PsychologyMemory

Doorways erase your train of thought. Measurably.

Walking through a doorway genuinely makes you forget why you came. In experiments, people carrying items between rooms forgot what they held more often after passing a doorway — even a virtual one — because the brain treats it as an event boundary and files the previous scene away.

Step by step

  1. In experiments, people carrying objects between rooms forgot more right after a doorway.
  2. The brain treats the doorway as an event boundary and files the previous scene away.
  3. It works with virtual doorways too. The purge is cognitive, not physical.

Source

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