Thinking of doors makes us forget… literally

Many times it happens that, when going from one place to another, we forget what we were going to do.

This often happens when we draw routes that we are already used to: going to work, to school, etc. Thus, we realize that we have subconsciously taken the route to our office when in reality we want to go visit a friend, just because both routes share the initial section and we are more used to going to work than visiting the flat of the buddy.

think about doors

This is explained because, having passed through the same place so many times, our brain encodes this route as the path to follow by default, presses the button on the "autopilot" and, while our feet calmly lead us down the wrong path, we can devote ourselves to thinking about other things interesting. However, at other times we totally forgot what we were going to do when we are in our own house, a site that we frequent so much that there is no “default route”.

In these cases, the only thing that remains in our consciousness is a sensation of having had a very clear objective seconds ago, a purpose that no longer exists except as a disorientation inexplicable. In addition, as a consequence of this bewilderment, it is difficult for us to mentally recapitulate the actions that we have carried out just before finding ourselves where we are. we are and, perhaps for this reason, we do not realize that the last thing we have done before our destiny disappeared from our minds is... to go through a door.

cut sequences

Surprisingly, the key to these little everyday mysteries could be right there, at the doors. There are indications that going through one influences our memories unconsciously and that, in fact, the simple fact imagining going through a door can cause these memory blurs (Radvansky et al, 2011) (Lawrence & Peterson, 2014). That is thinking about doors can make it easier for us to forget the common thread of what we were doing. The explanation is problematic, but it could be as follows: the doors act as dividers in our memories.

Perhaps as a matter of performance, our brain breaks our flow of experiences into smaller portions. In this sense, the mental representation of a door would act as a trigger for one of these divisions exerted on our mind, unconsciously cutting the “narrative” of the facts that we are living We can think of these fragments as the cinematographic shots that divide any movie. Fortuitously, important aspects of developing an action plan can be lost in this "cutting" process and not move on to the next fragment: that's why we often get up from the sofa and end up paralyzed by uncertainty a few more meters there.

Does it only happen when thinking about doors?

However, by this same logic there are other elements that can have the same effect on us. For example, it has been observed how sentences that introduce a temporal discontinuity produce the same effect. Thus, when we read something similar to "a week later...", our ability to associate memories is less for those memories that are They lie on either side of that temporal divide when compared to memories found in a single fragment (Ezzyat et al, 2010).

It is also for this split mechanism which is why it is so easy to have the need to reread the last few lines after realizing that the narration that we are reading has jumped in time or space (and is therefore different from the last one we read). we remember). The fault is not the book, nor does it have to be because what we read lacks interest. The person responsible for these things happening is the memory assembly system that operates in our brain.

The latter is interesting because it stands out in symbolic character of this process. It is not that we are biologically predisposed to forget when thinking about doors, it is that this it is a side effect of the symbolic charge of these artifacts. This means that practically any other perceptual phenomenon can produce in us the same effect if we subconsciously assign a meaning similar to that which the words usually have. doors. do you hear that? They are the psychoanalysts, who are already sharpening their pencils.