Doorway effect

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doorway_effect

by aavshr • 2 years ago

313 146 2 years ago

en.wikipedia.org

msoucy• 2 years ago

I've had to introduce this to my friends at work. Where I sit, I can't have my phone with me. So sometimes it'll take me four tries to leave the room, grab my phone, and actually remember to do the thing that I meant to do. Usually I get back to my desk after doomscrolling for a few minutes and remember.

interroboink• 2 years ago

I clicked to add a comment, but as soon as the page changed I forgot what I was going to write ...

----

Seriously though, happens to me all the time. Not sure if just getting dotty. The connection between spatial presence and memory is an interesting one; see also Memory Palaces[1]

It makes me wonder if it's different for people totally blind since birth. Is the visual aspect important, or just the "spacial-ness"?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Method_of_loci

temp08262• 2 years ago

I was joking with someone who was asking about getting a walking pad for their standing desk that it would be psychologically disastrous for this reason, citing the ancient Greeks memorizing epic poems by walking places to make memory associations. Why would one purposely want to have an association made between something as mundane/regular as walking with working at a screen?!

4hg4ufxhy• 2 years ago

Wouldn't it be moving through space that would make the assosiation, not walking itself?

shermantanktop3• 2 years ago

Sounds like a very hot key in your memory hashmap.

pazimzadeh• 2 years ago

This is extremely amplified when taking psychedelics

RIMR• 2 years ago

Yeah, I've walked from my living room to the back yard on mushrooms, and the change in mindset was like I'd flown to another continent.

willio58• 2 years ago

I was about to say this. Walking into a different room can vastly change your entire experience for the better (or worse)

thelastparadise3• 2 years ago

(or worse)

Whatever you do, don't look in the mirror.

HKH2• 2 years ago

Memory aside, the sum of the colors reflected around the room is immediately noticeable as you cross the threshold.

LoganDark• 2 years ago

To be fair, almost everything is amplified by psychedelics. It's like their primary effect is turning everything into some sort of feedback loop.

When I tried LSD, I'd constantly forget where I was in the middle of sentences, because everything happening in my brain made it feel like way more time was passing than was actually. As a result it was harder to recall the topic of the sentence because it felt like many many topics ago.

I would describe it as "an entire universe happening each instant". It was honestly kind of cool.

Writing was far easier, because I'd always be looking at what I've already written, rather than trying to rely on my memory of what I've spoken.

bmmayer1• 2 years ago

Opening a new browser tab and forgetting what I was going to do in that tab is a very frequent phenomenon for me.

csours• 2 years ago

I have a pad of honest to g-d paper next to my keyboard for this exact reason.

Goal for the day: log into a server.

Why is that so complicated? hahahahahaha welcome to the corporation.

dang2• 2 years ago

Related. Others?

Why Walking Through a Doorway Makes You Forget (2011) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17921972 - Sept 2018 (5 comments)

The “Doorway Effect” – forgetting why you entered a room - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17328740 - June 2018 (130 comments)

fudged71• 2 years ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17921972

dang2• 2 years ago

Added above. Thanks!

CPLX• 2 years ago

This seems sort of intuitive to me so I’m inclined to believe it, but at this point can we really believe any of these sort of pop-behavioral studies with interesting quirky effects?

It seems like the entire field is so overwhelmed with fake data and bullshit that it’s hard to separate anything that might actually be real.

LeoPanthera• 2 years ago

This is a weird comment. The Wikipedia article has a comprehensive list of sources underneath, and the comments on this post are full of people saying "this exact thing happens to me".

So I'm going to say, yes, we can believe it.

xattt• 2 years ago

Consider an acute care facility. Patient care supplies (IV bags, IV sets, catheters, dressing supplies) are usually in a side room called the supply room.

Ours was in a room behind a doorframe without a door. If I was getting dressing supplies in a state of flow/on auto-pilot, more often than not, I would blank as soon as I went through that doorway and would have to actively think exactly what the hell I was there for.

iwontberude• 2 years ago

This will be especially true if we have apps and windows that appear every time we enter a different room.

xpe8• 2 years ago

Many psychological studies sound convincing but are hard to replicate and/or based on low sample sizes or poor experimental design. Seeing a plausible mechanism underlying a theory isn’t enough. So I’m writing this comment as a placeholder. Who here has checked the source studies?

Roughly speaking what is the total number of people in all studies pertaining to this claimed effect?

SubiculumCode4• 2 years ago

There is an absolutely vast literature studying the effects of context and context changes on many different forms of cognition, going back decades. Your posts really adds little of value, and relies on some over-broad stereotypes of the soundness of psychology research. Do some google scholar searches.

xpe8• 2 years ago

There is an absolutely vast literature studying the effects of context and context changes on many different forms of cognition, going back decades. Your posts really adds little of value, and relies on some over-broad stereotypes of the soundness of psychology research. Do some google scholar searches.

In four words, the above comment is: harsh, judgmental, not curious.

Below, I hope to (a) offer another point of view about how your comment may be perceived and (b) demonstrate to you that the sample sizes and replicated studies regarding the Doorway Theory are unimpressive.

First, you made this discussion personal, and it wasn't particularly constructive. It is hard to say what goals you might have, but if your goal is curious conversation, I don't think this is the way. Do you? What is your experience/philosophy/science of productive conversation? Based only on this interaction, I wonder if you may not have thought about this very much and/or you aren't putting it into practice and/or you're taking something out on me.

Second, the word "stereotypes" gets casually thrown around. Empirically, how often would you say that using it advances constructive conversation?

Third, using this definition of stereotype: "a widely held but fixed and oversimplified image or idea of a particular type of person or thing." ... why would you think my view of this is "fixed" or unchanging? I don't see a rational reason for seeing that based on what I wrote.

Fourth, for people that think in a Bayesian way -- and I think such a model is fairly useful in modeling how people actually operate -- we all have priors. Please do not accuse me of stereotyping when I'm only sharing a prior. One key question is what we do with them as we gain more information.

Fifth, on what basis would you validly say that my prior regarding my confidence in psychological studies is an "over-broad stereotype"? I've tried, but I don't think you can. You can disagree with my prior -- that's fair game. And we can talk empirically and rationally about how/why we have different priors.

Sixth, your comment shifts away the context I intended (I hope it was clear given the context, but maybe it was not) and criticizes a straw man. You wrote "There is an absolutely vast literature studying the effects of context and context changes on many different forms of cognition, going back decades". Perhaps this literature is largely sound and replicable. But that's not what I was referring to here; I was discussing the Doorway Effect in particular. From what I've seen so far, there were two early studies, both at Notre Dame, consisting of about 90 people in total. This alone certainly isn't enough in my mind to give high credence to the results. At least one subsequent attempt to replicate was mixed. So, please don't tell me to "do some google scholar searches". That is rather presumptive.

Would you like to continue to discussion on a better foot going forward?

xpe8• 2 years ago

How is the theory falsifiable? What if I pass between two rooms that look identical? Has this been studied? (It seems to me that the underlying claim of episodic memory might not be able to tell a difference.)

shermantanktop3• 2 years ago

That's psychology and cognitive science. It can be meaningful, insightful, at times revelatory, all while suffering from a degree of non-reproducibility and confirmation bias.

kerkeslager6• 2 years ago

How is the theory falsifiable?

If they didn't observe it, that would provide some level of falsifiability?

What if I pass between two rooms that look identical? Has this been studied? (It seems to me that the underlying claim of episodic memory might not be able to tell a difference.)

There's a study listed on that page which observed that re-entering the same room did not improve recall.

xpe8• 2 years ago

Observation alone doesn’t necessarily give falsifiability. This requires an interaction of clear terminology with physics. In short, I was prodding at their definition of “doorways”.

kansface• 2 years ago

I only skimmed, but the two linked articles have ~50 participants or _fewer_ (college students) for each.

epistasis2• 2 years ago

Meaning that the effect must be fairly strong to be observable in two studies with n=50?

I would agree in general, but I would like to see three or more, as well as variations to test the boundaries of this.

Things can go wrong in one or two studies, so having independent replication is needed to really cement things.

tshaddox• 2 years ago

Meaning that the effect must be fairly strong to be observable in two studies with n=50?

Do what now? Isn't the problem that it could have randomly happened (especially if people did a bunch of other similar studies that didn't observe an effect, and only these two were published)?

wins32767• 2 years ago

And all but one of the studies are by the same lead author.

TrianguloY2• 2 years ago

I've noticed that retracing your steps (either literally if walking or not) helps enormously.

For me it happens that I'm doing something on my phone, remember to do something else, switch apps to do it, and literally forget what it is. But by going back or checking the recent apps I find again the "trigger" of the original reminder.

For example, you are checking [social network] and you see a post that reminds you to go searching for [object]. You close the app, open the browser...and you try to remember what were you going to search. Just going back and seeing the social network posts you were watching will remind you again of it.

It's like the though's owner is the other situation/room, and as soon as you forget one you forget the other with it. Quite interesting

rootusrootus• 2 years ago

I've noticed that retracing your steps (either literally if walking or not) helps enormously.

Definitely. My wife and I have a running joke about it. I'll walk into the room, she says "What's up?" and I say "trying to find something and I forgot what it was. Hold on, let me go back to my office to remember."

jowea• 2 years ago

Yeah it also happens to me on the computer. Specially funny when I end up distracted by something else, then a hour later come back to the original trigger and remember how I ended up on the last hour long rabbit hole and what I was actually going to do.

lcnPylGDnU4H9OF• 2 years ago

“There’s a hole in the bucket, dear Liza...”

https://youtube.com/watch?v=zYY6Q4nRTS4

Probably a timeless phenomenon. But I wouldn’t be as good as Henry. I’d take the bucket to the well and eventually shout back up the way, “there’s a hole...!”

(What do you think he needed the water for anyway?)

m463• 2 years ago

I sometimes encounter the same thing, but sort of... inside out.

I recently told someone, "I remember telling you, I was on the phone with you in X location and I recall telling you!"

pflenker• 2 years ago

This works for me to an absurd degree. I sometimes remember, hours later, that I had some idea e.g. while showering or while brewing coffee. Returning to the bathroom or kitchen respectively helps me remember these ideas.

layer8• 2 years ago

Ah, this is explains the effect of entering a room and not remembering why you went there.

codelobe• 2 years ago

... Or pressing the start key in Vista and seeing a wall of live tile distractions.

In my experience the start page idea was a software implementation of "Doorway Effect". I always had to return to the desktop to have my "refrigerator logic" spin up.

<https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/fridge_logic>

seabass-labrax2• 2 years ago

Vista..? The Windows start page was introduced in version 8, not Vista. Vista had a bog-standard, pre-8 menu.

rossdavidh• 2 years ago

Oddly, for me at least, going back to the room I was in before almost always causes me to remember.

worik• 2 years ago

My mother had this as she went senile. She would come to a complete halt in the doorways.

Then when my dog got old and doolaly he started to do it.

Not just humans

mbork_pl2• 2 years ago

It's the second time in my life that I encounter the word "doolally", and I love it.

egypturnash• 2 years ago

Living in a shotgun house has convinced me this effect is very real. When I have to walk from the front to the back, I have developed the habit of saying what I'm going to do as I walk through each of the five doors I have to pass through; this puts my intent into a different mental pipeline, that's much more resistant to being flushed out when I pass through a door.

If my husband is at home then he tends to get in on the act, leading to conversations like "I should set a timer for five minutes." "You should set a timer for five minutes!" "I'm gonna set a timer for five minutes." "Didja set that timer for five minutes?" "I just set a timer for five minutes!" when I'm crossing from the kitchen to the living room and leaving some water to boil.

smeej• 2 years ago

Maybe a counter-anecdote? I live in a studio layout house. The only interior door/doorway is to the bathroom. Yet I regularly forget things between my kitchen counter and my desk, or sometimes even between my stove and the counter across from it, despite having generally strong short and long-term recall.

I had chalked it up to the familiarity of the places. I see the same things inside all the time, so one day's moments blend into the previous days' similar moments.

I find a related thing happens in places I visit a lot, like my church, where each time I go, the previous experiences layer on top of it. There just aren't quite enough of them there to crowd out what I'm trying to do this time.

hnlmorg3• 2 years ago

That’s not a counter-anecdote. The linked article describes how this is about psychological barriers which can align with physical barriers but doesn’t have to be. Such as application windows on a computer desktop.

What you’re describing is still a physical barrier but it’s not a literal door way.

giraffe_lady• 2 years ago

Widely known in the restaurant industry as the walk-in effect. You go into the walk-in fridge and then forget what you went in there to get. You go back to your station to remember.

swayvil2• 2 years ago

Forgetting your dreams when you wake up in morning. The doorway effect could explain that too. Bigger door = bigger/more frequent effect.

shermantanktop3• 2 years ago

This has some similarities to the cultural anthropological concept of ritual liminality:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liminality

The "doorway effect" is a more everyday phenomenon. Interesting that the idea that transitions result in disorientation scales from the mundane to the religious.

vagab0nd• 2 years ago

Sorry to hijack this, but a related problem of mine is I can't picture myself going through a doorway. Like the brain just doesn't compute for some reason.

dhc02• 2 years ago

Can you picture other things?

A long time ago I read that if you are awakened and want to fall back asleep, you should picture yourself turning around, going through a door to your basement stairway and descending the steps towards the dark basement.

I tried forever to do this and couldn't, and thought it was something about this scenario specifically. But then years later, I learned about aphantasia and realized I can't actually picture anything at all. The doorway wasn't special.

kerkeslager6• 2 years ago

I'm quite adept at visualization, as I'm a visual learner (visualization comes more naturally to me than any other form of thinking) AND visualization is something I regularly, explicitly do in order to prepare for rock climbing.

Visualizing myself going through a doorway is difficult even for me. I think it's in part because it requires some creativity (compare "visualize yourself going through a doorway" as opposed to "visualize yourself going through the doorway of your childhood house"). The salient conceptual feature of a doorway is that it goes somewhere and so the prompt basically is asking you to imagine something without explicitly asking you. Even your example of the basement stairway is much easier for me to visualise, because the doorway has stairs after it.

thelastparadise3• 2 years ago

you should picture yourself turning around, going through a door to your basement stairway and descending the steps towards the dark basement.

Nope. Not doing that!

Sounds like nightmare city!

Eduard2• 2 years ago

huh, so you cannot visualize yourself e. g. going to the toilet by transitioning from the hallway to the bathroom?

nakedneuron• 2 years ago

Interesting phenomenon. Seems to be a thing. I guess it's because how memory is encoded spatially and in the middle of changing places there would either be no clear signal due to multiple neuron parties firing or the brain is busy with context change in that transition and never builds strong memories of crossing a particular doorway.

ThinkingGuy• 2 years ago

Sounds like aphantasia:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphantasia

hnlmorg3• 2 years ago

TOTP 2FA is terrible for this. I’ll sign into a website, pick my phone up to read the TOTP code, and instead end up on HN or Signal or something. Put the phone down after a couple of minutes, look back up to my computer screen with the 2FA prompt and go “oh yeah, that’s why I looked at my phone”

That happens probably 50% of the time. And I wish that was an exaggeration.

seabass-labrax2• 2 years ago

By which point, of course, your TOTP token has expired. I feel your pain :)

hnlmorg3• 2 years ago

Haha yeah, that’s the most annoying part of it.

ydant• 2 years ago

This is exactly why I've eventually ended up with almost no notifications on my phone. I am way too susceptible to being distracted mid-task, and the only way I've found to effectively combat that is by aggressively removing those distractions.

Now if only I could turn off the "you must investigate X" shouting my brain randomly throws at me WITHOUT external stimuli.

kaetemi2• 2 years ago

Yep. Switching to phone is instant context loss.

kaetemi2• 2 years ago

Is there no way to stop Chrome on Android from remembering all open tabs? I find this one of the things that causes distraction from what I was going to do.

SoftTalker2• 2 years ago

Why don't more sites ask for the username/password and the TOTP code on the same form? Is there a downside to that approach? I've only seen it done that way rarely.

TrianguloY2• 2 years ago

Probably because not all accounts have TOTP enabled, so it would be strange to ask for a TOTP if you don't have one.

Maybe with newer services that requires TOTP since day one is a possibility.

akho• 2 years ago

Why do you need a phone for totp?..

jbjbjbjb• 2 years ago

Memory is organized around specific events or episodes, such as attending a lecture or having a family meal, rather than being a continuous stream interrupted by sleep.

For some reason that sentence really irked the critical thinker in me. As if they have the schema for the human brain.

daseiner1• 2 years ago

The wiki is worded far too strongly. The abstract of the cited research (c. 2000) describes it as a “model of autobiographical memory”. As is often said, models are not perfectly accurate representations of reality, but are useful representations of reality. How this model is used today - or if it’s even still considered relevant - I can’t speak to.

kerkeslager6• 2 years ago

As someone with ADHD which was unmedicated far beyond what was reasonable, passing through a doorway still has some mild but primordial terror, as I remember a time when walking through a door was like being awoken from unconsciousness in an unfamiliar day.

martinpw• 2 years ago

Funnily enough this cartoon showed up in the middle of an article I was just reading that was also linked from HN:

https://www.newyorker.com/cartoon/a27014

so a weird mix of being reminded about something that was about forgetting something. And it was one of those rare New Yorker cartoons that was actually funny.

Eduard2• 2 years ago

I forgot what made this New Yorker comic funny.

TaylorAlexander2• 2 years ago

A perhaps related effect is that when I leave the house I always forget one or two things, and I remember them usually once I start the car engine. So then I turn off the car and go back to my apartment and grab the remaining items. But I recently learned that I can imagine leaving the house, and it helps me remember the final things I forgot!

bigger_cheese• 2 years ago

I also get this very strong feeling of having forgotten something when I get into my car.

It used to happen almost daily. I would get into my car reverse out of my driveway. I would drive towards my workplace for about 2 to 5 minutes until I hit first red traffic light and as I'm waiting at traffic lights I would get this sinking feeling that I'd forgotten to close my garage door.

This is despite the fact I do not have a remotely operated garage door it is manual. I have to reverse out of garage, get out of my car, manually close the garage door and get back into car and reverse out of driveway.

I would wrack my short term memory while sitting at traffic lights and have no recollection of closing the garage door. It was as if my journey (in my memory) would always begin with turning out of my driveway.

Nowadays I force myself to look over shoulder and check the garage door as I turn out of my driveway and onto the street.

TaylorAlexander2• 2 years ago

Yeah I have that with locking the front door! It normally auto-locks and I just need to make sure it is latched and I need to check the handle to make sure I didn’t have the auto-lock off. But this latch-check happens so fast (I do always do it) that I will often forget. I have never gone back to check and found it unlocked but I still go back and check often. But for me this happens when I’m 100 feet away at the car so it’s not too bad.

mgfist• 2 years ago

I'll click CMD+T and completely forget which site I wanted to go to once the blank page shows up

renewiltord• 2 years ago

Similar effect for full page context-switches. Example was the Windows menu when they made the windows key open a full screen view. Could never remember.

topspin• 2 years ago

I think it's a threat response. When you enter a different area your mind spikes for a moment as you (un)consciously scan around, and whatever thought you were tenuously holding is in jeopardy of getting pushed out. Watch a cat or dog, particularly those that spend a lot of time outdoors and don't take the world for granted; when a door is opened for them they'll step in, stop dead, look around, sniff the air, listen, and then get on with their business. Evolutionary wiring.

Springtime• 2 years ago

As another commenter mentions it's seemingly the same phenomenon as why 'memory palaces' work for memorizing arbitrary things (among other similarly effective mnemonics) and this article suggests something similar is also occurring unconsciously for random thoughts and gets disrupted by such actions.

Such spacial-based memory triggers I've also seen demonstrated by magician/skeptic Derren Brown, where recall of the participant is manipulated via location-based touch or gestures (both for remembering and forgetting things).

novia• 2 years ago

This makes me think of the gates at shinto shrines called torii.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torii

imp0cat• 2 years ago

Yet another reason to visit Japan at least once during a lifetime.

dougSF70• 2 years ago

I tend to find this holds true 100% of the time.

private Boolean doorway_effect(Boolean tall_person, Boolean carrying_heavy_item, Boolean carrying_hot_drink, Boolean doorway_low)

Boolean bang_head = false;

if(tall_person && (carrying_heavy_item || carrying_hot_drink) && doorway_low) {

     bang_head = true;

}

return bang_head;

}

jkrubin• 2 years ago

I had a relevant comment while reading through the Wikipedia article, but I forgot it as soon as I opened up the comments.

posnet• 2 years ago

Have you ever walked into a room and found a vampire?

No, not the sexy kind, but a foul creature with bony limbs and ashen skin? The kind that snarls as you enter, like a beast about to pounce? The kind that roots you to the spot with its sunken, hypnotic eyes, rendering you unable to flee as you watch the hideous thing uncoil from the shadows? Has your heart started racing though your legs refuse to? Have you felt time slow as the creature crosses the room in the darkness of a blink?

Have you shuddered with fear when it places one clawed hand atop your head and another under your chin so it can tilt you, exposing your neck? Have you squirmed as its rough, dry tongue slides down your cheek, over your jaw, to your throat, in a slithering search that's seeking your artery? Have you felt its hot breath release in a hiss against your skin when it probes your pulse—the flow that leads to your brain? Has its tongue rested there, throbbing slightly as if savoring the moment? Have you then experienced a sinking, sucking blackness as you discover that not all vampires feed on blood—some feed on memories?

Well, have you?

Maybe not. But let me rephrase the question:

Have you ever walked into a room and suddenly forgotten why you came in?

https://old.reddit.com/r/shortscarystories/comments/1inv0n/n...

dymk• 2 years ago

r/shorthotstories

Razengan• 2 years ago

Inspiration material!

twright0• 2 years ago

Mostly off-topic, but if you find this compelling, you will certainly enjoy reading the short story "There Is No Antimemetics Division" whose chapters are linked from https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/antimemetics-division-hub

geewee• 2 years ago

It's a nice series of stories, although I feel like they do go a bit off the deep end in some of the later installments - but the premise is very fun.

treetalker• 2 years ago

I bought the book and read it based on another HN recommendation. The premise was interesting at first but the writing is trash and it ended up being the worst book I had read in recent memory. As another comment noted, it goes off the rails about halfway through. Not worth wasting paper, in my opinion. FWIW.

fensgrim• 2 years ago

On topic of this specific kind of vampire, see also: Blindsight, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blindsight_(Watts_novel)

tetris11• 2 years ago

Or, the energy vampires from the What We Do in the Shadows TV series:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_We_Do_in_the_Shadows_(TV_...

(Ctrl-F) "Colin Robinson"

starkrights• 2 years ago

Entirely off topic, but that post is borderline history. The commenter’s second-most-upvoted poster being u/unidan, to positive reaction? What a time.

lxgr• 2 years ago

Very related: There Is No Antimemetics Division (https://qntm.org/scp)

    An antimeme is an idea with self-censoring properties; an idea which, by its intrinsic nature, discourages or prevents people from spreading it.

    Antimemes are real. Think of any piece of information which you wouldn't share with anybody, like passwords, taboos and dirty secrets. Or any piece of information which would be difficult to share even if you tried: complex equations, very boring passages of text, large blocks of random numbers, and dreams...

    But anomalous antimemes are another matter entirely. How do you contain something you can't record or remember? How do you fight a war against an enemy with effortless, perfect camouflage, when you can never even know that you're at war?

    Welcome to the Antimemetics Division.

    No, this is not your first day.

keefle• 2 years ago

Can someone explain the meaning of this to me?

Is the encounter with the vampire similar to forgetting why one came into a room because when encountering a vampire in a newly entered room you forget everything before that and focus on the vampire?

zdbrandon• 2 years ago

The story is implying that whenever this happens to you -- forgetting why you came into a room -- the truth is that you were attacked by a vampire that made you forget the reason you were there, as well as the attack itself.

lagerlagerlager• 2 years ago

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_functions

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_multitasking

geon• 2 years ago

The wikipedia article reads a lot like it’s from The Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy.

tejtm• 2 years ago

My wife calls this "male refrigerator blindness".

But we all have it.

Paraphrasing a theory I read ... somewhere; it comes from when we were furtive subterranean critters, where entering and leaving burrows resulted in the invalidation of whatever threat just was, (example: birds outside, snakes underground) and that clearing the decks to more efficiently deal with different threats in the new context included dumping short term memory.

Loughla• 2 years ago

I like that theory. I don't think we give evolution and our animal past enough credit for many of the psychological things we encounter in our lives.

That's actually what was most interesting to me about the ringworld series. Just an open conversation about how evolution has impacted action (however hokey it might be in the books, and ignoring the rishathra).

newzisforsukas• 2 years ago

You can really notice this when under the influence of salvia divinorum.

darylteo• 2 years ago

Literally happened to me a couple of hours ago. Baader-meinhof'ed.

Needed to check something out in the backyard
As I'm walking out, noticed the trash
took the trash out
wondered why I was standing in the backyard.
noticed what I needed to check out on the way back

ADD life I suppose.

bjackman• 2 years ago

I really like how this Wikipedia page uses the word "replicable" at the top and goes to great lengths to describe the studies and replications :D

You can almost hear the authors going "no, come back! It's real! Not pre-2010 trash psychology! This is not a corporate motivational speaker factoid!"

red_admiral• 2 years ago

I hear the White House has lots of doorways.

rapiz• 2 years ago

Is this another metaphor in the game Superliminal?

scrollinondubs• 2 years ago

Pretty sure this phenomenon is actually a subset of "Transfer Appropriate Processing" from psych class: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transfer-appropriate_processin...

The "doorway effect" seems to be one expression of that larger phenomenon in which memory recall is largely influenced by the context in which it was encoded. It's the reason that if you're cramming for an exam, to the extent you can recreate the exact conditions of your study environment to mirror those of the test-taking environment, you'll do better.

0xEF2• 2 years ago

This is super interesting and nice to understand a phenomenon I have experienced, so thank you.

I have to admit that I thought the article was going to be about a different psychological quirk that I have noticed; the one where, for reasons unknown to me, people will congregate in hallways or stand in doorways to talk.

Does anyone else see this? Particularly at large gatherings like parties or company events? Is there a name for it?

nick7376182• 2 years ago

Human-scale spaces

Sharlin2• 2 years ago

Indeed. People are gravitating towards spaces that make them feel comfortable and safe, subconsciously or not, when engaging in the sort of intimate interactions that an in-depth conversation can be. One practical consideration that probably also often plays a part is acoustics, literally how easy it is to hear and to be heard.

KineticLensman• 2 years ago

I've found a very good way of forcing myself to return to a particular place in the house: leave my glasses there. This also reduces the doorway effect in terms of stopping me from doing things that require glasses when I end up somewhere else.

(I'm long sighted and need glasses for reading and precision tasks).

red75prime• 2 years ago

I adapted to that by associating my intention with the destination. Works fine if I don't forget to do it.

mbork_pl2• 2 years ago

An alternative explanation would be that this is caused by aliens who can wipe out your memories of them the moment you stop seeing them.

...am I the only one with tally marks on my hands?

(SCNR.)

sirsuki• 2 years ago

In the tech communities we call this “context switching”

mnw21cam• 2 years ago

This is also probably part of the reason why sleep specialists say you should set aside your bedroom for nothing but sleeping and sex. I think walking through a doorway loads the context of the new room into your brain, so you forget the stuff associated with the context of the room you just walked out of. If the context of your bedroom just has sleeping in it, you're less likely to have unwanted thought running around in your mind while you're trying to get to sleep.

ArunRaja• 2 years ago

Synonymous:

Programming: Function call and state getting captured on a stack.

cuddlyogre• 2 years ago

This was one of the reasons people hated the Windows 8 start screen. You go to access something while keeping what's on screen in your mind but the entire thing is now replaced with a sea of icons and text on a blue background. Such a drastic change in view has close to the effect that a power outage does.

glxxyz• 2 years ago

    "Woking (WOH-king) n.
    Standing in the kitchen wondering what you came in here for."

The Deeper Meaning of Liff, Douglas Adams & John Lloyd

maxglute• 2 years ago

Does this effect blind people?

NeoTar• 2 years ago

You clearly need "Jan Hankl's Flank Pat System" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DY-Zdgo0OXo

[Spoilers - To avoid people having to watch the whole video, it's a Mitchell and Webb sketch about how clapping your hands against your thighs helps you locate books on a bookshelf. Towards the end of the video it shows how making a 'scissors' motion with your fingers helps you find scissors.

Although a joke, a physical motion like patting your flanks or making a scissors motion can help you keep your planned activity in mind]

SoftTalker2• 2 years ago

Sitting in a meeting and then forgetting most of it when you walk out. That's why I always take notes.

SubiculumCode4• 2 years ago

Context changes impose substantial cognitive costs, disrupting reaction times, perception, and attention maintenance, and yes, memory. Context has a huge role in memory, and context shifts can lead you to not recognize familar people, like encountering your college professor at a dinner party.

The ability to perform in spite of context changes improves over childhood into adolescence, but the costs remain there and will become more pronounced as working memory loads or task demands increase.

Those who design GUIs should really take this into account. When, for example, clicking on a menu replaces the whole screen, like a version of Windows experimented with on the start menu, the complete context change imposes real costs on cognition.

I apologize for not providing citations, but a google scholar search will quickly provide relevant materials; this comment was written from what I learned in my PhD studies on the development of memory.

wscott• 2 years ago

I was immediately reminded of this Cosby standup: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qH_mHMgjcFY

Yeah, I know, I am not allowed to like anything Cosby anymore...

RHSman2• 2 years ago

Add weed for especially impressive results

notwhatswrong• 2 years ago

Sidequest: Ask yourself, if now after forgetting the allegedly important _what_ weighted your mind (laden/burdend) before, gives you something like to feel bestowed 'freedom'?

otterpro• 2 years ago

This is why I advocate separation of work space and personal space, especially when working from home. It allows my mind to reset after physically leaving a space designated for work. If I don't, my mind will linger on work way more than I need to. At a minimum, I'd like to have separate PC for work, and even a separate desk for work. Ideally, I'd like a separate room for work but I don't have the luxury of having another empty room.

Ishmaeli• 2 years ago

One of my biggest pet peeves is when I'm walking in a crowded area, and as I follow someone through a doorway or other transition space, they stop and look around.

The doorway or (whatever) is already a natural traffic bottleneck. And these people are making it worse by stopping right in the middle of it.

I suspect it's because of this psychological effect. But it's so annoying that many people's response seems to be to stop in their tracks. Okay maybe you've forgotten why you went through this doorway. But have you also suddenly forgotten that you're in the middle of a crowd of people trying to move around? Apparently so.

swayvil2• 2 years ago

If you fail to notice a doorway, does the effect still apply?

Are chronically forgetful people aware of doorways that the rest of us are not?

Can doorways (that bring about the effect) be purely subjective and personal?

If a person is beset by an eternal blizzard of subjective doorways, does he give the appearance of dumbness?

Do those who habitually ignore doorways appear smarter?

brindlejim• 2 years ago

It's almost as though your physical surroundings are your true phenotype, creating a whole-brain activation with memory cues that disappear when you leave the room. The edges of the self are blurred.

leobg• 2 years ago

Gives literal meaning to the question “Where was I?”.

(George Carlin had that in one of his routines. “Where was I? Oh, I believe I was…” (steps over) “…right here.”)

jkl5xx• 2 years ago

I'd never heard of this effect before but it reminds me of a feature I've aways wanted for ios which is, in order to unlock your phone, you need to type in what you're planning to do (and maybe for how long), so you can refer to that or get notified when your memory inevitably blanks and you get sidetracked.

Doorway effect

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