Walking through a doorway can make you forget. You'll walk from one room to another with a clear idea of whatever you need to do, but when you get there, you can't remember what you wanted to do. Studies show that a doorway seems to insert a mental divider into memory.
Our brains record memories in segments, rather than as a continuous event. Passing through a doorway triggers a pause between events and in that tiny pause, connective parts of memories can be lost.

The doorway effect

Researchers found that imagining walking through a doorway can also interfere with your memory. Worse still, phrases that insert a temporal boundary between events have the same sort of mental divider as a doorway. For example, reading a sentence that starts with "A few hours later..."
This tells us that our brains operate with certain mechanical dynamics. When you can't remember why you walked through a doorway, don't be alarmed. Your brain simply thought the doorway meant you needed a memory divider.

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Yes, Walking Through A Doorway Really Does Make You Forget -- Here's Why

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More often than I care to admit, I’ll walk from one room to another with a clear vision in mind of whatever I need to do once I get there, but then I get there and can’t remember why I started. The only thing that happened between my first movement and my last is that I walked through a doorway. Surely that has nothing at all to do with forgetting something I knew just moments before, right?

Wrong, says new research. As it turns out, walking through a doorway exerts an imperceptible influence on memory. In fact, merely imagining walking through a doorway can zap memory.

Researchers in the<a href="http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09658211.2014.980429#.VMCA8kfF-H4">latest study </a>took their cue from an <a href="http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/17470218.2011.571267#.VMCA0kfF-H4">earlier study </a>showing that passing through a doorway seems to insert a mental divider into memory. Our brains record memories in segments, or episodes, rather than as a continuous event. Dubbed the “Event Horizon Model” by earlier researchers, walking through a doorway triggers memory segmentation, like a video editor inserting a momentary pause between scenes. In that tiny pause—the Event Horizon—the connective parts of memories can be lost, and we suddenly can’t recall that we got up from watching the basketball game to unplug the iron in the next room.

Think of it as a blip in your brain's matrix.

Even more curious is that imagining walking through a doorway has a similar effect. The research team brought two groups of participants into a large room. One group experienced the room as a continuous space; the other walked through it after divider curtains were set up to simulate a doorway. The groups were then shown a picture of an unusually shaped object before closing their eyes and imagining walking across the room they’d seen earlier. The first group imagined the room as a big space with no physical dividers; the other imagined walking through the draped doorway.

They were then asked to jog their memories and pick out the picture of the object from a set of ten images. As predicted, the group that imagined walking through a doorway performed significantly worse on the memory test than the other group.

"That walking through a doorway elicits forgetting is surprising because it is such a subtle perceptual feature compared to the rich environment in which it sits," the researchers said, "that simply imagining such a walk yields a similar result is even more surprising, particularly when compared with actually walking through doorways." Indeed.

And this gets even weirder. If right now I started telling you a story about a boy and his dog, going on for a few paragraphs detailing all the things this boy and his dog do together in their happy little boy-dog comedy drama of a life, and then I suddenly inserted a phrase like “A few hours later…” – do you think your recall of what I just told you about the boy and his dog might be better or worse?

If you’ve been following the plot of this article so far you’re likely guessing “worse,” and you’d be right. <a href="http://pss.sagepub.com/content/22/2/243">Research </a>has demonstrated that phrases which insert a temporal boundary between events in a narrative place the same sort of mental divider into memory as a doorway. It’s as if the phrase instructs the brain’s video editor to insert a pause between memory episodes, and you find yourself going back to re-read the last few paragraphs that you suddenly can’t remember much about.

What all of this tells us is that our brains operate with certain mechanical dynamics that we generally only glimpse when they hiccup. So the next time you can’t remember why you walked from one room to another, don’t be alarmed. Just remind yourself that your brain simply misconstrued instructions from your environment and thought that doorway meant you needed a memory divider. Rest assured, “Oh yeah the iron!” will come back eventually.

The latest study was published in the journal <a href="http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09658211.2014.980429#.VMCA8kfF-H4">Memory </a>.

You can find David DiSalvo on <a href="http://www.forbes.com/companies/twitter/">Twitter </a> <a href="https://twitter.com/neuronarrative">@neuronarrative </a>.

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David DiSalvo is the author of the best-selling book "What Makes Your Brain Happy and Why You Should Do the Opposite", which has been published in 15 languages, and the

David DiSalvo is the author of the best-selling book "What Makes Your Brain Happy and Why You Should Do the Opposite", which has been published in 15 languages, and the books "Brain Changer: How Harnessing Your Brain’s Power to Adapt Can Change Your Life" and "The Brain in Your Kitchen". His work has appeared in Scientific American Mind, Forbes, Time, Psychology Today, The Wall Street Journal, Slate, Esquire, Mental Floss and other publications, and he’s the writer behind the widely read science and technology blogs “Neuropsyched” at Forbes and “Neuronarrative” at Psychology Today. He can be found on Twitter @neuronarrative and at his website, daviddisalvo.org. Contact him at: disalvowrites [at] gmail.com.

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Yes, Walking Through A Doorway Really Does Make You Forget

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