Have you ever walked through a door and thought to yourself, "What was I going to do?" If you have, you are not alone. Psychologists believe that walking through a door and entering another room creates a "mental block" in the brain. This is generally referred to as the doorway effect.
In the early years of brain research, scientists thought that human memory was like a closet, with many sections in which we could store little boxes of experiences from our lives. Boxes would remain there forever, and whenever we had to look into them, we could just go to that particular section and find that box of memory.
Beautiful as this description of human memory formation sounds, it is not true. Our brain is much more complex than that. Psychological studies suggest that our memories are episodic(情节性的)in general. If you think back on anything, you'll probably quickly realize our memories don't function as clear narratives. Instead, they're more episodic and divided into parts.
A new research led by psychologist Oliver Baumann from Bond University in Australia suggests that it's not so much the doorways that cause a memory wipe, as moving from one location to a significantly different one—it's the abrupt change of scene that prepares our minds for something new. "A good example is moving around in a department store," says Baumann, "Taking the elevator between floors may have no effect on our memory, but moving from the store to the parking lot might cause us to forget something that we need to buy."
Baumann also points out that a busy and perhaps overloaded brain does seem to play some part in this phenomenon. In other words, walking through open doors is thought to reset memory to make room for a new episode.
The good news is that experiencing such forgettable episodes after entering another room does not tell you anything about your memory and intelligence. So when you enter a room and suddenly forget why you are there, you should not think that Alzheimer's disease is creeping up on you!
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