[HN Gopher] Doorway effect
___________________________________________________________________
Doorway effect
Author : aavshr
Score : 294 points
Date : 2024-02-08 21:04 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (en.wikipedia.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (en.wikipedia.org)
| msoucy wrote:
| I've had to introduce this to my friends at work. Where I sit, I
| can't have my phone with me. So sometimes it'll take me four
| tries to leave the room, grab my phone, and actually remember to
| do the thing that I meant to do. Usually I get back to my desk
| after doomscrolling for a few minutes and remember.
| interroboink wrote:
| I clicked to add a comment, but as soon as the page changed I
| forgot what I was going to write ...
|
| ----
|
| Seriously though, happens to me all the time. Not sure if just
| getting dotty. The connection between spatial presence and memory
| is an interesting one; see also Memory Palaces[1]
|
| It makes me wonder if it's different for people totally blind
| since birth. Is the visual aspect important, or just the
| "spacial-ness"?
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Method_of_loci
| temp0826 wrote:
| 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?!
| 4hg4ufxhy wrote:
| Wouldn't it be moving through space that would make the
| assosiation, not walking itself?
| klyrs wrote:
| I do believe that you have identified the joke
| temp0826 wrote:
| Joke identification confirmed. Proceed with subroutine
| "LAUGH".
| shermantanktop wrote:
| Sounds like a very hot key in your memory hashmap.
| pazimzadeh wrote:
| This is extremely amplified when taking psychedelics
| RIMR wrote:
| Yeah, I've walked from my living room to the back yard on
| mushrooms, and the change in mindset was like I'd flown to
| another continent.
| willio58 wrote:
| I was about to say this. Walking into a different room can
| vastly change your entire experience for the better (or worse)
| thelastparadise wrote:
| > (or worse)
|
| Whatever you do, don't look in the mirror.
| mtizim wrote:
| _do_ look in the mirror, don 't panic, face your fears, and
| look away full of love.
| HKH2 wrote:
| Memory aside, the sum of the colors reflected around the room
| is immediately noticeable as you cross the threshold.
| LoganDark wrote:
| To be fair, almost everything is amplified by psychedelics.
| It's like their primary effect is turning everything into some
| sort of feedback loop.
|
| 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.
| bmmayer1 wrote:
| Opening a new browser tab and forgetting what I was going to do
| in that tab is a very frequent phenomenon for me.
| csours wrote:
| I have a pad of honest to g-d paper next to my keyboard for
| this exact reason.
|
| Goal for the day: log into a server.
|
| Why is that so complicated? hahahahahaha welcome to the
| corporation.
| dang wrote:
| 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)
| fudged71 wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17921972
| dang wrote:
| Added above. Thanks!
| CPLX wrote:
| This seems sort of intuitive to me so I'm inclined to believe it,
| but at this point can we really believe any of these sort of pop-
| behavioral studies with interesting quirky effects?
|
| It seems like the entire field is so overwhelmed with fake data
| and bullshit that it's hard to separate anything that might
| actually be real.
| LeoPanthera wrote:
| This is a weird comment. The Wikipedia article has a
| comprehensive list of sources underneath, and the comments on
| this post are full of people saying "this exact thing happens
| to me".
|
| So I'm going to say, yes, we can believe it.
| xattt wrote:
| Consider an acute care facility. Patient care supplies (IV
| bags, IV sets, catheters, dressing supplies) are usually in a
| side room called the supply room.
|
| Ours was in a room behind a doorframe without a door. If I was
| getting dressing supplies in a state of flow/on auto-pilot,
| more often than not, I would blank as soon as I went through
| that doorway and would have to actively think exactly what the
| hell I was there for.
| iwontberude wrote:
| This will be especially true if we have apps and windows that
| appear every time we enter a different room.
| xpe wrote:
| Many psychological studies sound convincing but are hard to
| replicate and/or based on low sample sizes or poor experimental
| design. Seeing a plausible mechanism underlying a theory isn't
| enough. So I'm writing this comment as a placeholder. Who here
| has checked the source studies?
|
| Roughly speaking what is the total number of people in all
| studies pertaining to this claimed effect?
| SubiculumCode wrote:
| There is an absolutely vast literature studying the effects of
| context and context changes on many different forms of
| cognition, going back decades. Your posts really adds little of
| value, and relies on some over-broad stereotypes of the
| soundness of psychology research. Do some google scholar
| searches.
| xpe wrote:
| > There is an absolutely vast literature studying the effects
| of context and context changes on many different forms of
| cognition, going back decades. Your posts really adds little
| of value, and relies on some over-broad stereotypes of the
| soundness of psychology research. Do some google scholar
| searches.
|
| In four words, the above comment is: harsh, judgmental, not
| curious.
|
| Below, I hope to (a) offer another point of view about how
| your comment may be perceived and (b) demonstrate to you that
| the sample sizes and replicated studies regarding the Doorway
| Theory are unimpressive.
|
| First, you made this discussion personal, and it wasn't
| particularly constructive. It is hard to say what goals you
| might have, but if your goal is curious conversation, I don't
| think this is the way. Do you? What is your
| experience/philosophy/science of productive conversation?
| Based only on this interaction, I wonder if you may not have
| thought about this very much and/or you aren't putting it
| into practice and/or you're taking something out on me.
|
| Second, the word "stereotypes" gets casually thrown around.
| Empirically, how often would you say that using it advances
| constructive conversation?
|
| Third, using this definition of stereotype: "a widely held
| but fixed and oversimplified image or idea of a particular
| type of person or thing." ... why would you think my view of
| this is "fixed" or unchanging? I don't see a rational reason
| for seeing that based on what I wrote.
|
| Fourth, for people that think in a Bayesian way -- and I
| think such a model is fairly useful in modeling how people
| actually operate -- we all have priors. Please do not accuse
| me of stereotyping when I'm only sharing a prior. One key
| question is what we do with them as we gain more information.
|
| Fifth, on what basis would you validly say that my prior
| regarding my confidence in psychological studies is an "over-
| broad stereotype"? I've tried, but I don't think you can. You
| can disagree with my prior -- that's fair game. And we can
| talk empirically and rationally about how/why we have
| different priors.
|
| Sixth, your comment shifts away the context I intended (I
| hope it was clear given the context, but maybe it was not)
| and criticizes a straw man. You wrote "There is an absolutely
| vast literature studying the effects of context and context
| changes on many different forms of cognition, going back
| decades". Perhaps this literature is largely sound and
| replicable. But that's not what I was referring to here; I
| was discussing the Doorway Effect in particular. From what
| I've seen so far, there were two early studies, both at Notre
| Dame, consisting of about 90 people in total. This alone
| certainly isn't enough in my mind to give high credence to
| the results. At least one subsequent attempt to replicate was
| mixed. So, please don't tell me to "do some google scholar
| searches". That is rather presumptive.
|
| Would you like to continue to discussion on a better foot
| going forward?
| xpe wrote:
| How is the theory falsifiable? What if I pass between two rooms
| that look identical? Has this been studied? (It seems to me that
| the underlying claim of episodic memory might not be able to tell
| a difference.)
| shermantanktop wrote:
| That's psychology and cognitive science. It can be meaningful,
| insightful, at times revelatory, all while suffering from a
| degree of non-reproducibility and confirmation bias.
| kerkeslager wrote:
| > How is the theory falsifiable?
|
| If they didn't observe it, that would provide some level of
| falsifiability?
|
| > What if I pass between two rooms that look identical? Has
| this been studied? (It seems to me that the underlying claim of
| episodic memory might not be able to tell a difference.)
|
| There's a study listed on that page which observed that re-
| entering _the same room_ did not improve recall.
| xpe wrote:
| Observation alone doesn't necessarily give falsifiability.
| This requires an interaction of clear terminology with
| physics. In short, I was prodding at their definition of
| "doorways".
| kerkeslager wrote:
| Eh, that feels pedantic to me.
|
| Communication involves active participation from the
| audience, in that a receptive and curious audience can be
| expected to make a good-faith effort to intuit what a
| communicator means when parts of the communication are left
| vague. This of course means that _mis_ communication is
| always possible, but the alternative is being paralyzed by
| overcommunicating details which are in most cases obvious.
|
| If you are hypothesizing that some element of the doorway
| might change their results, that's a totally valid
| hypothesis, but you've not given enough information for me
| to intuit what elements of the doorway you think might
| change results, i.e. you're not doing a better job than the
| original authors of the study in communicating.
|
| And notably, underspecifying what they mean by "doorway"
| doesn't invalidate the study, it just limits what
| conclusions can be drawn from their observations. I feel I
| have enough information about what they mean by doorway to
| draw useful conclusions from these studies. Of course it's
| possible I'm wrong (i.e. miscommunication has occurred),
| but you haven't communicated anything to me that would lead
| me to believe there's an important element of their
| definition of "doorway" that I'm missing.
| xpe wrote:
| Fair points and well said.
|
| None of what I'm about to say is not meant to be harsh or
| insulting... I'm simply sharing a probabilistic estimate
| of how I view the situation so far. How you react will
| further refine my perspective.
|
| I've developed antibodies to the word "pedantic",
| particularly when one leads with it. It seems that when
| people use the word, it has a tendency to make discussion
| harder. How often have you seen someone use the word and
| the conversation develop further into something
| interesting? Versus the opposite?
|
| Using the word "pedantic" often gets perceived as a kind
| of slight. It is hard to say if the speaker realizes this
| consciously or not. It feels to me like it conveys a
| subtext, as if "why are you being so detailed about
| this?". This goes along with a general attitude of
| conveying less curiosity and more certainty. Speaking for
| myself, on forums such as this, I'd rather learn about
| other's perspectives and reasoning rather than discount
| them.
|
| I don't like using "pedantic" when I want to encourage
| curious conversation. Speaking personally, when I hear
| it, it gives me the impression the other person is not
| demonstrating a mindset or vocabulary for the kind of
| communication that I find most valuable. I can relate:
| I'm hard for people to pin down: I've worked in too many
| industries and lived in too many places to be easily
| understood by any one frame of reference. The "me" of
| five years ago would have a hard time understanding the
| "me" of today. I'll give you an example: tell someone you
| think free will is an illusion and watch people's
| reactions. :)
|
| I recognize what I'm saying, to some ears, could be
| construed as being anti-science or perhaps even pro-
| conspiracy theories. I can assure you that I don't hold
| such positions. I somewhat aspire to be a perfectly
| Bayesian agent but fall well short of course.
|
| I simply want to add that I have a low-to-middling
| confidence in psychology based studies in general, at
| least out of the gate, until I dig into (or find someone
| else I trust who has) the study. You might say this is my
| attempt to strike a balance between epistemic optimism
| and pessimism. My "alarm bells" ring louder for studies
| that have some kind of "appealing" aspect like; e.g. "oh,
| that's why I forgot something when I walk into a new
| room". We simply cannot discount how many people latch
| onto studies because the result is self-serving.
|
| As I get older, I see _tremendous_ value in considering
| large amounts of information but giving new information a
| very high _tentativeness_ score. I have a huge aversion
| to the i.e "recent information being novel and
| interesting effect". Some might call me too cautious --
| people in the Silicon Valley ecosystem often would.
| People in more traditional industries would say exactly
| the opposite; e.g. that I'm "too worried" about ethics
| and AI.
|
| How does the above sound to you?
|
| Now, some particulars. I'm no expert, but I want to show
| why I'm skeptical after having read some details from
| Wikipedia article. It mentions two studies, both from
| Notre Dame, consisting of (A) 41 people and (B) 51
| people. Then, it has an entry for another Notre Dame
| study without detail.
|
| Then:
|
| > In a 2021 study, researchers at Bond University tried
| to replicate the doorway effect in four experiments: in
| both physical rooms and virtual rooms, and both with and
| without the participants doing a "distractor task"
| (counting backwards). In one experiment -- in virtual
| rooms, and with a distractor task -- doorways caused a
| statistically significant increase in false positives
| (i.e., false memories), but not false negatives (i.e.,
| forgetting). In the other three experiments, doorways had
| no effect. The researchers suggested that this was
| consistent with real life, in which "we might
| occasionally forget a single item we had in mind after
| walking into a new room but, crucially, this usually
| happens when we have other things on our mind . . . ."
|
| This is the kind of replication problem that I'm talking
| about. The kind that makes credible and prolific
| psychologists be very careful to caveat their field. To
| quote Paul Bloom w.r.t. the field of psychology's state
| of understanding of the human mind, "A lot of our
| findings are not as robust as we thought they were" (from
| "What Do We Know About Our Minds?" with Sam Harris).
| kerkeslager wrote:
| > I've developed antibodies to the word "pedantic",
| particularly when one leads with it. It seems that when
| people use the word, it has a tendency to make discussion
| harder. How often have you seen someone use the word and
| the conversation develop further into something
| interesting? Versus the opposite?
|
| You're describing a correlation but haven't established
| causation. Is the causality:
|
| _someone using the word "pedantic" -> uninteresting
| conversation_
|
| Or could the causality be:
|
| _person being pedantic - > uninteresting conversation_
|
| AND
|
| _person being pedantic - > someone using the word
| "pedantic"_
|
| ?
|
| I have many experiences where a pedantic person shuts
| down a conversation and nobody uses the word "pedantic",
| so I feel there's strong evidence that pedantry, not the
| use of the word "pedantic", makes conversations
| uninteresting.
|
| > Using the word "pedantic" often gets perceived as a
| kind of slight. It is hard to say if the speaker realizes
| this consciously or not. It feels to me like it conveys a
| subtext, as if "why are you being so detailed about
| this?". This goes along with a general attitude of
| conveying less curiosity and more certainty. Speaking for
| myself, on forums such as this, I'd rather learn about
| other's perspectives and reasoning rather than discount
| them.
|
| With love, I'd like to gently ask: is that what you think
| you were doing when you discounted the researcher's
| perspective because they didn't define the word
| "doorway"?
|
| In my experience, whether or not something is a slight
| has been irrelevant to whether it's true, so perceiving
| things as slights is counterproductive to maintaining an
| attitude of curiosity. Particularly, I'm curious about
| what I can do better.
|
| It's worth noting that the reason I'm recognizing your
| behavior as pedantic here is that I have received the
| feedback that I'm prone to being pedantic, and as a
| result, I've worked very hard to recognize when _I_ am
| being pedantic. I say this because I hope you 'll
| recognize that I'm giving you feedback which I found
| helpful to myself and hope will help you, not because I
| think I'm better than you or I'm trying to hurt you.
|
| I'd venture you _may_ have received this feedback too,
| and received it as a slight or shutting down the
| conversation.
|
| Indeed given some of the things you're referencing such
| as "perfect Bayesian agent", believing free will is an
| illusion, and Sam Harris, I strongly suspect we have very
| similar intellectual backgrounds.
|
| > I don't like using "pedantic" when I want to encourage
| curious conversation. Speaking personally, when I hear
| it, it gives me the impression the other person is not
| demonstrating a mindset or vocabulary for the kind of
| communication that I find most valuable.
|
| The person you are communicating also has a mindset and
| vocabulary for the kind of communication that _they_ find
| most valuable. You don 't get to force everyone into your
| communication preferences, and attempting to do so is a
| surefire way to prevent communication entirely. Even if
| your communication preferences are objectively better
| than theirs (which is a real possibility!), the content
| of the communication is likely much more valuable than
| the means of communication.
|
| My experience is that the most valuable communication is
| a product of collaboration between both parties to build
| a common terminology. That collaboration can't happen if
| you insist on your own preferred forms of communication.
| Maybe if you could get the other person to use your form
| of communication it would be better, but you can't ever
| get anyone to communicate exactly how you want, so that's
| irrelevant. And notably, your preferred communication
| _probably isn 't_ perfect in every way.
|
| > I simply want to add that I have a low-to-middling
| confidence in psychology based studies in general, at
| least out of the gate, until I dig into (or find someone
| else I trust who has) the study.
|
| Same.
|
| Part of my objection to insisting on a stricter
| definition of the word "doorway" is that it doesn't
| address any of the reasons my confidence is low. If I
| have 51% confidence in a study of doorways, it's not
| particularly interesting to me to improve that to 51%
| confidence in a doorways between wooden doorframes
| painted white that connect two rooms of equal size within
| a 20,000 square foot residential property that costs $70k
| in a top 10% school district. Specificity isn't adding
| anything pragmatic here because I still can't base most
| decisions on such low-confidence conclusions. If
| anything, the conclusion is _less_ useful, because it
| only applies to such a narrow situation.
|
| But, you asked about falsifiability--and I think that's a
| pretty different topic from confidence.
| kansface wrote:
| I only skimmed, but the two linked articles have ~50 participants
| or _fewer_ (college students) for each.
| epistasis wrote:
| Meaning that the effect must be fairly strong to be observable
| in two studies with n=50?
|
| I would agree in general, but I would like to see three or
| more, as well as variations to test the boundaries of this.
|
| Things can go wrong in one or two studies, so having
| independent replication is needed to really cement things.
| tshaddox wrote:
| > Meaning that the effect must be fairly strong to be
| observable in two studies with n=50?
|
| Do what now? Isn't the problem that it could have _randomly_
| happened (especially if people did a bunch of other similar
| studies that didn 't observe an effect, and only these two
| were published)?
| epistasis wrote:
| For a publishable effect at smaller n, the effect size
| needs to be fairly large. If you have a huge number of
| people in a trial, you can get statistical significance of
| negligible consequence.
|
| The problem with a single study of n=50 isn't the 50, it's
| that it's a single study.
| jbullock35 wrote:
| That's not quite right. If the study is underpowered at n
| = 50 --- which is extremely likely --- statistically
| significant estimates are likely to be inflated. And as
| power declines, they also become more likely to have the
| wrong sign (e.g., the study will yield a positive
| estimate even though the true effect is negative).
|
| See https://doi.org/10.1177/1745691614551642.
| wins32767 wrote:
| And all but one of the studies are by the same lead author.
| TrianguloY wrote:
| I've noticed that retracing your steps (either literally if
| walking or not) helps enormously.
|
| For me it happens that I'm doing something on my phone, remember
| to do something else, switch apps to do it, and literally forget
| what it is. But by going back or checking the recent apps I find
| again the "trigger" of the original reminder.
|
| For example, you are checking [social network] and you see a post
| that reminds you to go searching for [object]. You close the app,
| open the browser...and you try to remember what were you going to
| search. Just going back and seeing the social network posts you
| were watching will remind you again of it.
|
| It's like the though's owner is the other situation/room, and as
| soon as you forget one you forget the other with it. Quite
| interesting
| rootusrootus wrote:
| > I've noticed that retracing your steps (either literally if
| walking or not) helps enormously.
|
| Definitely. My wife and I have a running joke about it. I'll
| walk into the room, she says "What's up?" and I say "trying to
| find something and I forgot what it was. Hold on, let me go
| back to my office to remember."
| jowea wrote:
| Yeah it also happens to me on the computer. Specially funny
| when I end up distracted by something else, then a hour later
| come back to the original trigger and remember how I ended up
| on the last hour long rabbit hole and what I was actually going
| to do.
| lcnPylGDnU4H9OF wrote:
| "There's a hole in the bucket, dear Liza..."
|
| https://youtube.com/watch?v=zYY6Q4nRTS4
|
| Probably a timeless phenomenon. But I wouldn't be as good as
| Henry. I'd take the bucket to the well and eventually shout
| back up the way, "there's a hole...!"
|
| (What do you think he needed the water for anyway?)
| jagged-chisel wrote:
| In Mr. Belafonte's live recording of it, Dear Liza asks
| Henry to fetch the water before he starts singing. What she
| needs it for could be any number of household uses -
| cooking, cleaning (oneself or dishes or floors), laundry...
| m463 wrote:
| I sometimes encounter the same thing, but sort of... inside
| out.
|
| I recently told someone, "I remember telling you, I was on the
| phone with you in X location and I recall telling you!"
| pflenker wrote:
| This works for me to an absurd degree. I sometimes remember,
| hours later, that I had some idea e.g. while showering or while
| brewing coffee. Returning to the bathroom or kitchen
| respectively helps me remember these ideas.
| layer8 wrote:
| Ah, this is explains the effect of entering a room and not
| remembering why you went there.
| codelobe wrote:
| ... Or pressing the start key in Vista and seeing a wall of
| live tile distractions.
|
| In my experience the start page idea was a software
| implementation of "Doorway Effect". I always had to return to
| the desktop to have my "refrigerator logic" spin up.
|
| <https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/fridge_logic>
| seabass-labrax wrote:
| Vista..? The Windows start page was introduced in version 8,
| not Vista. Vista had a bog-standard, pre-8 menu.
| rossdavidh wrote:
| Oddly, for me at least, going back to the room I was in before
| almost always causes me to remember.
| worik wrote:
| My mother had this as she went senile. She would come to a
| complete halt in the doorways.
|
| Then when my dog got old and doolaly he started to do it.
|
| Not just humans
| mbork_pl wrote:
| It's the second time in my life that I encounter the word
| "doolally", and I love it.
| egypturnash wrote:
| Living in a shotgun house has convinced me this effect is _very_
| real. When I have to walk from the front to the back, I have
| developed the habit of saying what I 'm going to do as I walk
| through each of the five doors I have to pass through; this puts
| my intent into a different mental pipeline, that's _much_ more
| resistant to being flushed out when I pass through a door.
|
| If my husband is at home then he tends to get in on the act,
| leading to conversations like "I should set a timer for five
| minutes." "You should set a timer for five minutes!" "I'm gonna
| set a timer for five minutes." "Didja set that timer for five
| minutes?" "I just set a timer for five minutes!" when I'm
| crossing from the kitchen to the living room and leaving some
| water to boil.
| smeej wrote:
| Maybe a counter-anecdote? I live in a studio layout house. The
| only interior door/doorway is to the bathroom. Yet I regularly
| forget things between my kitchen counter and my desk, or
| sometimes even between my stove and the counter across from it,
| despite having generally strong short and long-term recall.
|
| I had chalked it up to the familiarity of the places. I see the
| same things inside all the time, so one day's moments blend
| into the previous days' similar moments.
|
| I find a related thing happens in places I visit a lot, like my
| church, where each time I go, the previous experiences layer on
| top of it. There just aren't quite enough of them there to
| crowd out what I'm trying to do this time.
| hnlmorg wrote:
| That's not a counter-anecdote. The linked article describes
| how this is about psychological barriers which can align with
| physical barriers but doesn't have to be. Such as application
| windows on a computer desktop.
|
| What you're describing is still a physical barrier but it's
| not a literal door way.
| giraffe_lady wrote:
| Widely known in the restaurant industry as the walk-in effect.
| You go into the walk-in fridge and then forget what you went in
| there to get. You go back to your station to remember.
| swayvil wrote:
| Forgetting your dreams when you wake up in morning. The doorway
| effect could explain that too. Bigger door = bigger/more frequent
| effect.
| shermantanktop wrote:
| This has some similarities to the cultural anthropological
| concept of ritual liminality:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liminality
|
| The "doorway effect" is a more everyday phenomenon. Interesting
| that the idea that transitions result in disorientation scales
| from the mundane to the religious.
| vagab0nd wrote:
| 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.
| dhc02 wrote:
| Can you picture other things?
|
| A long time ago I read that if you are awakened and want to
| fall back asleep, you should picture yourself turning around,
| going through a door to your basement stairway and descending
| the steps towards the dark basement.
|
| I tried forever to do this and couldn't, and thought it was
| something about this scenario specifically. But then years
| later, I learned about aphantasia and realized I can't actually
| picture anything at all. The doorway wasn't special.
| kerkeslager wrote:
| I'm quite adept at visualization, as I'm a visual learner
| (visualization comes more naturally to me than any other form
| of thinking) AND visualization is something I regularly,
| explicitly do in order to prepare for rock climbing.
|
| Visualizing myself going through a doorway is difficult even
| for me. I think it's in part because it requires some
| creativity (compare "visualize yourself going through a
| doorway" as opposed to "visualize yourself going through the
| doorway of your childhood house"). The salient conceptual
| feature of a doorway is that _it goes somewhere_ and so the
| prompt basically is asking you to imagine something without
| explicitly asking you. Even your example of the basement
| stairway is much easier for me to visualise, because the
| doorway has stairs after it.
| thelastparadise wrote:
| > you should picture yourself turning around, going through a
| door to your basement stairway and descending the steps
| towards the dark basement.
|
| Nope. Not doing that!
|
| Sounds like nightmare city!
| Eduard wrote:
| huh, so you cannot visualize yourself e. g. going to the toilet
| by transitioning from the hallway to the bathroom?
| nakedneuron wrote:
| Interesting phenomenon. Seems to be a thing. I guess it's
| because how memory is encoded spatially and in the middle of
| changing places there would either be no clear signal due to
| multiple neuron parties firing or the brain is busy with
| context change in that transition and never builds strong
| memories of crossing a particular doorway.
| ThinkingGuy wrote:
| Sounds like aphantasia:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphantasia
| hnlmorg wrote:
| TOTP 2FA is terrible for this. I'll sign into a website, pick my
| phone up to read the TOTP code, and instead end up on HN or
| Signal or something. Put the phone down after a couple of
| minutes, look back up to my computer screen with the 2FA prompt
| and go "oh yeah, that's why I looked at my phone"
|
| That happens probably 50% of the time. And I wish that was an
| exaggeration.
| seabass-labrax wrote:
| By which point, of course, your TOTP token has expired. I feel
| your pain :)
| hnlmorg wrote:
| Haha yeah, that's the most annoying part of it.
| thelastparadise wrote:
| And then you get SIM-jacked.
| ydant wrote:
| This is exactly why I've eventually ended up with almost no
| notifications on my phone. I am way too susceptible to being
| distracted mid-task, and the only way I've found to effectively
| combat that is by aggressively removing those distractions.
|
| Now if only I could turn off the "you must investigate X"
| shouting my brain randomly throws at me WITHOUT external
| stimuli.
| kaetemi wrote:
| Yep. Switching to phone is instant context loss.
| kaetemi wrote:
| Is there no way to stop Chrome on Android from remembering
| all open tabs? I find this one of the things that causes
| distraction from what I was going to do.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Why don't more sites ask for the username/password and the TOTP
| code on the same form? Is there a downside to that approach?
| I've only seen it done that way rarely.
| TrianguloY wrote:
| Probably because not all accounts have TOTP enabled, so it
| would be strange to ask for a TOTP if you don't have one.
|
| Maybe with newer services that requires TOTP since day one is
| a possibility.
| jbjbjbjb wrote:
| > Memory is organized around specific events or episodes, such as
| attending a lecture or having a family meal, rather than being a
| continuous stream interrupted by sleep.
|
| For some reason that sentence really irked the critical thinker
| in me. As if they have the schema for the human brain.
| daseiner1 wrote:
| The wiki is worded far too strongly. The abstract of the cited
| research (c. 2000) describes it as a "model of autobiographical
| memory". As is often said, models are not perfectly accurate
| representations of reality, but are _useful_ representations of
| reality. How this model is used today - or if it's even still
| considered relevant - I can't speak to.
| kerkeslager wrote:
| As someone with ADHD which was unmedicated far beyond what was
| reasonable, passing through a doorway still has some mild but
| primordial terror, as I remember a time when walking through a
| door was like being awoken from unconsciousness in an unfamiliar
| day.
| martinpw wrote:
| Funnily enough this cartoon showed up in the middle of an article
| I was just reading that was also linked from HN:
|
| https://www.newyorker.com/cartoon/a27014
|
| so a weird mix of being reminded about something that was about
| forgetting something. And it was one of those rare New Yorker
| cartoons that was actually funny.
| Eduard wrote:
| I forgot what made this New Yorker comic funny.
| TaylorAlexander wrote:
| A perhaps related effect is that when I leave the house I always
| forget one or two things, and I remember them usually once I
| start the car engine. So then I turn off the car and go back to
| my apartment and grab the remaining items. But I recently learned
| that I can imagine leaving the house, and it helps me remember
| the final things I forgot!
| bigger_cheese wrote:
| I also get this very strong feeling of having forgotten
| something when I get into my car.
|
| It used to happen almost daily. I would get into my car reverse
| out of my driveway. I would drive towards my workplace for
| about 2 to 5 minutes until I hit first red traffic light and as
| I'm waiting at traffic lights I would get this sinking feeling
| that I'd forgotten to close my garage door.
|
| This is despite the fact I do not have a remotely operated
| garage door it is manual. I have to reverse out of garage, get
| out of my car, manually close the garage door and get back into
| car and reverse out of driveway.
|
| I would wrack my short term memory while sitting at traffic
| lights and have no recollection of closing the garage door. It
| was as if my journey (in my memory) would always begin with
| turning out of my driveway.
|
| Nowadays I force myself to look over shoulder and check the
| garage door as I turn out of my driveway and onto the street.
| TaylorAlexander wrote:
| Yeah I have that with locking the front door! It normally
| auto-locks and I just need to make sure it is latched and I
| need to check the handle to make sure I didn't have the auto-
| lock off. But this latch-check happens so fast (I do always
| do it) that I will often forget. I have never gone back to
| check and found it unlocked but I still go back and check
| often. But for me this happens when I'm 100 feet away at the
| car so it's not too bad.
| mgfist wrote:
| I'll click CMD+T and completely forget which site I wanted to go
| to once the blank page shows up
| renewiltord wrote:
| Similar effect for full page context-switches. Example was the
| Windows menu when they made the windows key open a full screen
| view. Could never remember.
| topspin wrote:
| I think it's a threat response. When you enter a different area
| your mind spikes for a moment as you (un)consciously scan around,
| and whatever thought you were tenuously holding is in jeopardy of
| getting pushed out. Watch a cat or dog, particularly those that
| spend a lot of time outdoors and don't take the world for
| granted; when a door is opened for them they'll step in, stop
| dead, look around, sniff the air, listen, and then get on with
| their business. Evolutionary wiring.
| Springtime wrote:
| As another commenter mentions it's seemingly the same phenomenon
| as why 'memory palaces' work for memorizing arbitrary things
| (among other similarly effective mnemonics) and this article
| suggests something similar is also occurring unconsciously for
| random thoughts and gets disrupted by such actions.
|
| Such spacial-based memory triggers I've also seen demonstrated by
| magician/skeptic Derren Brown, where recall of the participant is
| manipulated via location-based touch or gestures (both for
| remembering and forgetting things).
| novia wrote:
| This makes me think of the gates at shinto shrines called torii.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torii
| imp0cat wrote:
| Yet another reason to visit Japan at least once during a
| lifetime.
| dougSF70 wrote:
| I tend to find this holds true 100% of the time.
|
| private Boolean doorway_effect(Boolean tall_person, Boolean
| carrying_heavy_item, Boolean carrying_hot_drink, Boolean
| doorway_low)
|
| Boolean bang_head = false;
|
| if(tall_person && (carrying_heavy_item || carrying_hot_drink) &&
| doorway_low) { bang_head = true;
|
| }
|
| return bang_head;
|
| }
| jkrubin wrote:
| I had a relevant comment while reading through the Wikipedia
| article, but I forgot it as soon as I opened up the comments.
| posnet wrote:
| Have you ever walked into a room and found a vampire?
|
| No, not the sexy kind, but a foul creature with bony limbs and
| ashen skin? The kind that snarls as you enter, like a beast about
| to pounce? The kind that roots you to the spot with its sunken,
| hypnotic eyes, rendering you unable to flee as you watch the
| hideous thing uncoil from the shadows? Has your heart started
| racing though your legs refuse to? Have you felt time slow as the
| creature crosses the room in the darkness of a blink?
|
| Have you shuddered with fear when it places one clawed hand atop
| your head and another under your chin so it can tilt you,
| exposing your neck? Have you squirmed as its rough, dry tongue
| slides down your cheek, over your jaw, to your throat, in a
| slithering search that's seeking your artery? Have you felt its
| hot breath release in a hiss against your skin when it probes
| your pulse--the flow that leads to your brain? Has its tongue
| rested there, throbbing slightly as if savoring the moment? Have
| you then experienced a sinking, sucking blackness as you discover
| that not all vampires feed on blood--some feed on memories?
|
| Well, have you?
|
| Maybe not. But let me rephrase the question:
|
| Have you ever walked into a room and suddenly forgotten why you
| came in?
|
| https://old.reddit.com/r/shortscarystories/comments/1inv0n/n...
| dymk wrote:
| r/shorthotstories
| Razengan wrote:
| Inspiration material!
| twright0 wrote:
| Mostly off-topic, but if you find this compelling, you will
| certainly enjoy reading the short story "There Is No
| Antimemetics Division" whose chapters are linked from
| https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/antimemetics-division-hub
| geewee wrote:
| It's a nice series of stories, although I feel like they do
| go a bit off the deep end in some of the later installments -
| but the premise is very fun.
| sumtechguy wrote:
| and there goes my afternoon....
| fensgrim wrote:
| On topic of this specific kind of vampire, see also:
| Blindsight,
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blindsight_(Watts_novel)
| tetris11 wrote:
| Or, the energy vampires from the _What We Do in the Shadows_
| TV series:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_We_Do_in_the_Shadows_(TV_.
| ..
|
| (Ctrl-F) "Colin Robinson"
| starkrights wrote:
| Entirely off topic, but that post is borderline history. The
| commenter's second-most-upvoted poster being u/unidan, to
| positive reaction? What a time.
| lxgr wrote:
| Very related: There Is No Antimemetics Division
| (https://qntm.org/scp) An antimeme is an idea
| with self-censoring properties; an idea which, by its intrinsic
| nature, discourages or prevents people from spreading it.
| Antimemes are real. Think of any piece of information which you
| wouldn't share with anybody, like passwords, taboos and dirty
| secrets. Or any piece of information which would be difficult
| to share even if you tried: complex equations, very boring
| passages of text, large blocks of random numbers, and dreams...
| But anomalous antimemes are another matter entirely. How do you
| contain something you can't record or remember? How do you
| fight a war against an enemy with effortless, perfect
| camouflage, when you can never even know that you're at war?
| Welcome to the Antimemetics Division. No, this is
| not your first day.
| keefle wrote:
| Can someone explain the meaning of this to me?
|
| Is the encounter with the vampire similar to forgetting why one
| came into a room because when encountering a vampire in a newly
| entered room you forget everything before that and focus on the
| vampire?
| zdbrandon wrote:
| The story is implying that whenever this happens to you --
| forgetting why you came into a room -- the truth is that you
| were attacked by a vampire that made you forget the reason
| you were there, as well as the attack itself.
| lagerlagerlager wrote:
| * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_functions
|
| * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_multitasking
| tejtm wrote:
| My wife calls this "male refrigerator blindness".
|
| But we all have it.
|
| Paraphrasing a theory I read ... somewhere; it comes from when we
| were furtive subterranean critters, where entering and leaving
| burrows resulted in the invalidation of whatever threat just was,
| (example: birds outside, snakes underground) and that clearing
| the decks to more efficiently deal with different threats in the
| new context included dumping short term memory.
| Loughla wrote:
| I like that theory. I don't think we give evolution and our
| animal past enough credit for many of the psychological things
| we encounter in our lives.
|
| That's actually what was most interesting to me about the
| ringworld series. Just an open conversation about how evolution
| has impacted action (however hokey it might be in the books,
| and ignoring the rishathra).
| newzisforsukas wrote:
| You can really notice this when under the influence of salvia
| divinorum.
| darylteo wrote:
| Literally happened to me a couple of hours ago. Baader-
| meinhof'ed.
|
| > Needed to check something out in the backyard
|
| > As I'm walking out, noticed the trash
|
| > took the trash out
|
| > wondered why I was standing in the backyard.
|
| > noticed what I needed to check out on the way back
|
| ADD life I suppose.
| bjackman wrote:
| I really like how this Wikipedia page uses the word "replicable"
| at the top and goes to great lengths to describe the studies and
| replications :D
|
| 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!"
| red_admiral wrote:
| I hear the White House has lots of doorways.
| rapiz wrote:
| Is this another metaphor in the game Superliminal?
| scrollinondubs wrote:
| Pretty sure this phenomenon is actually a subset of "Transfer
| Appropriate Processing" from psych class:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transfer-appropriate_processin...
|
| 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.
| 0xEF wrote:
| This is super interesting and nice to understand a phenomenon I
| have experienced, so thank you.
|
| I have to admit that I thought the article was going to be about
| a different psychological quirk that I have noticed; the one
| where, for reasons unknown to me, people will congregate in
| hallways or stand in doorways to talk.
|
| Does anyone else see this? Particularly at large gatherings like
| parties or company events? Is there a name for it?
| nick7376182 wrote:
| Human-scale spaces
| Sharlin wrote:
| Indeed. People are gravitating towards spaces that make them
| feel comfortable and safe, subconsciously or not, when
| engaging in the sort of intimate interactions that an in-
| depth conversation can be. One practical consideration that
| probably also often plays a part is acoustics, literally how
| easy it is to hear and to be heard.
| 0xEF wrote:
| Very interesting to think about, considering my anxiety
| tends to push me in the opposite direction, so I favore
| less crowded spaces or less physical closeness to other
| people.
|
| The acoustic component is worth diving into, to me, since
| this is a big trigger. If the space is too loud, or
| cacophonous, I end up starting to lose higher-order
| functioning and have to vacate or wear my earplugs/noise-
| canceling headphones and just cut myself off from the sound
| (makes my job pretty awkward at times, tbh)
|
| Small spaces amplify this acoustic aversion for me,
| especially when there are already people occupying the
| area. It's not claustrophobia, more of a "my brain will try
| to focus on all sounds at once and get sensory overload, so
| I probably should not go/stay there."
|
| Anyway, thanks for the food fir thought.
| Sharlin wrote:
| Yeah, the acoustics definitely depend on the space, but
| often it's easier to talk next to a wall, or of course if
| there's a main source of noise, somewhere away from it,
| like in a hallway.
| KineticLensman wrote:
| I've found a very good way of forcing myself to return to a
| particular place in the house: leave my glasses there. This also
| reduces the doorway effect in terms of stopping me from doing
| things that require glasses when I end up somewhere else.
|
| (I'm long sighted and need glasses for reading and precision
| tasks).
| red75prime wrote:
| I adapted to that by associating my intention with the
| destination. Works fine if I don't forget to do it.
| mbork_pl wrote:
| An alternative explanation would be that this is caused by aliens
| who can wipe out your memories of them the moment you stop seeing
| them.
|
| ...am I the only one with tally marks on my hands?
|
| (SCNR.)
| sirsuki wrote:
| In the tech communities we call this "context switching"
| mnw21cam wrote:
| This is also probably part of the reason why sleep specialists
| say you should set aside your bedroom for nothing but sleeping
| and sex. I think walking through a doorway loads the context of
| the new room into your brain, so you forget the stuff associated
| with the context of the room you just walked out of. If the
| context of your bedroom just has sleeping in it, you're less
| likely to have unwanted thought running around in your mind while
| you're trying to get to sleep.
| ArunRaja wrote:
| Synonymous:
|
| Programming: Function call and state getting captured on a stack.
| cuddlyogre wrote:
| This was one of the reasons people hated the Windows 8 start
| screen. You go to access something while keeping what's on screen
| in your mind but the entire thing is now replaced with a sea of
| icons and text on a blue background. Such a drastic change in
| view has close to the effect that a power outage does.
| glxxyz wrote:
| "Woking (WOH-king) n. Standing in the kitchen wondering
| what you came in here for."
|
| The Deeper Meaning of Liff, Douglas Adams & John Lloyd
| maxglute wrote:
| Does this effect blind people?
| NeoTar wrote:
| You clearly need "Jan Hankl's Flank Pat System"
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DY-Zdgo0OXo
|
| [Spoilers - To avoid people having to watch the whole video, it's
| a Mitchell and Webb sketch about how clapping your hands against
| your thighs helps you locate books on a bookshelf. Towards the
| end of the video it shows how making a 'scissors' motion with
| your fingers helps you find scissors.
|
| Although a joke, a physical motion like patting your flanks or
| making a scissors motion can help you keep your planned activity
| in mind]
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Sitting in a meeting and then forgetting most of it when you walk
| out. That's why I always take notes.
| SubiculumCode wrote:
| Context changes impose substantial cognitive costs, disrupting
| reaction times, perception, and attention maintenance, and yes,
| memory. Context has a huge role in memory, and context shifts can
| lead you to not recognize familar people, like encountering your
| college professor at a dinner party.
|
| The ability to perform in spite of context changes improves over
| childhood into adolescence, but the costs remain there and will
| become more pronounced as working memory loads or task demands
| increase.
|
| Those who design GUIs should really take this into account. When,
| for example, clicking on a menu replaces the whole screen, like a
| version of Windows experimented with on the start menu, the
| complete context change imposes real costs on cognition.
|
| I apologize for not providing citations, but a google scholar
| search will quickly provide relevant materials; this comment was
| written from what I learned in my PhD studies on the development
| of memory.
| wscott wrote:
| I was immediately reminded of this Cosby standup:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qH_mHMgjcFY
|
| Yeah, I know, I am not allowed to like anything Cosby anymore...
| RHSman2 wrote:
| Add weed for especially impressive results
| notwhatswrong wrote:
| Sidequest: Ask yourself, if now after forgetting the allegedly
| important _what_ weighted your mind (laden/burdend) before, gives
| you something like to feel bestowed 'freedom'?
| otterpro wrote:
| This is why I advocate separation of work space and personal
| space, especially when working from home. It allows my mind to
| reset after physically leaving a space designated for work. If I
| don't, my mind will linger on work way more than I need to. At a
| minimum, I'd like to have separate PC for work, and even a
| separate desk for work. Ideally, I'd like a separate room for
| work but I don't have the luxury of having another empty room.
| Ishmaeli wrote:
| One of my biggest pet peeves is when I'm walking in a crowded
| area, and as I follow someone through a doorway or other
| transition space, they stop and look around.
|
| The doorway or (whatever) is already a natural traffic
| bottleneck. And these people are making it worse by stopping
| right in the middle of it.
|
| I suspect it's because of this psychological effect. But it's so
| annoying that many people's response seems to be to stop in their
| tracks. Okay maybe you've forgotten why you went through this
| doorway. But have you also suddenly forgotten that you're in the
| middle of a crowd of people trying to move around? Apparently so.
| swayvil wrote:
| If you fail to notice a doorway, does the effect still apply?
|
| Are chronically forgetful people aware of doorways that the rest
| of us are not?
|
| Can doorways (that bring about the effect) be purely subjective
| and personal?
|
| If a person is beset by an eternal blizzard of subjective
| doorways, does he give the appearance of dumbness?
|
| Do those who habitually ignore doorways appear smarter?
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