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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.'"
Alex Trebek: Good evening and welcome to another edition of "Open the Door Jeopardy" where contestants must step through a door after ringing in and answer because answering a 'clue' in the form of a question just isn't confusing enough. Ken Jennings, as our returning champion you start. ... 'His death and subsequent disagreement of heir resulted in the Battle of Hastings.' ... uh ... um ... I knew it a second ago.
Ken Jennings: I'll start with the category 'I Confess!' for $400, Alex.
Alex Trebek: Very good
*Ken Jennings rings in, opens the door and steps through it*
Ken Jennings: Um
Alex Trebek: Ooooh, I'm sorry, time is up. Anyone else?
*the heavy treads of IBM's Watson machine crush the door as it rolls in*
Watson: Who was Edward the Confessor?
My work here is dung.
Obviously the subjects' brainwaves diffracted when they walked through the door...
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
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.
It's one of the reasons why I've always insisted upon having at least one guaranteed-uninterrupted (nothing short of "the building's on fire... again") two-hour block of time per day in any tech job I have. If I don't have that, don't complain to me that I write bad code, but DO expect me to gripe about it in my status and my supervisor evaluation.
#!/usr/bin/env python
import os, sys, time, re, LeaveMeTheFuckAlone
Everybody gets what the majority deserves.
This is why I hate going to meetings and feeling stupid. Come to my cube and I'll know the answers.
I would think this is due to the brain first checking the next room. It being a new place, we probably want to be well aware of the room before being too far in. Thus our attention is taken away from whatever we are thinking about a minute ago.
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
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
Subject: I think that door just sighed.
Experimenter: Ghastly, isn't it? All the doors on this experiment have been programmed to have a cheery and sunny disposition. Now, how many objects in your backpack?
Subject: Uh, really? That's, uh ... I'm sorry, what? Ah, I forget... what?
Experimenter: *scribbles on clibpoard*
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.
So those WERE the droids I was looking for?
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
He would but he just walked through the door from the bathroom and has forgotten them.
...the future crusty old bastards are already drinking the Kool-Aid.
Dammit, now I forgot what I came to this website for.
I'd argue that taking stock of the new room is the biggest of those distractors. There's a lot involved when you have to take stock of "new" territory, and it'd be pretty easy for that to distract you. Even if you're familiar with the room, it takes a moment to verify things are as you left them. We're not all that far removed from needing to figure out if there's something waiting to eat us around every corner.
The Quirkz Handbook of Self-Improvement for People Who Are Already Pretty Okay
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?
In the first place, this has been known since the time of the ancient Greeks, in the form of the memorization technique known as the "method of loci." Rhetoricians memorized their speeches by associating each part of the speech with a room in their house, and as they gave the speech would mentally walk through the house. This is in fact the source of our expressions "in the first place," "in the second place," etc.
In the second place... uh... I forgot what I was going to say.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
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