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Related. Others? Why Walking Through a Doorway Makes You Forget (2011) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17921972 - Sept 2018 (5 comments) The “Doorway Effect” – forgetting why you entered a room - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17328740 - June 2018 (130 comments)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17921972
This is extremely amplified when taking psychedelics
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I was joking with someone who was asking about getting a walking pad for their standing desk that it would be psychologically disastrous for this reason, citing the ancient Greeks memorizing epic poems by walking places to make memory associations. Why would one purposely want to have an association made between something as mundane/regular as walking with working at a screen?!
Wouldn't it be moving through space that would make the assosiation, not walking itself?
Sorry to hijack this, but a related problem of mine is I can't picture myself going through a doorway. Like the brain just doesn't compute for some reason.
You can almost hear the authors going "no, come back! It's real! Not pre-2010 trash psychology! This is not a corporate motivational speaker factoid!"
This makes me think of the gates at shinto shrines called torii. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torii
This is extremely amplified when taking psychedelics
When I tried LSD, I'd constantly forget where I was in the middle of sentences, because everything happening in my brain made it feel like way more time was passing than was actually. As a result it was harder to recall the topic of the sentence because it felt like many many topics ago.
I would describe it as "an entire universe happening each instant". It was honestly kind of cool.
Writing was far easier, because I'd always be looking at what I've already written, rather than trying to rely on my memory of what I've spoken.
The "doorway effect" seems to be one expression of that larger phenomenon in which memory recall is largely influenced by the context in which it was encoded. It's the reason that if you're cramming for an exam, to the extent you can recreate the exact conditions of your study environment to mirror those of the test-taking environment, you'll do better.