Blame it on the Door

I first read this in Zoomer magazine. If you want to feel better about yourself, read on.

The common and annoying experience of arriving somewhere only to realize you've forgotten what you went there to do. We all know why such forgetting happens: we didn’t pay enough attention, or too much time passed, or it just wasn’t important enough. But a “completely different” idea comes from a team of researchers at the University of Notre Dame. The first part of their paper’s title sums it up: “Walking through doorways causes forgetting.”

Psychologists have discovered the so-called ‘senior moments’ that can leave us utterly bemused and retracing our steps may actually be caused by the way the brain processes information as the body leaves one room and enters another.

It appears the mind regards a doorway as something experts call an ‘event boundary’, signalling the end of one memory episode and the beginning of another.

Psychologists found the brain tends to file away events and memories from one room as soon as it exits into another, storing information in successive chapters or episodes.

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