One of the worst feelings in the world is walking into a room, knowing you’re supposed to be doing something, but totally blanking on what that something is.
Fortunately, it turns out this phenomenon, dubbed the “boundary effect,” has nothing to do with your deteriorating mental capacities and is, in fact, a natural part of the brain’s data collection maintenance process.
According to the MirrorUK, researchers at the University of Notre Dame just completed a study which finds that the act of passing through a doorway, or and “event boundary,” signals the brain “that one memory episode is finished and another can begin.”‘
Researchers at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana came up with the theory after getting volunteers to play a not-so-fun video game.
In the game, which had 55 ‘virtual’ rooms, volunteers had to pick up objects from one table and put them down on another.
As soon as they picked the object up, it would disappear.
They either had to walk to another table in the room to put the object down, or they had to walk into the next room.
As they went through the game, researchers would give them pop quizzes, asking them to name whatever object they had just picked up.
And, lo and behold, their responses were more unsure and slower when they’d had to move rooms to get to the next object.
The study was also repeated in real life, and the results were the same.
Think of it like managing the free space on your DVR.
There’s a finite amount of room on that beast.
After watching this past week’s episode of “Game of Thrones,” you delete it so there’s room to record next week’s episode.
Simple as that.