The Nuance
Why Your Brain Needs Boundaries
And how modern life is ripping them down
It happens to everyone now and then. You walk into a room and find you’ve forgotten why you’re there. Was there something you needed? Or something you wanted to do? Whatever it was, it’s gone.
Psychologists call this “the doorway effect.”
For a 2011 study in the Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, researchers at the University of Notre Dame confirmed that people are much more likely to lose their train of thought or forget something after passing through a doorway.
This is not just a weird mental quirk. It hints at the way your brain relies on spatial and contextual cues to organize information and impose some order on the world.
“Entering or exiting through a doorway serves as an ‘event boundary’ in the mind,” said Notre Dame psychologist Gabriel Radvansky, PhD, in a press release that accompanied his 2011 study.
More of Radvansky’s work explains how your brain uses these event boundaries to partition and package experiences in ways that ultimately aid recall and inform behavior — sort of like the way drawing a grid on top of a random assortment of dots can help you better recognize and recreate their pattern.
