Nov 192011
Walking through doorways causes forgetting, new research shows
We’ve all experienced it: The frustration of entering a room and forgetting what we were going to do. Or get. Or find.
New research from University of Notre Dame Psychology Professor Gabriel Radvansky suggests that passing through doorways is the cause of these memory lapses. “Entering or exiting through a doorway serves as an ‘event boundary’ in the mind, which separates episodes of activity and files them away,” Radvansky explains.
Kind of a poor system design.
4 Responses to “Who am I? Why am I here?”
Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.
“Event Boundaries” as a Tannhauser gate of mind. I seem to remember a blurb in the pre-internet days about architechture, about the Germans love of having a lot of rooms with closed doors and closed spaces–and perhaps how that influenced the wizard war what with Turing, Enigma, etc.
And of course there is this study:
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2011-11/uoc–ias111511.php
The ‘different ways of knowing’ saying irks me too, as a reductionist, but there seems to be something to it. Boundaries, vortices–those things that aren’t things have always interested me.
It was once said that Kim Peek was once frightened of mirrors and old style clock faces.
Not too long after Foucault’s Pendulum snapped…
http://news.discovery.com/space/foucaults-pendulum-snaps-crashes-through-paris-musum-floor.html
We saw this story, shades of Kuttner’s writing on Zulchequon
http://www.newser.com/story/130092/man-tears-out-own-eyes-in-church.html
Once when I was very small, my parents took me to Church. There was this huge doorway that seemed to swallow them, while I heard chanting from within. Around me were a bunch of other little kids in a vestibule nursery I gather–also know missing their parents. This didn’t seem right, and later I was told that I put up such a fit that the other children and the teenage girl were terrified of me, and my folks were ashamed to go back to church.
Either I was born an atheist, or perhaps it was an ancestral memory of kids on a slab. Doorways are powerful images–perhaps that is why the monolith of 2001 resonates–as it is a door after all.
I wonder if they’d get similar results with computer users who needed to alt-tab between full-screen apps to perform tasks versus those who have all the necessary windows open and visible at once.
We’ve got ridiculously small monitors at work, and old legacy apps that almost fill the screen at legible resolutions. Several times a day I find my myself having to alt-tab back to a previous window to remind myself what I was going to do in the new window…
It is always good to have a small notepad, even when using a computer. Apropos of nothing, on the Science Channel there was the program “What is Reality?” Here a recording was played of Craig Hogan’s Holometer:
http://www.symmetrymagazine.org/breaking/2010/10/20/fermilab-scientists-to-test-hypothesis-of-holographic-universe
So help me, it sounded as if we were hearing distant conversations. The New Agers tried to adopt it as their own of course, but it sounded like nothing so much as the last scene in The Shining, where we learn that Mr. Torrence is finally where he always wanted to be–with the sound of a nice party in the background.
In terms of computers–what with nanowires, I wonder if rope memory could make a comeback via MEMs–perhaps small Curta calculators and small mechanical fire control computers as were on old ships…
Nothing wrong with the system design, it’s the fool invented doorways should be shot.
[I was fully expecting the first comment to be something along the lines of “I had a witty comment lined up but forgot it when I clicked through to the comment section”…]