We have all experienced this strange sensation more than once: going to look for something in another room and suddenly, the brain pauses and we ask ourselves:
“What did I come to look for?”
.
Science explains
why we forget what we were going to do
and it is worth knowing.
“Memory loss is
unusual forgetfulness
.
When you cannot remember new facts or access one or more memories from the past, or both,” he explains from
Medline Plus
, the United States National Library of Medicine.
And they highlight that “it can occur for a
short time
and then resolve (transitory), or
not disappear
and, depending on the cause, it can worsen over time.”
However, the everyday situation we are referring to does not have to do with serious issues, but with what scientists call the
“threshold effect.”
It is more common than one thinks, and even a
sign that the brain is working.
Why we forget what we were going to do: threshold effect
To give an example, when we are about to leave the house and we go back to look for the keys, we can come across
other things that catch our attention
, removing the focus from the main action.
There is nothing wrong with these memory microdisconnections and they serve to explain how our brain organizes memories, priorities and goals.
Forgetting what we are going to do can even be a sign that the brain is working well.
But if the idea is to find a "culprit," psychology and behavioral science studies discovered it.
And it is a rather unexpected one: the doors.
A study carried out by the
University of Notre Dame
in 2011 observed that the simple act of walking through a door greatly interferes with these small memory losses
.
This work consisted of simple software similar to a video game in which each of the participants saw 55 large and small rooms on the screen.
From this interface, they had to move the room objects, which were hidden in a box when moving, and exchange them for others.
Upon arriving at each of the rooms, they were presented with an object (for example, a telephone) and they were asked if it was what they were carrying, according to the work carried out by the
doctor in Psychology Gabriel Radvansky.
Then an
investigation by Knox College of Illinois
in 2016 took the same starting point but went one step further, appearing as a publication of the
United States National Institutes of Health (NIH).
Two investigations explain why we forget the things we were going to do.
He asked his participants to imagine the process of
carrying various things from one room to another
, and sometimes they were asked to specifically imprint in their mental recreation the act of crossing a door.
Again when
“the door”
appeared , in this case mental, cases of sudden forgetfulness were much more frequent.
This is what is known as
the Doorway Effect
, translated as Threshold Effect, that is, the curious relationship between
changing rooms and losing sight
- and memory - of what we had gone to do there.
Phases of learning and memory
The processes of learning tasks or facts consist of different phases and it is important to know in which some dysfunction occurs that causes these forgetfulness, as explained by
Félix Viñuela
, coordinator of the Neuropsychology Section of the Spanish Society of Neurology (SEN). .
The threshold effect has to do with crossing the door.
Retention phase of new information.
In this first stage it is possible that we do not pay enough attention or that we do not have the necessary motivation and interest.
Consolidation phase.
In the second phase, a consolidation problem may appear in the brain areas that allow us to record these messages.
Evocation disorder phase.
Even if we have paid attention to the information and it is consolidated, it is difficult for us to recover it later due to brain problems.
There are more recall problems as the years go by due to physiological aging, since cognitive processes work more slowly and it is more difficult to recover information.
What causes lack of short-term memory
But, of course, there are many other factors that cause lack of short-term memory.
And they are not only associated with aging.
The following are important to take into account when it comes to repeated forgetfulness.
Stress and fatigue.
These are two factors that specialists point out because suffering from stress or fatigue causes the ability to pay attention to what is happening around to drop considerably.
Stress, fatigue and mood can be factors when it comes to forgetting.
Photo Shutterstock.
Feeding.
Diet greatly influences memory and the ability to remember certain things.
A healthy diet contributes to having a young and agile brain, and this is the main organ and ally of memory.
Moods.
When our brain is receiving excess stimuli, it becomes much more forgetful, they warn.
Moods such as sadness, anger or even joy can cause short-term memory failures, as well as reduce the ability to process any type of information.