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Out of Sight, Out of Mind
PerlJedi writes "Researchers at the University of Notre Dame have conducted a very simple study, with some surprising (or at least amusing) results about how our short term memory works. Quoting: 'Sometimes, to get to the next object the participant simply walked across the room. Other times, they had to walk the same distance, but through a door into a new room. From time to time, the researchers gave them a pop quiz, asking which object was currently in their backpack. The quiz was timed so that when they walked through a doorway, they were tested right afterwards. As the title said, walking through doorways caused forgetting: Their responses were both slower and less accurate when they'd walked through a doorway into a new room than when they'd walked the same distance within the same room.'"
So many famous quotes talk about the gravity of "walking through that door", about the hope of "opening a new door" or "closing a door...opening a window" that I wonder how much people associate doors metaphorically with permission to forget and ignore everything on the other side?
Of course, ancient Greeks used architecture, specifically an image of a large house, to remember things: a common technique to plan and memorize a speech was to lay it out visually in your head, each room representing a major topic and each door perhaps representing a transition or gravid point. So architecture as memory cuts both ways.
Switching contexts is computationally expensive for our brains, and is a lossy procedure. Any techie can tell you that constant interruptions cause bad code because you lose context and the "gestalt" of what you are doing.
While that is true, it does nothing to diminish the weirdness of this result. Walking from one place to another doesn't seem like much of a "change of context." Especially when your present location has utterly nothing to do with what you're trying to remember.
Changing mental focus causes forgetting. Can you multi-thread?
Walking across room: : Command: Get blue pencil trudge trudge trudge See: pencils Take: blue one. w00t!
Walking across room, through door: : Command: Get green string trudge trudge trudge See: Door Look for: Knob Act: Turn knob Act: Push door Door does not open. Act: Pull door Door opens trudge trudge trudge Halt. Query: What am I in here for? Pencil? Chair? Left-handed widget extractor? Rope? Hook? Trebuchet? Keys? Potrzebie? Fail!
I frequently find distraction breaks my thread of thought and I lose the frayed thread end. Rather like going up stairs - "Uh. What did I come up here for?" Go downstairs - "Uh. What did I come down here for?" I've been doing this ever since I spent 20 minutes searching my parents house for the screwdriver I was holding in my hand all the time - I was about 12 years old at the time - I'm an expert in this field!
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
As the title said, walking through doorways caused forgetting
I could see how that would be a survival instinct. When you cross a barrier into another space, job one for your brain is taking stock of where you are and processing possible threats. It's not that you forget what you have in your hand, your brain has merely busy with another set of priorities.
When our ancestors moved from the cover of the woods to a grassy meadow, when they entered a cave, or rounded the bend of a river they were effectively going through a door to another space. The surviving human brains would have been attuned to both threats and opportunities, which would be a priority processing task kicked off by crossing the barrier threshold.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
It's a very weird phenomenon... like deja-vu in reverse.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Doesn't seem like it's doorways or line of sight, but changing rooms is like turning a new page in ones mind. New room, new collection of objects, new page of memory to work with.
That's how I feel it works in my own mind in any case.
Hundreds of processes happen, going from one room to another. Identifying the door is a good start (walls are so unyielding) looking for the knob, using hand-eye coordination to put hand on doorknob, turn, sense door opens or does not, pulling, pushing, how far is door open, don't hit it going through, see objects in new room, processes information (I didn't walk out into space and plummet like Wile E. Coyote, etc.) then resume walking, assuming you know what you came in for.
Probably at some point they'll use this as a screen for Alzheimers Disease (or early onset dementia.)
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
It is well known that when learning a new dance step, it is much easier to keep the room in the same orientation when rehearsing it. One gets particularly confused trying the step facing another direction before the step begins to be committed to muscle memory. Dancers call it "room memory".
The glass is half glass.
After you have some unpleasant experience -- break up with your girlfriend, argument with your boss -- just walk into another room and start doing something else
"We receive as friendly that which agrees with, we resist with dislike that which opposes us" - Faraday
Switching contexts is computationally expensive for our brains, and is a lossy procedure. Any techie can tell you that constant interruptions cause bad code because you lose context and the "gestalt" of what you are doing.
In fact, it's a little more subtle than that.
What is expensive is not switching contexts, as you can check by reading 2 web pages simultaneously, it's pretty easy.
But your performance degrades a lot when you try to multitask with your two cerebral hemispheres (for example computing and drawing at the same time).
Also, when you have similar tasks, you have an internal limit, and you can easily store tasks that fit within your limit.
When a task is closed, you'll forget it immediately, to free space for an incoming task.
My own limit is around 3.
This is called Zeigarnik effect:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suspense#Zeigarnik_effect
Context is king in memory. It both helps and hinders. Memories are linked to the place and time where you first learned them. The brain is like a 3 dimensional chording keyboard combined with a hologram combined with photographic film. If you've only seen something once, you'll remember the context. As you see that thing more and more, the context/background gets washed out and all that remains is the pattern of the image/concept. So if you are told to remember the words "fish, piano, disestablishmentarianism, Arizona, and tooth", you are going to tie that pattern to the context you are in. Change the context and it becomes harder to remember.
I wonder if it's cheating to "play back" your conversation with the person who gave you the list?
Frank Lloyd Wright exploited this phenomenon in his architecture. If you're familiar with his "compression and release", you're probably also familiar with how dumbstruck a person can get walking into one of his buildings. http://goo.gl/H6ygK
It should probably also be noted that context is very important in data compression, and it doesnt seem unreasonable that brains have evolved to store information efficiently using some of the strategies that we have found successful in compsci.
"His name was James Damore."