You enter a room with the determination of the one who knows exactly what is going on. Suddenly, you stop. Wait ... What was I going to do here? Dammit! If I just think about it. How could I have forgotten? If this has ever happened to you, do not worry. You are not losing your mind.
It is inevitable to feel a twinge of terror when we suffer lapses so apparently important, but the truth is that these types of misconceptions are not only perfectly normal, but are proof that our brain works as it should (at least in terms of attention and memory ). They are due to something called Threshold Effect.
The name is not casual. It turns out that our brain is more likely to forget what we are doing just because of changing rooms. Sometimes it also happens when we interrupt one idea with another. We ask another person to pay attention to us because we want to say something important, and when we say it, we have completely forgotten. The Threshold Effect making his own again.
Although we often associate memory with the image of a kind of hard disk in which we record things as if they were files, the truth is that the brain does not work that way at all. Actually, the inside of our head is more of a supercomputer that performs multiple tasks at the same time and balances the load of those tasks based on the stimuli that come from the environment.
When we change from one room to another, the brain tends to establish a new framework of experiences for memory. In a way, it's as if I were going through a page to write down what happens in that room on a clean sheet of the notebook. The attention is focused on a new scenario and, as a result of that jump, we often forget some of the processes that we had running at that time. The phenomenon does not depend on the distance traveled, but on the fact of crossing a threshold to change rooms, hence its name.
In 2011, a group of researchers from the University of Notre Dame in Indiana, United States, conducted an experiment with 55 perfectly healthy students. The first part consisted of wandering around the virtual house of a videogame carrying objects inside a box. Every so often they were asked what object they were carrying. The result showed that, when crossing thresholds between rooms, students forgot what they were carrying much more easily. In a second part of the study they recreated the experiment using a real house with identical results. Change of stay resets the attention and the brain chooses which objects to which I was paying attention at that moment is not necessary to remember at that moment.
Interestingly, no study has been able to explain exactly how the Threshold Effect occurs, or how to prevent it from occurring. Probably using mnemonic tricks helps, but it is a matter of attention, and the brain can not pay attention to everything, all the time. [via Mental Floss]