Forgetfulness is actually sign of great intelligence

A Different View with Dave O’Connell

Good news for those among us who walk into a room with great purpose – and then sheepishly wonder why we’d ever made the journey in the first place.

It’s not a sign you’re losing your marbles; quite the opposite in actual fact – it indicates that your brain is in perfect working order!

Same scenario if you’ve left your car keys in the ignition, locked yourself out of the house, gone to ask someone a question and then forget what you wanted to say – scientists call it the Doorway Effect and it’s actually the quintessential sign of a very active mind.

That’s because the best of brains is the equivalent of a super-high-powered computer, with dozens of tasks and applications running at once.

And – according to that bible of brainboxes everywhere, Mental Floss – the Doorway Effect is the result of several of these brain programmes running simultaneously.

So in an effort to keep some order or things, by walking through a mental ‘doorway’, the mind tends to instinctively forget what had happened in the ‘other room’.

To explain the concept, researchers in the US taught 55 college students to play a computer game in which they moved through a virtual building, collecting and carrying objects from room to room.

Every so often, a picture of an object popped up on the screen – and if the object shown was the one they were carrying or had just put down, the participants clicked ‘yes’.

Sometimes these pictures appeared after the participant had walked into a room; other times they appeared while the participant was still in the middle of a room.

The researchers then built a real-world version of the environment and ran the experiment again, using a box to hide the objects people were carrying so they couldn’t double-check.

The results of both trials were the same – the simple act of walking through a doorway made people forget what they were doing.

So the researchers concluded that their subjects’ brains saw doorways as a kind of cut-off point. The memories and movement that carried the students through one context literally hit a wall.

On the other side of that wall was new context, and therefore a fresh landscape for memory.

So next time you start something and forget what it was or why you’d ever thought of doing it in the first place, remember – it’s a sign of intelligence rather than forgetfulness.

But a word to the wise – or more particularly to students – this ruse won’t work with homework.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.