signals our brains to jettison short-term thoughts in our memory and prepare space for new, short-term memories that will occur to us in the new environment on the other side of the door jamb.
In a paper originally published on Scientific American, Notre Dame researchers Gabriel Radvansky, Sabine Krawietz and Andrea Tamplin tested participants to see if moving from one room to another had an effect the participants’ ability to remember.
From Salon:
Is it walking through the doorway that causes the forgetting, or is it that remembering is easier in the room in which you originally took in the information? Psychologists have known for a while that memory works best when the context during testing matches the context during learning; this is an example of what is called the encoding specificity principle. But the third experiment of the Notre Dame study shows that it’s not just the mismatching context driving the doorway effect. In this experiment … participants sometimes picked up an object, walked through a door, and then walked through a second door that brought them either to a new room or back to the first room. If matching the context is what counts, then walking back to the old room should boost recall. It did not.
This “doorway effect” suggests that there’s more to the remembering than what you paid attention to or how hard you tried to remember something. Instead, some forms of memory appear to be designed to keep information ready to use until it is bumped out by new stimuli. We then rid ourselves of the previous memory to be ready for new memories.
I remember what I was going to say now. You can blame your memory loss on doors. I’m going to remember that, I think. As long as I stay right here.
Julian Rogers is a writer, editor, community manager and marketing communications consultant for high-achieving businesses — from solo entrepreneurs to large private companies. Find out what he’s thinking about on his blog: mrturophile.com, or connect with him on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and Google+.
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