Thinking about doors makes us forget... literally...

Thinking about doors can make it easy for us to forget the main thread of what we were doing.

It often happens that, as we move from one place to another, we forget what we were going to do.. 

This often happens when we trace routes that we are already used to: going to work, to school, etc. We realize, then, that we have subconsciously taken the route to our office when we actually want to go visit a friend, just because both routes share the initial stretch and we are more used to going to work than to visit our colleague's apartment.

Thinking of doors

This is because, having passed so many times through the same place, our brain encodes this route as the default path to follow, hits the "autopilot" button and, while our feet take us quietly along the wrong route, we can dedicate ourselves to thinking about other more interesting things. However, at other times we totally forget what we were going to do when we are in our own home. when we are in our own homea place we frequent so often that there is no "default route".

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

Cut sequences

Surprisingly, the key to these small everyday mysteries could be right there, in the doors.. There are indications that passing through one influences our memories in an unconscious way and that, in fact, simply imagining passing through a door can cause these memory blurs (Radvansky et al, 2011) (Lawrence & Peterson, 2014). That is, that 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 the following: doors act as dividers of our memories.

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

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 like "one week later...", our ability to associate memories is lower for those memories that lie on either side of that temporal division if we compare them with memories that lie in a single fragment (Ezzyat et al, 2010).

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

The latter is interesting because it highlights the symbolic character of this process. It is not that we are biologically predisposed to forget when thinking about doors, it is that this is a side effect of these artifacts. is a side effect of the symbolic charge of these artifacts.. This means that virtually any other perceptual phenomenon can produce the same effect on us if we subconsciously assign to it a meaning similar to that which doors tend to have. Hear that? It's the psychoanalysts, who are already sharpening their pencils.