Many times it happens that, when going from one place to another, we forget what we were going to do
This often happens when we follow routes that we are already accustomed to: going to work, school, etc. We realize, thus, that we have subconsciously taken the route to our office when in reality we want to go visit a friend, only because both routes share the initial section and we are more accustomed to going to work than to visiting the apartment. buddy.
This is explained because, having passed through the same place so many times, our brain encodes this route as the default path to follow, hits the “autopilot” button and, while our feet calmly take us along the wrong route, We can dedicate ourselves to thinking about other, more interesting things. However, on other occasions we completely forget what we were going to do. when we are in our own house a place we frequent so much that there is no “default route.”
In these cases, the only thing that remains in our consciousness is a sensation of having had a very clear objective seconds ago, a purpose that no longer exists except as an inexplicable disorientation. Furthermore, as a result of this daze, it is difficult for us to mentally recapitulate the actions we have carried out just before finding ourselves where we are and, perhaps for this reason, we do not notice that the last thing we have done before our destination disappeared from our mind is… pass through a door.
Surprisingly, The key to these small everyday mysteries could be right there, in the doors There are indications that passing through a door influences our memories unconsciously and that, in reality, the simple act of imagining that we pass through a door can cause these memory blurs (Radvansky et al, 2011) (Lawrence & Peterson, 2014) . That is Thinking about doors can make it easier for us to forget the common thread of what we were doing The explanation is problematic, but it could be this: the doors act as dividers of our memories.
Perhaps as a matter of performance, our brain divides our flow of experiences into smaller portions. In that sense, the mental representation of a door would act as a trigger for one of these divisions exerted on our mind, unconsciously cutting the “narrative” of the events that we are living. We can think of these fragments as the cinematographic shots that divide any film. By chance, important aspects when developing an action plan can be lost in this “cutting” process and not move on to the next fragment: that is why we often get up from the couch and end up paralyzed by uncertainty a few meters away.
Does it only happen when thinking about doors?
However, by this same logic there are other elements that can have the same effect on us. For example, it has been observed how sentences that introduce a temporal discontinuity produce the same effect Thus, when we read something similar to “a week later…”, our ability to associate memories is lower for those memories that are on either side of that temporal division if we compare them with memories that are found in a single fragment (Ezzyat et al, 2010).
It is also for this division mechanism which is why it is so easy to have the need to reread the last few lines after realizing that the narrative we are reading has taken a leap in time or space (and is therefore different from the last one we remember ). The fault is not the book, nor does it have to be because what we read is uninteresting. What is responsible for these things happening is the memory assembly system that operates in our brain.
The latter is interesting because it highlights the symbolic nature of this process. It is not that we are biologically predisposed to forget when thinking about doors, it is that this It is a side effect of the symbolic load of these artifacts This means that practically any other perceptual phenomenon can produce the same effect on us if we subconsciously assign it a meaning similar to that which doors usually have. Do you hear that? They are the psychoanalysts, who are already sharpening their pencils.
