If You Walk Into A Room & Forget Why You Went There, Here’s Why

It’s mostly not about your age:

The doorway effect

Forgetting why you went into a room is mostly not about your age at all, and is rather about the doorway effect, whereby entering a new room can make you temporarily forget what you intended to do because the brain treats the change in location as an event boundary.

This is in large part a neurological thing: the brain divides continuous experiences into separate events, builds a working model of each one, and updates that model when a significant change occurs; during this process, the default mode network interacts with the hippocampus, while working memory is cleared to make room for new information.

Note: “working memory” is referred to as “short-term memory” in this video, which is correct (working memory is short-term memory), but it’s not as clear or specific as “working memory”, and can also cause ambiguities due to the popular usage of “short-term memory” to refer to things that are, neurologically speaking, different (due to having been moved to long-term memory already).

Anyway, passing through doorways can make you slower to recall what you were doing, and the effect can become stronger still when multitasking overloads your working memory.

As well as physically passing through doorways, event boundaries can also be triggered by some other things too, such as looking into another room, an alarm ringing, someone changing the subject, or shifts in location, time, motivation, or even just switching computer tabs.

Because your brain isn’t very good at telling the difference between imagination and external reality (not specific to you, dear reader; this applies to everyone, and again, we’re talking neurologically here), this means it happens quite similarly when reading a story in a book, too. Major shifts like a time-skip between chapters, can slow reading, increase neural activity, and make it harder to remember what was going on in the previous chapter.

As for how to recover your train of thought: the confusion usually resolves on its own, but retracing your steps, and/or deliberately keeping your goal in mind very consciously, can help (this latter is similar to what we described in our Task Zero article.

For more on all of this, enjoy:

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Want to learn more?

You might also like:

• Using the”Task Zero” approach
• Get Past Executive Dysfunction
• How To Boost Your Memory Immediately (Without Supplements)

Take care!