It happens to everyone now and then. You walk into a room and find you’ve forgotten why you’re there. Was there something you needed? Or something you wanted to do? Whatever it was, it’s gone.
Psychologists call this “the doorway effect.”
For a 2011 study in the Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, researchers at the University of Notre Dame confirmed that people are much more likely to lose their train of thought or forget something after passing through a doorway.
This is not just a weird mental quirk. It hints at the way your brain relies on spatial and contextual cues to organize information and impose some order on
the world.
“Entering or exiting through a doorway serves as an ‘event boundary in the mind,” said Notre Dame psychologist Gabriel Radvansky, Ph.D., in a press release that accompanied his 2011 study.
More of Radvansky’s work explains how your brain uses these event boundaries to partition and package experiences in ways that ultimately aid recall and inform behavior sort of like the way drawing a grid on top of a random assortment of dots can help you better recognize and recreate their pattern.
‘Modern life can be like walking into a house that is empty, not only of furniture but of floors. There is no structure to support or guide you through living there.’
The gist is that your brain likes to nest its knowledge inside of settings that resemble the real world.
A famous memorization technique known as the method of loci supports this
idea. The technique involves visualizing a place — such as your childhood home — and mentally placing things you want to remember at specific locations inside it. According to a 2009 case study, one person used this technique to memorize a string of more than 65,000 digits.
Why does your brain work this way? Experts believe the human mind tries to create links between places and the events that transpire in them so that the next time you’re in the same setting, you’ll know what to expect and how best to respond.
Event boundaries don’t just help your brain organize and store information. They influence many other aspects of cognition.
When you cross an event boundary, your attention to your immediate surroundings tends to sharpen. (This helps explain the doorway effect.)
Also, depending on where you are and what you’re accustomed to doing there, your mood, your thinking, and your behavior can all shift in ways that accord
with your setting. For example, if you walk into your kitchen, you may feel hungry. If you lie down in bed, you may feel sleepy. If you go to your office, you may feel stressed.
A lot of this event-boundary work dovetails with the research on habits.
As you’re probably heard, environmental cues or “triggers” underlie habitual behaviors. Once you’ve established an association between a setting and behavior, it’s extremely difficult — some experts say impossible — for you to dissolve that association. You’re often better off changing up your routines so that you’re avoiding the setting or cues that your brain has tied to your problem habit.
All of this research raises some important questions: What happens when we relocate huge portions of our lives away from distinct physical spaces and into virtual ones? What happens when work, play, shopping, learning, flirting, and many of our other daily activities are no longer separated by spatial and temporal, and contextual boundaries, but instead bleed together wherever and whenever we happen to be on our screens?
These are questions experts are only beginning to examine. The early findings should worry us.
In his new book Frontal Fatigue, Yale University psychiatrist Mark Rego, MD, explores some of the ways that technology is pulling down the boundaries that used to define and delineate our lives.
“Modern life can be like walking into a house that is empty, not only of furniture but of floors,” Rego says. “There is no structure to support or guide you through living there.”
Research on “border theory,” which describes how people separate work and family life, hints at some of the trouble we can get into when we do too much in the same place using the same tools.
“Individuals who detach from work report higher psychological well-being, greater positive daily outcomes” such as better mood and sleep quality “and
higher job performance than do those who remain attached,” wrote the authors of a 2014 review of the research on work-family boundary dynamics.
Not surprisingly, they found that technology use in the home, for example, checking work email — was associated with reduced levels of detachment and poorer well-being outcomes.
You’re wired to function within certain types of boundaries not the kinds that constrain you, but the kind that creates helpful separation.
More research in this vein has linked working from home to elevated rates of burnout, which is now so commonplace that some experts have started calling it an “epidemic.”
Those who study remote work and work-life boundaries often stress the importance of drawing hard lines between your leisure time and your work time. If you do work from home, they say it helps to designate a specific location for that work. When you’re not working, keep away from it.
By confining your work to a single physical space, such as a home office, you’ll help your brain detach from it whenever you’re not in that spot.
Some experts offer similar advice when it comes to the act of worrying. By designating a time and location for anxious thoughts, you may be able to prevent them from flooding all the other parts of your life.
The big takeaway here is that you’re wired to function within certain types of boundaries not the kinds that constrain you, but the kind that creates some helpful separation.
These boundaries perform all sorts of good work for you. Blurring their lines something that technology makes easier than ever may confuse how you think, feel, and behave in ways we’re only beginning to understand.