Do you forget what you should do as soon as you enter a certain room? Does that weird feeling arise that that information was there a minute ago, and is no longer? Know that you are not the only one, and science seeks explanations for this little “brain discomfort”.
Specialists from the University of Notre Dame (USA) even have a nickname for this phenomenon: “door effect”. The team even showed that memory undergoes a kind of reduction when a person walks through the door into another room.
The explanation for this is that memories are divided into episodes, and people often find it difficult to recall information from previous episodes. When someone walks through the door to enter another room, it’s as if the memory unlocks a new episode.
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Meanwhile, researchers at the University of Queensland (Australia) raise a caveat: going through doors that join identical rooms most of the time does not affect memory. The justification is that, in this case, there are not enough changes for the brain to create a “new episode”.
A study published in Plos One points out that approximately 56% of information is forgotten within an hour, 66% after one day and 75% after six days, which reminds us that, although the brain is capable of impressive things, its ability to store and remember details is limited. .
In a 2017 paper called “The Biology of Forgetting,” published in neuron, scientists point out that over time, memory traces begin to fade, and if information is not retrieved and revisited frequently, it will eventually be lost. The group also suggests that the brain cleans up, ridding itself of unused memories as they accumulate.