Walking through doorways causes forgetting (2016) | Hacker News Reader

Walking through doorways causes forgetting (2016)

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43 pointsstefap220 comments

Completely true. And funny, because any actor who memorizes lines could tell you that.

Seriously -- if you memorize lines in your apartment and you've got them down pat, then you show up to your class/theater/set/audition and suddenly you have difficulty remembering them.

Because -- and this is common knowledge in acting -- your brain has subconsciously associated the lines with your apartment.

Which is why, once you've memorized the lines at home, you then take a walk and practice and re-memorize them again. Then while you're on the subway you practice and fix them again. And when you show up early to your class/theater/set/audition you spend 10 minutes practicing them again, to associate them with the space where you're performing.

You just have to. It's how memorization works. For whatever reason, it's associated with your mental location.

Same reason that when plays are on tour, they try to have a full rehearsal run-through in each new theater before a performance. You need to associate your memory with the new theater and fix your mistakes during rehearsal, not during performance.

Is there a way to hack around this?

I'm (involuntarily) great at remembering passwords when I'm at my desk at home, or a PIN when paying for petrol, but at other times in the "wrong" context, I'm totally blank. I read something a while back about methods for subconscious recollection based on an individuals location / state of mind context.

Just now, I forcefully remembered a password by picturing myself at my desk at home. But now maybe I've re-contextualized the memory and I'll struggle to recall it when I actually need it.

This wouldn’t work for a whole script but I found a hack for forgetting what you were leaving one room to do: say “I’m gonna put out the trash” as you start walking through the door. You forget what you were doing but the concept of putting out the trash is working its way through the slower pipeline of becoming a series of vibrations generated by your lungs, throat, and mouth, and you will parse what you just said and remember what you are doing.

For memorizing lines? Chew a piece of gum. I've found that it takes the emphasis away from my location in my mind and places some emphasis and connection with the feeling of chewing gum. For extra points, alternate different flavors for different sets of things to memorize.

Some classical techniques for memory involve creating your own mental spaces for memorising things.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Art_of_memory

something that helps is to block out as much external stimuli as possible. for example, when memorizing a pin, i focus on the grid of numbers. for a password, i focus on my computer, or something abstract related to the service i am signing on to.

i have the benefit of traveling a lot, so my computer becomes an always available item of focus, whereas the surroundings turn into a blur because they always change

"for a password, i focus on my computer"

I'm not sure what that means. When I have a password that is completely random, but well memorized and I typically use it on a desktop or laptop keyboard, I tend to find it impossible at first to enter it on a phone, because it seems to be essentially all in muscle memory that isn't applicable to typing on the phone.

it means i ignore the room i am in. i pretend the room does not exist. there is only me and a laptop.

that way, i get the same feeling of the situation no matter where i actually am.

Ah. But for me, there is only me and the keyboard. And different kinds of keyboards may not have anything in common.

pretty much the same thing :-)

Maybe try keeping something fragrant nearby your desk or wherever you would reinforce the memories.

Then you can bring it with you when you need to remember.

people are going to start looking at me funny when i start burning incense candles every time i get money from an ATM. :-)

do it with your eyes shut?

I think this is a cheap optimization the brain uses. Every time our location changes, it clears short term memory to have a fresh slate and be aware in the new situation. Think of it as setting up a new stack frame.

I think it evolved so that a caveman could exit the cave and immediately forget what he was thinking about before and be fully aware, watching for predators and looking for food. He can start climbing a tree and suddenly the whole word is that tree and that task.

Nowadays that's why we walk into another room and can't remember why we went there, or we open the fridge door and can't remember what we wanted. I turn on my phone to do something, but somehow the phone itself is a new context and I end up doing something else.

Lots of brain connections work with one sense controlling how another is processed. In a car you can talk to a passenger all day and drive fine. But answer your phone, and suddenly you're absent and distracted.

I experimented to find out why. When I was talking to a friend in the passenger seat, I held up a card to prevent myself from seeing the passenger out of the corner of my eye - and suddenly I was absent and distracted.

Maybe its because when we don't see someone we're conversing with, we have to create a mental model of them to compensate. Because we're built to see the people we interact with, and our brains may just work that way. And the work of creating the mental model interferes with driving (prevents processing of the alternate mental model of the road situation?)

Anyway, for what its worth.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Janus

Somewhat off-topic: I have this weird problem that if I close my eyes and imagine walking towards a doorway and going through it, I can't. I can get pretty close to the door, but just can't go through it. It's like the brain doesn't compute for some reason.

This is why some people swear by more screens. I think it helps them keep mental context.

One of the most annoying things about computers these days is the number of applications that put everything in tabs, and/or modal dialogs. The whole point of a GUI, to me, is that you can view information from multiple places side by side, not just swap between them. In the mid-80s, Apple wrote copious documentation about why modes, and modal dialogs, are bad, and tabs were not a standard part of the interface either.

As far as multiple screens go, it's not just viewing things side by side, but having boundaries to snap to. Maybe it would be handy to kind of divide very large monitors into subscreens...

A project for perl/tk? :)

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