Location Taken: Mount Saint Helens area, Washington
Time Taken: June 2010
I- I seem to have forgotten what I was planning to say about this photo, in the time between deciding to write about it and when I actually started doing so. How embarrassing.
Maybe I shouldn’t have wandered off to check some webpages and get a drink in between those steps.
Ah well, I probably got caught by the doorway effect. It’s the odd mental quirk that keeps causing you to forget what you were going into a room for the second you cross the doorway. And then you find yourself doing three other things before suddenly realizing “Keys! I came here for my keys!”.
The really odd part about it is that the doorway itself is important. It’s not just wandering away from what was reminding you of your task, it’s entering a new space that triggers the memory blank.
Essentially, when your brain finishes one task and starts another, it dumps all the info on the old task it was holding in easily-accessed memory back into the general memory banks, clearing the way for new info. This would not be so bad if swapping rooms didn’t also trigger this dumping. A new space must mean a new task, no?
I wonder how many times our species used to encounter this, back deep in human history before we invented doorways. This patch of dirt with the pile of furs isn’t that different from that patch of dirt with the fire. Maybe it’s just, shall we say, a bug in our programming, something that didn’t reveal itself until we came up with newfangled ideas like housing and doors.
