Feature image source: https://www.newscientist.com/
I don’t understand how I can remember every word of a song from 2000s, but I can’t remember why I walked into the kitchen.
Did you ever experienced that sometime you wish to go to the kitchen to get a cup of tea or a cookie, you crossed your bedroom and just reached the other side of the kitchen door and your mom suddenly calls you, you listened and responded, but then you look back into the kitchen and forget what you were there for?
It’s scary if you start feeling old right away. But the fact is, it is totally normal. It happens to almost everyone.
This phenomenon is called THE DOORWAY EFFECT.
The doorway effect is a temporary memory lapse that we experience when we forget about what we came into a room for.
The doorway effect explains that there is much more to remembering than just what you paid attention to. Instead, some forms of memory are seemingly optimized to keep information ready-to-hand in their storage, and then purge that information in favor of new stuff as and when required.
In the early years of brain studies, scientists believed that the human memory was like a cupboard, with numerous sections where we could store parts of our experiences from our lives. The parts would stay in those sections forever, and whenever we needed to remember them, we could simply look into that particular section and retrieve that part of memory.
As simple as this description of human memory formation sounds, it’s not correct. Our brain is so much more fancier and complicated.
Human memories are episodic, which means that they can be split into segments or parts and they hugely depend on the person who is forming them. [For instance, how you recall a particular incident will most likely be different from how another person recalls the exact same incident.]
The Doorway Effect occurs because we change both our physical and mental environments when we move to a different setting. This results into our thinking about different things. That swift thought up goal, which was probably only one work among the many we’re trying to get done, gets forgotten in the befuddlement of the changes in the environment.
In a research study, Radvansky, Krawietz, and Tamplin (2011) demonstrated the doorway forgetting effect in a real life, as opposed to a virtual, walking environment. They also studied whether returning to the original room could result in re-instatement of memory. The answer: Not really. Going back to the formal room doesn’t necessarily lead you to suddenly remember why you had journeyed to the kitchen.
Psychologists believe that passing through the doorway and entering a different room creates a ‘mental block’ in the brain, meaning, that walking through open doors resets the memory to make room for the creation of a new episode. This is referred to as the doorway effect.
In terms of neurology, scientists refer to this experience as the “location-updating effect“.
Researchers (in layman’s terms) look at the impact of crossing from one room to another and how much time it takes for us to remember tasks or items if we cross through doorways into another room, versus if we don’t make the same transition. Interestingly, some studies show that this happens even when we cross into new rooms on a virtual or digital level.
The brain is the controlling system of our body and because it is made up of 100 billion neurons, it allows us to do incredible things. We have the complex abilities to think, plan, and speak but even then, the simplest of tasks can slip out of our minds.
Unless you live in a completely door-less homes, Radvansky’s team suggests that there’s no specific cure for this. The only way to overcome this strange effect is to train yourself to be mindful of your purpose as you walk through the doorways, and make a conscious effort to remember why you went there.
So, the next time you catch yourself fuzzy in the middle of rooms, don’t be creeped out that you have Alzheimer. Instead, blame those pesky doors!
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