Ever walk into a room with some purpose in mind, only to completely forget what that purpose was?
Turns out, doors themselves are to blame for these strange memory lapses.
Psychologists at the University of Notre Dame have discovered that passing through a doorway triggers what’s known as an event boundary in the mind, separating one set of thoughts and memories from the next. Your brain files away the thoughts you had in the previous room and prepares a blank slate for the new locale.
Thank goodness for studies like this.
It’s not our age, it’s the door!
I knew it couldn’t be my fault.
hate doors. 🙂
Well I can’t use that excuse it happens to me the minute I stand up.
Then when I sit down it comes back. Up and down all day. Well at least I get some exercise.
I know, they suck!! I got this email from my mother in law!!
No wonder why i run around in circles all day.
This means that I can probably accomplish a lot more during the course of a day by just leaving all the doors open, but it doesn’t address the staircase. Now that I’m upstairs, what did I come up here for anyway?
I guess our minds are geared more toward surviving immediate threats than learning from past mistakes, or we wouldn’t forget so much when we cross an “event boundary.”
I’d also guess that some people leave more at the doorstep than others.
LOL!!!! 🙂
My event boundary is cannabis. 🙂
-flek
What door? Wait, why did I come in here?
Portals between dimensions (or dementia) of the mind.
If I’m in the kitchen, and think of something I need to do in the bedroom, somewhere during that time while I’m traversing down the hallway, I forget why I was heading to the bedroom. So when I get to the bedroom I find myself empty minded.
That’s when I get the idea that I need to go back to the kitchen to retrieve my original thought, and then I eventually remember why it was I was heading toward the bedroom in the first place. Seems crazy, but it works.
. . .