Why do you come here?
And why, why do you hang around?
Nothing too heavy or existential for our final Cynical Self-Help post of 2023, though it is about something our brain does, and I imagine it's something we all experience from time to time... probably with greater frequency as time goes by.
You go upstairs to get something from the bedroom. By the time you reach the bedroom, you can't recall for the life of you what it is you want or why you came upstairs in the first place.
It doesn't have to be upstairs - it can be as simple as going from the lounge into the kitchen. Or even opening the fridge door. Why did I come here? What did I want?
And I thought we had a chance for love
A rare and special kind of love
Well you opened a door then shut it again
I lost your love and I lost a friend
For a long time, I believed this frustrating phenomenon was the result of advancing years. Then again, considering that it's been happening for as long as I can remember (although, as we've just discussed, "as long as I can remember" is a relative term), I've long worried my years actually started advancing at a very early age.
Turns out it's nothing to do with old age at all though... it's what scientists call The Doorway Effect. A series of experiments by Gabriel A. Radvansky and David E. Copeland which commenced in 2006 concluded that...
Memory was worse after passing through a doorway than after walking the same distance within a single room.
One explanation for this effect is down to what neuroscientists call episodic memory...
Episodic memory involves the ability to learn, store, and retrieve information about unique personal experiences that occur in daily life. These memories typically include information about the time and place of an event, as well as detailed information about the event itself.
Simply put: if you have a thought in one room, then try to carry that thought to another room, it becomes harder to remember. You wouldn't have forgotten what it was you were looking for if you'd stayed in the room where you first realised you'd lost it. Of course, that causes something of an issue when it comes to looking for them...
Louise gets very frustrated when she asks me to do a job, or add an item to the shopping list, and the first thing I do is run for a notepad to write it down.
"Why can't you remember?"
At last - I have an answer to that question! But will I be able to remember it when I go downstairs to tell her?
Another potential explanation for the doorway effect involves a slightly more complex understanding of how our brains are organised. BBC Science expounds...
As we move through our days, our attention shifts between [different levels of thinking] – from our goals and ambitions, to plans and strategies, and to the lowest levels, our concrete actions.
At concrete action level, I am hammering on a keyboard right now.
The strategy involves transfering the ideas in my head onto a computer screen.
My plan is to explain complex mental health issues to myself (and anyone else who might be interested).
My goal is to help me understand my own mental health.
My ambition is to feel better.
That's a clumsy generalisation of the different levels of thinking, but the fact is that our brain switches effortlessly between these different levels throughout the day. That's why we can drive home some days without thinking about the journey (or the mechanical process of changing gear or swapping pedals) at all. Other days though, our thoughts might be dominated by those things - if traffic is bad or our car is making a strange noise.
The Beeb continues...
The way our attention moves up and down the hierarchy of action is what allows us to carry out complex behaviours, stitching together a coherent plan over multiple moments, in multiple places or requiring multiple actions.
They liken this to the old metaphor of spinning plates... but every so often, a plate falls and we can't remember what we're doing or why we're doing it.
Our memories, even for our goals, are embedded in webs of associations. That can be the physical environment in which we form them, which is why revisiting our childhood home can bring back a flood of previously forgotten memories, or it can be the mental environment – the set of things we were just thinking about when that thing popped into mind.The Doorway Effect occurs because we change both the physical and mental environments, moving to a different room and thinking about different things. That hastily thought up goal, which was probably only one plate among the many we’re trying to spin, gets forgotten when the context changes.
If you want to remember more - stay exactly where you are! (Sidebar: would I have done better in my GCSEs if I'd done all my revision in the hall where I eventually sat the exam?)
Sorry, I just popped downstairs to make a cup of herbal tea. What was I writing about? The Doorway Effect? What was that again...?
Does it, I wonder, have anything to do with The Staircase Effect... or what the French call "l'esprit d'escalier"?
No. This is the frustration we feel when we leave a room after an argument or contentious conversation and - too late! - come up with the pithy reply or put-down we should have used at the time. I'm kicking myself I didn't say...
A fire officer came to visit our workplace last week. When he looked at our fire plan, he complained that it wasn't a procedure, it was just a series of actions. I wish I'd thought to hand him a dictionary and ask him to look up the actual definition of "procedure". Too late now...
