[url][/url]"More often than I care to admit, I’ll walk
from one room to another with a clear vision
in mind of whatever I need to do once I get
there, but then I get there and can’t
remember why I started. The only thing that
happened between my first movement and
my last is that I walked through a doorway.
Surely that has nothing at all to do with
forgetting something I knew just moments
before, right?
Wrong, says new research. As it turns out,
walking through a doorway exerts an
imperceptible influence on memory. In fact,
merely imagining walking through a
doorway can zap memory.
Researchers in the latest study took their
cue from an earlier study showing that
passing through a doorway seems to insert
a mental divider into memory. Our brains
record memories in segments, or
episodes, rather than as a continuous
event. Dubbed the “Event Horizon Model”
by earlier researchers, walking through a
doorway triggers memory segmentation,
like a video editor inserting a momentary
pause between scenes. In that tiny pause—
the Event Horizon—the connective parts of
memories can be lost, and we suddenly
can’t recall that we got up from watching
the basketball game to unplug the iron in
the next room.
Think of it as a blip in your brain’s matrix.
Even more curious is that imagining
walking through a doorway has a similar
effect. The research team brought two
groups of participants into a large room.
One group experienced the room as a
continuous space; the other walked through
it after divider curtains were set up to
simulate a doorway. The groups were then
shown a picture of an unusually shaped
object before closing their eyes and
imagining walking across the room they’d
seen earlier. The first group imagined the
room as a big space with no physical
dividers; the other imagined walking
through the draped doorway.
They were then asked to jog their memories
and pick out the picture of the object from a
set of ten images. As predicted, the group
that imagined walking through a doorway
performed significantly worse on the
memory test than the other group.
“That walking through a doorway elicits
forgetting is surprising because it is such a
subtle perceptual feature compared to the
rich environment in which it sits,” the
researchers said, “that simply imagining
such a walk yields a similar result is even
more surprising, particularly when
compared with actually walking through
doorways.” Indeed.
And this gets even weirder. If right now I
started telling you a story about a boy and
his dog, going on for a few paragraphs
detailing all the things this boy and his dog
do together in their happy little boy-dog
comedy drama of a life, and then I suddenly
inserted a phrase like “A few hours later…”
– do you think your recall of what I just told
you about the boy and his dog might be
better or worse?
If you’ve been following the plot of this
article so far you’re likely guessing “worse,”
and you’d be right. Research has
demonstrated that phrases which insert a
temporal boundary between events in a
narrative place the same sort of mental
divider into memory as a doorway. It’s as if
the phrase instructs the brain’s video editor
to insert a pause between memory
episodes, and you find yourself going back
to re-read the last few paragraphs that you
suddenly can’t remember much about.
What all of this tells us is that our brains
operate with certain mechanical dynamics
that we generally only glimpse when they
hiccup. So the next time you can’t
remember why you walked from one room
to another, don’t be alarmed. Just remind
yourself that your brain simply
misconstrued instructions from your
environment and thought that doorway
meant you needed a memory divider. Rest
assured, “Oh yeah the iron!” will come back
eventually."- David Disalvo
www.forbes.com/sites/daviddisalvo/2015/01/22/yes-walking-through-a-doorway-really-does-make-you-forget-heres-why/?utm_campaign=ForbesTech&utm_source=TWITTER&utm_medium=social&utm_channel=Business&linkId=11887753[url]"More often than I care to admit, I’ll walk
from one room to another with a clear vision
in mind of whatever I need to do once I get
there, but then I get there and can’t
remember why I started. The only thing that
happened between my first movement and
my last is that I walked through a doorway.
Surely that has nothing at all to do with
forgetting something I knew just moments
before, right?
Wrong, says new research. As it turns out,
walking through a doorway exerts an
imperceptible influence on memory. In fact,
merely imagining walking through a
doorway can zap memory.
Researchers in the latest study took their
cue from an earlier study showing that
passing through a doorway seems to insert
a mental divider into memory. Our brains
record memories in segments, or
episodes, rather than as a continuous
event. Dubbed the “Event Horizon Model”
by earlier researchers, walking through a
doorway triggers memory segmentation,
like a video editor inserting a momentary
pause between scenes. In that tiny pause—
the Event Horizon—the connective parts of
memories can be lost, and we suddenly
can’t recall that we got up from watching
the basketball game to unplug the iron in
the next room.
Think of it as a blip in your brain’s matrix.
Even more curious is that imagining
walking through a doorway has a similar
effect. The research team brought two
groups of participants into a large room.
One group experienced the room as a
continuous space; the other walked through
it after divider curtains were set up to
simulate a doorway. The groups were then
shown a picture of an unusually shaped
object before closing their eyes and
imagining walking across the room they’d
seen earlier. The first group imagined the
room as a big space with no physical
dividers; the other imagined walking
through the draped doorway.
They were then asked to jog their memories
and pick out the picture of the object from a
set of ten images. As predicted, the group
that imagined walking through a doorway
performed significantly worse on the
memory test than the other group.
“That walking through a doorway elicits
forgetting is surprising because it is such a
subtle perceptual feature compared to the
rich environment in which it sits,” the
researchers said, “that simply imagining
such a walk yields a similar result is even
more surprising, particularly when
compared with actually walking through
doorways.” Indeed.
And this gets even weirder. If right now I
started telling you a story about a boy and
his dog, going on for a few paragraphs
detailing all the things this boy and his dog
do together in their happy little boy-dog
comedy drama of a life, and then I suddenly
inserted a phrase like “A few hours later…”
– do you think your recall of what I just told
you about the boy and his dog might be
better or worse?
If you’ve been following the plot of this
article so far you’re likely guessing “worse,”
and you’d be right. Research has
demonstrated that phrases which insert a
temporal boundary between events in a
narrative place the same sort of mental
divider into memory as a doorway. It’s as if
the phrase instructs the brain’s video editor
to insert a pause between memory
episodes, and you find yourself going back
to re-read the last few paragraphs that you
suddenly can’t remember much about.
What all of this tells us is that our brains
operate with certain mechanical dynamics
that we generally only glimpse when they
hiccup. So the next time you can’t
remember why you walked from one room
to another, don’t be alarmed. Just remind
yourself that your brain simply
misconstrued instructions from your
environment and thought that doorway
meant you needed a memory divider. Rest
assured, “Oh yeah the iron!” will come back
eventually."- David Disalvo
www.forbes.com/sites/daviddisalvo/2015/01/22/yes-walking-through-a-doorway-really-does-make-you-forget-heres-why/?utm_campaign=ForbesTech&utm_source=TWITTER&utm_medium=social&utm_channel=Business&linkId=11887753[/url]"More often than I care to admit, I’ll walk
from one room to another with a clear vision
in mind of whatever I need to do once I get
there, but then I get there and can’t
remember why I started. The only thing that
happened between my first movement and
my last is that I walked through a doorway.
Surely that has nothing at all to do with
forgetting something I knew just moments
before, right?
Wrong, says new research. As it turns out,
walking through a doorway exerts an
imperceptible influence on memory. In fact,
merely imagining walking through a
doorway can zap memory.
Researchers in the latest study took their
cue from an earlier study showing that
passing through a doorway seems to insert
a mental divider into memory. Our brains
record memories in segments, or
episodes, rather than as a continuous
event. Dubbed the “Event Horizon Model”
by earlier researchers, walking through a
doorway triggers memory segmentation,
like a video editor inserting a momentary
pause between scenes. In that tiny pause—
the Event Horizon—the connective parts of
memories can be lost, and we suddenly
can’t recall that we got up from watching
the basketball game to unplug the iron in
the next room.
Think of it as a blip in your brain’s matrix.
Even more curious is that imagining
walking through a doorway has a similar
effect. The research team brought two
groups of participants into a large room.
One group experienced the room as a
continuous space; the other walked through
it after divider curtains were set up to
simulate a doorway. The groups were then
shown a picture of an unusually shaped
object before closing their eyes and
imagining walking across the room they’d
seen earlier. The first group imagined the
room as a big space with no physical
dividers; the other imagined walking
through the draped doorway.
They were then asked to jog their memories
and pick out the picture of the object from a
set of ten images. As predicted, the group
that imagined walking through a doorway
performed significantly worse on the
memory test than the other group.
“That walking through a doorway elicits
forgetting is surprising because it is such a
subtle perceptual feature compared to the
rich environment in which it sits,” the
researchers said, “that simply imagining
such a walk yields a similar result is even
more surprising, particularly when
compared with actually walking through
doorways.” Indeed.
And this gets even weirder. If right now I
started telling you a story about a boy and
his dog, going on for a few paragraphs
detailing all the things this boy and his dog
do together in their happy little boy-dog
comedy drama of a life, and then I suddenly
inserted a phrase like “A few hours later…”
– do you think your recall of what I just told
you about the boy and his dog might be
better or worse?
If you’ve been following the plot of this
article so far you’re likely guessing “worse,”
and you’d be right. Research has
demonstrated that phrases which insert a
temporal boundary between events in a
narrative place the same sort of mental
divider into memory as a doorway. It’s as if
the phrase instructs the brain’s video editor
to insert a pause between memory
episodes, and you find yourself going back
to re-read the last few paragraphs that you
suddenly can’t remember much about.
What all of this tells us is that our brains
operate with certain mechanical dynamics
that we generally only glimpse when they
hiccup. So the next time you can’t
remember why you walked from one room
to another, don’t be alarmed. Just remind
yourself that your brain simply
misconstrued instructions from your
environment and thought that doorway
meant you needed a memory divider. Rest
assured, “Oh yeah the iron!” will come back
eventually."- David Disalvo
www.forbes.com/sites/daviddisalvo/2015/01/22/yes-walking-through-a-doorway-really-does-make-you-forget-heres-why/?utm_campaign=ForbesTech&utm_source=TWITTER&utm_medium=social&utm_channel=Business&linkId=11887753

Hmmmmmm