Why do we forget something, as soon as we pass the doorway?

It happened to everyone. You run up the stairs to pick up the keys, but forget that you wanted to take them just as you go into the bedroom. Open the refrigerator and look at its contents just to understand that you do not remember why it was opened at all. Or you wait until your friend concludes to tell him something very important, but as soon as you have such an opportunity, this something important disappears from your head. And you can only say: "What was it I wanted to say?" And everyone thinks only: "How do we know?" In this case, the doors do not play any role - it's just pure psychology.

History of builders

And although these errors can cause shame, they are quite common. They are known as the "doorway effect", and reveal some interesting points of how the human brain works. Understanding this will help you see moments of momentary forgetfulness not just as an excuse for irritation (although they will still remain irritating). These features of the human brain can best be described with the help of a story about a woman who met three builders at dinner. "What are you doing today?" - she asked first. "I put one brick on top of the other, and so time after time," sighed the first. "What are you doing today?" She asked the second. "I'm building a wall," was his simple answer. The third builder shone with pride and replied: "I build a church!"

Different levels of attention

Perhaps you've heard this story as a motivation to look at things more widely, but for a psychologist inside you, the important moral of this story is also that you need to think about each action at different levels in order to perform it successfully. The third builder may have the most inspiring view of work, but no one can build a church without figuring out how to put one brick on another, as the first builder does. During each day, a person's attention switches between these levels, from our goals and ambitions to planning and strategy, and then to the lowest level-concrete actions. When everything is under control, most often in already familiar situations, people can easily keep track of what they want to do, and the practical part happens by itself. If you are an experienced driver, you control the gears, dashboard and steering wheel automatically, and your attention is focused on less routine tasks, such as maneuvering through the flow of cars or talking to passengers. When the situation becomes less routine, attention shifts to specific details of what needs to be done, which for a moment makes the human mind distract from a wider picture. That is why in conversation with passengers there is a pause when the driver arrives at a dangerous intersection or the engine starts to make strange sounds.

"Doorway Effect"

The way human attention moves up and down the hierarchy of action, allows a person to demonstrate his complex systems of behavior. It thus allows you to create a consistent plan for performing a large number of tasks at different times and different locations. The "doorway effect" manifests itself when your attention moves between levels, and it demonstrates the dependence of human memory (even the memory of what you were going to do in just a minute) from the environment in which you are.

Analysis of the situation

Imagine that you go down the stairs leading to the bedroom to take the keys, and forget that you came for the keys as soon as you find yourself in the bedroom. From the psychological point of view, the following happened: your plan ("Keys!") Was forgotten already in the process of realizing a given strategy ("We must go to the bedroom"). Perhaps this plan is part of a larger plan ("We need to prepare for leaving home"), which in turn is also part of bigger and bigger plans ("Go to work", "Save position", "Be diligent and decent Citizen "and so on). Each level requires attention at some point. And somewhere in the course of navigating through the interlacing of all these plans, a sudden thought about the keys came to your mind. Your mind quickly focused on it, created a plan for you to take these keys, and then switched to other plans, such as a direct trip to the bedroom, reflections on who had left his things on the stairs, the planning of the working day and A million other things.

The reasons for the "doorway effect"

And if you imagine the entire system, like the cymbals rotating in the poles in the circus, then you can understand how difficult it is. And sometimes some spinning plates fall. Our memory (even the memory of our intentions) is braided by a network of associations. It can be your physical environment, where you have formed a specific intention or experienced a situation. That is why a visit to a childhood home can cause a huge surge of memories, and if you forget something, you are recommended to return to the place where you thought about it. It can also be a mental environment, that is, what you were thinking about when a particular thought came to your mind. And the "doorway effect" happens due to the fact that you are changing both the physical and the mental environment at the same time.