If I were older than I am, then no doubt I would put it down to my advancing years or early-onset dementia.
It was only recently that I realised there is a term for the ‘phenomenon’ (a bit of a strong descriptor to be fair) of looking for something at home and then walking into the other room and forgetting what it is you were looking for.
The ‘doorway effect’ aka the ‘location updating effect’ is the term used by those more Mensa able than I, to describe how our brains compartmentalise memories once we walk into a new location, or cross a threshold, like a doorway, making it infinitely more difficult to remember what our intentions were just a few seconds earlier.
For me, it's usually keys, a phone or a wallet, or some rice cakes, which are the new middle-aged snacking crack of choice for the discerning gentleman.
It’s as if your mind goes blank and you stand there like a crazy cat lady, minus the cats, looking bemused and confused before turning on your heels and heading back to whence you came, only, once you cross back through the threshold, to remember the said item again before the process can repeat three or four times.
This contextual reset prioritises information in the new location, as we forget what we were doing or thinking, in the previous location, before you do the poor man’s moonwalk between rooms as, in my case, I curse myself and use profanity, to no avail, to jolt me back to my previous senses.
There is some less-than-useful advice online on how to defeat the scourge.
Before leaving location A, you should mentally rehearse your intention, whatever that means, in the King's English, or write it down on a Post-it note before making the move.
You could verbalise your intention, like a mantra, as, again, you would be deemed a crazy walking through the house past the kids and their teenage friends, repeating ‘Rice cakes, rice cakes, ra-ra-ra’.
Visualisation is another tip where you imagine yourself holding the car keys or the cup of tea as an extension to the sticky note ‘method’, which is to place such sticky notes on doorframes as you go, which would seriously merit a visit from the men in white coats.
The most helpful, if extreme, bit of advice comes from Medium.com, who advise you to overcome this affliction by ‘moving to an open plan space’.
It's worth considering, dragging the kids away from their schools and lives to go and live in a converted warehouse in Shoreditch just so daddy dearest doesn’t forget why he went into the kitchen.
- Brett Ellis is a teacher.
