Ultimate Blog Challenge - The Doorway Effect

Photo by Hannah Wei on Unsplash

It's a new day at the Ultimate Blog Challenge.

Here's something I've been researching about, you may be able to relate.

Does the following ever happen to you?

You walk into a room in your house or office building, and as you arrive, for the life of you, you can't remember what brought you here?

This actually has a name: 

The doorway Effect

It is a known psychological event where a person's short-term memory declines when passing through a doorway, moving from one location to another. It's also called event boundary or location updating effect. 

Think of your memory as a closet with numerous sections where you can store little boxes with your experiences. Boxes will remain forever, and when we want to look into them, we can just go to that particular section and retrieve the box of memory. 

Sadly that's not exactly how things work. Our brain is much more complex, and has the ability to change over a person's lifetime. 

Our memories are split into episodic segments. We break each action into separate events using event boundaries. 

The boundary for making a cake batter is the action of putting the cake into the oven. This is why it's crucial to set an alarm. Otherwise you'll end up with a burned cake.

The boundary for speaking on the phone is the action of ending the call. You promised the caller to take care of something? Better make a note of it, otherwise it's gone.

So going through a door is the end (and the beginning) of something. This creates an event boundary in your mind. Our brains compartmentalize events and tie them to the environment - or the room - in which they occurred.

Photo Credit: Rachel Claire on Pexels

I often recall when and where somebody told me something (and what they were wearing). Even if I don't remember the actual content, I can tell "we were talking about this topic when we ran into each other at the grocery store."

So when we pass from one side of the door to the other, our brain signals to our memory that we are entering a new space. It stores all the information about the first room, and what you did there, and tucks it away. Or, deletes it in order to not accumulate irrelevant clutter.

Actually, scientists found out that every time we walk through a doorway, we dump 20% of our short term memory. (That's really bad news if you live in a house with a lot of doors... ;-)

You are now ready to focus on the second room, and promptly forget what you intended to do when you crossed the threshold. 

Neurologists call this the location updating effect. Our focus needs to be on where we are at the moment to pay attention to our surroundings and the new things that are calling for our attention. 

After all there might be lions or tigers or bears ;-)

I like to repeat in my mind the item I want to grab. I will walk down the stairs and mumble "TP roll, TP roll". I will, however, get distracted by dirty laundry that somebody strategically placed in front of the basement door. I may very well go back up to the bathroom to get the official laundry hamper, carry it down, put the items from the ground floor into this basket, walk down to the basement where the washer and drier (as well as our toilet paper roll stock) are located, start a load of laundry, walk back up and feel like I forgot something. 

What was it? I was upstairs, and I came downstairs, intending to do or get something? Shoot, the toilet paper. Back down to the basement I go. 

Oftentimes I go to work and intend to do something first time I arrive, for example to check if I actually sent an e-mail I was preparing. So I will greet my colleagues, switch on my computer and that's when the phone rings and somebody tells me they have a computer emergency. 

I may still remember that I wanted to check my sent items by that time.

But then an calendar appointment notification pops up. Shoot, our insurance broker is gonna be here in 15 minutes. I need to get a bunch of binders and take them to the conference room. 

Don't do it, focus on that e-mail now!

So when you open your e-mails, the first ones you'll see are the ones in the inbox, right. One is titled your order is ready for pickup. Great, that is an item my colleague was desperately waiting for. Forwarding it to him, done.

Another phone call.

We may as well stop here. I will attend my meeting with the insurance specialist and go about the rest of my day without ever checking whether my e-mail was sent. 

Until, late at night it'll come back to haunt me. 

You may have figured it out, by the way: the electronica equivalent are computer programs and apps. We leave one for the next and forget about the first one. 

I try to use tools to counteract my forgetting stuff. I use the reminder app on my phone. I love it, you can add a date and time you want to be reminded, or a location. Genius! 

A location may be "getting out of your car" or "arriving at home", but also "arriving in the vicinity of a specific location" like the grocery store. So I will create a note about an item you can only purchase at one supermarket but not the other. When I go there, it will remind me of the fact that I wanted to pick up my whole wheat toast. 

Trouble is, the popup happens in the parking lot. 

In order to get into the store, you will need to enter through the sliding doors. 

DOORS! 

You will grab a cart, see people, see what's on sale. Will I remember to purchase my bread?

Let me know if that sounds familiar!