How Walking Through a Doorway Helps Us Remember and Makes Us Forget

What event horizons can teach us about how we organize life’s experiences, even the contradictions within them

There is a term in astrophysics that refers to a boundary where any event beyond it would not be visible to an observer. It’s called an event horizon. The simplest way to understand it is to imagine observing the horizon from a ship at sea. Since you can’t see beyond it from your perspective, anything that happens there wouldn’t be visible to you.

In space, event horizons exist around black holes, where the weight of gravity is so tremendous it literally tears apart objects through space and time into it. If the edge of the sea had that kind of gravity, you’d need a ship with speed greater than light’s to escape it. But Einstein’s theory of special relativity asserts nothing can travel faster than the speed of light. Thus enthusiasts to professionals have appropriately dubbed event horizons as the ultimate point of no return.

Believe it or not, there’s another event horizon that hits closer to home. Well, it’s actually in your home. Don’t be frightened; your home probably contains several. You might have just crossed one before you started reading this. In fact, if you sat down at your computer or opened your phone with a specific intention and forgot it, then you almost certainly crossed an event horizon. I hope you’re okay. Thankfully, the gravitational pull of event horizons in our home doesn’t usually exceed that of a ringing phone, crying baby, or luring scents of a warm Cinnabon. Although not entirely excluded from being points of no return (think about all those calories), event horizons here on Earth follow a different set of rules, particularly when it comes to memory.

Since we might otherwise consider our day to be one long stream of actions and events, the kinds of event horizons we encounter every day help break down this stream into memorable chunks, or segments. They exist as tiny moments of environmental change like a suddenly ringing phone, the sound of broken glass, even an itch at the back of your neck. Think about them like dividers between one particular event and another, the way timestamps divide video and chapters, a novel. They help us recall previous experiences and make reliable predictions about future ones.

The part of us that stands to benefit the most from this segmentation process is our memory, as part of what psychologists consider the “Event Horizon Model.” There are many forms of event horizons, but perhaps more interesting than the rest is the doorway, where merely passing through it tends to benefit our memory the least.

Since quarantining has recently kept most of us from moving around the house with purpose, now we do it in pajamas and more frequent trips to the fridge. Surely you’ve found yourself standing before an open refrigerator, having forgotten the craving that brought you there. Similarly, you might have gotten up from the couch, walked upstairs and down the hall to your bedroom, and stood in the doorway at a loss for what you were supposed to do next.

I’ve checked with my doctor. This is not an air-tight argument for a new Adderall prescription, nor a valid excuse for an early AARP application.

Research has it that changing location through a doorway, like moving from your bed to the couch, triggers an event segmentation causing people to forget more information than if they never made that change in the first place.

University of Notre Dame Professor of Psychology Gabriel Radvansky observed how picking objects up in one room and placing them in another affects our ability to recall both the objects carried and the requested destination they should end up. Subjects asked to move room-to-room took longer to respond to questions and made more errors than their peers, who made changes only within the same room.

Subjects who passed through two doorways also performed worse than those who only passed through one. One explanation for this mental hiccup is that the new visual-spatial processing that occurs upon stepping into a different room overloads our cognition by adding more information to our working memory.

Now depending on what kind of person you are, that could be a perfectly good excuse for moving into a studio apartment or prolonging your Schitt’s Creek binge.

In a surprise one-eighty turn a year later, however, Radvansky stated that walking through doorways also improves memory, propelling academics into bewilderment, begging to know whether he’d just passed through a door himself!

Nodding to work decades prior, Radvansky cited a study asking subjects to memorize one list of items in one room and a second list in another. When later asked to recall these items, the experiment found that subjects who changed rooms performed better than those whose learning happened in the same room. Radvansky proposed that the possibility of help or hindrance to memory really depends on the nature of the information and how we later recall it.

Let’s be honest. No one ever forgets why they’ve entered a bathroom upon closing the door. And the only door I can associate with trying to memorize lists for history class was the one that led to extra help.

Wherever the gravity of your next event horizon pulls you, be it the subtle tone of an incoming text message or getting out of your living room chair, there’s really no way to ensure you won’t end up in the kitchen scratching your head or forgetting how you intended to reply to that text. But that’s life. And life is full of all kinds of contradictory truths.

Sometimes you have to fail to land your greatest successes, change is one of life’s constants, and sometimes you have to tread through the darkness to find the light.

Never mind the forgetting and remembering. Isn’t it enough that we don’t get ripped apart through space and time every time we hear the Netflix logo animation? Or have you forgotten already?