Are you always forgetting things around the house? It might be the ‘Doorway Effect’
We’ve all done this before – walked into a room in our home and forgot why we went there in the first place. You either got distracted or you left without doing any specific task.
Yes, this has happened to the best of us – the frustration of entering a room and forgetting what we were going to do, or what we were looking for. As maddening as this may be, the reason behind it may actually be surprisingly simple. According to scientists, doorways can cause forgetfulness.
You might be asking yourself, “How can a doorway make me forget things?”
While it’s easy to pass this off as a brain fart, you should know that the reason we may lose track when we enter a specific room is much deeper. Research published in The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology discovered that walking through a doorway, or when there is a change of scene, may cause a cognitive shift.
Our short-term memory and ability to recall events will shift when there’s a change of location, especially for those of us that are multi-taskers…and most of us are. This is what psychologists call “the doorway effect” which suggests that passing through doorways is the cause of these memory lapses, where our mental state may change when moving between rooms and thoughts that occurred in the prior room may become less accessible.
Psychologists believe 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, leaving the thinker wondering why they entered that room in the first place.
However, just because entering doorways can cause forgetfulness does not mean you have to avoid them to remember things. Just go back through the doorway to where you started from and you may remember. As a hypnotherapist I’ve assisted my clients in training their brain to rewind itself to the thoughts they had just moments before they went through the doorway. You can do it too, it may take practice, but it can work.
So, for those of you who blamed it on aging, rest assured, it’s not age, it’s the door!
I came, I saw, I forgot what I was doing, retraced my steps, got lost on the way back, now I have no idea what’s going on…Yikes!!!
Make kindness a habit.
To Your Success,
Peak Performance Coach