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...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_We_Do_in_the_Shadows_(TV_...
(Ctrl-F) "Colin Robinson"
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?
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.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
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?)
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."
I recently told someone, "I remember telling you, I was on the phone with you in X location and I recall telling you!"
That happens probably 50% of the time. And I wish that was an exaggeration.
Now if only I could turn off the "you must investigate X" shouting my brain randomly throws at me WITHOUT external stimuli.
Maybe with newer services that requires TOTP since day one is a possibility.
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.
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.
What you’re describing is still a physical barrier but it’s not a literal door way.
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!"
----
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"?
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
Whatever you do, don't look in the mirror.
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)
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.
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.
Nope. Not doing that!
Sounds like nightmare city!
For some reason that sentence really irked the critical thinker in me. As if they have the schema for the human brain.
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.
[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]
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.
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)?
The problem with a single study of n=50 isn't the 50, it's that it's a single study.
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.
(I'm long sighted and need glasses for reading and precision tasks).
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.
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 miscommunication 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.
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).
"Woking (WOH-king) n.
Standing in the kitchen wondering what you came in here for."
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?
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.
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.
Then when my dog got old and doolaly he started to do it.
Not just humans
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?
Goal for the day: log into a server.
Why is that so complicated? hahahahahaha welcome to the corporation.
Yeah, I know, I am not allowed to like anything Cosby anymore...
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.
> 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.
(George Carlin had that in one of his routines. “Where was I? Oh, I believe I was…” (steps over) “…right here.”)
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;
}
Programming: Function call and state getting captured on a stack.
...am I the only one with tally marks on my hands?
(SCNR.)
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.
So I'm going to say, yes, we can believe it.
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.
Roughly speaking what is the total number of people in all studies pertaining to this claimed effect?
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?
Many physics, chemistry, and computer science studies suffer from these as well. Science is hard, and there are a lot of constraints on research. Typically the first finding is made with limited funding, meaning limited ability to do the study right. Also, usually there is no perfect study, just a balancing of different strengths and weaknesses. That is why in psychology and neuroscience research, we talk about converging evidence. 'Converging' here means evidence employing multiple modalities, measures, and procedures. This might mean combining evidence from animal and human models, molecular and neuroimaging, etc. Its messy stuff, and every approach has tradeoffs.
*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?*
You are writing a comment as a placeholder for what exactly? So far in your comment, it just seems like an excuse to bash on Psychology research, which is too often a cheap thrill here on HN, and usually from someone who has read little serious psychological research save the most flashy in-the-news findings.
*Roughly speaking what is the total number of people in all studies pertaining to this claimed effect?*
This appears to be a logical question, and within the immediate context, understandable. However, the more informed context would understand that the so-called "Doorway Effect" is just a specific example of a more general and prevalent cognitive phenomenon: The role of spatio-temporal context in memory and cognition.
You ask for specific sample sizes from studies that use tasks that look at the effect passing through doors, and well there may be just an of a few hundred.
But, I being somewhat knowledgeable int he field (PhD in memory research) would instead ask: What is it about doorways that could cause such an effect. Ah yes, it involves a change in the spatiotemporal context. What is the evidence that context changes impose costs to memory function? Well: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=cont...
So many, for so long.. Its a HUGE literature. Point is, its not about doors, and this is just one finding in a long list of similar findings that created CONVERGING evidence of a phenomenon.