Seemingly simple questions are often the most difficult to answer. In the What’s happening? section We try to find the answer to these questions every week. This time: Why do we become forgetful faster in another room?
The Doorway Effect: Forgetfulness in the Other Room
Have you ever experienced this? Go to the bathroom to get your toothbrush. And once you get there, you forget what you wanted to do again. Or you open the refrigerator and immediately forget what you want to take out. English speakers call it that Door effector the sudden forgetfulness when you open a door and enter another room.
Hold several signals in the air at once
This is due to the way people think, making associations. British psychologist Tom Stafford compares the formation of our daily thoughts to a circus performer balancing several plates in the air with thin sticks. It’s not easy to keep all these signals in the air at the same time. Because every single thought, big or small, needs your attention and oblivion is lurking.
Making subconscious associations can help you hold onto that thought and keep you from dropping the plate. If someone introduces themselves to you and you need to remember their name, connect their name to their appearance. Or the place where you first met. “Our memories are captured in a web of associations. The physical environment in which those memories are formed can be one of those associations,” explains Stafford BBC.
Read also: The different causes of forgetfulness
Living room associations and bathing associations
How does it work in practice? For example, if you are in the living room, you associate the emerging thoughts (like: “I still need to brush my teeth”) to the room you are in. But when you enter the bathroom, the “living room associations” fade into the background. And maybe your mind wanders along the way, making you think about things completely different from your toothbrush. Once in the bathroom you will get new associations that belong to this space. Then it might take a while for you to recall the thoughts of the living room. And before you remember again what you came to do in the bathroom.
If you pass one or more doors along the way, it is an extra stimulus for your brain, American psychologists have studied. The door is the border between 2 rooms in your house. When you open and close the door, your brain receives an additional signal that you are leaving one room for another. And that this new space brings with it different associations and memories. This also explains why forgotten childhood memories can suddenly resurface when you visit your parents’ house again after a long time. In any case, childhood memories acquired between the ages of 15 and 25 often return when you are in your 60s, as we explain in this article.
Read also: When do we talk about forgetfulness and when about dementia?
(Source: Archive, Algemeen Dagblad, Quest, BBC, Memory & Cognition. Photo: Shutterstock)
2024-01-09 05:01:07
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