Why You Forget Why You Walked Into a Room

You get up to grab something. You walk through a door. And it's gone. It happens to almost everyone, and it has a name: the doorway effect. In this video: the experiments that found it, why your brain "files away" your thoughts at every door, the 2021 study that made it disappear (and what brought it back), and three simple ways to stop forgetting why you came in. 0:00 Why did I come in here? 0:26 It has a name 0:38 The doorway experiments 1:27 Why a door wipes your mind 2:05 Does going back help? 2:27 The twist: a full head 2:59 What actually helps 3:31 Your memory isn't broken Sources: Radvansky & Copeland (2006). Walking through doorways causes forgetting. Memory & Cognition. Radvansky, Krawietz & Tamplin (2011). Walking through doorways causes forgetting: Further explorations. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology. McFadyen et al. (2021). Doorways do not always cause forgetting: a multimodal investigation. BMC Psychology. MacLeod et al. (2010). The production effect: Delineation of a phenomenon. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition. Factory Settings — the defaults your brain was shipped with. New episodes every week. #psychology #memory #doorwayeffect #brain #factorysettings