I’m sure you’ve had the experience of intending to go to another room to get / do something, and when you got there you forgot what you were doing.
I recently heard a theory that makes sense of this.
The very act of going through a door resets your brain to some degree.
Think about it. You’re in such and so room, which has a certain purpose / utility. Then you walk into another room that has some other purpose / utility. Your brain is resetting each time. Or, to put it in more abstract terms, our subjectivity is the context for our objectivity.
If you walk from the upstairs (where the bedrooms are) to the ground level (kitchen, living room) to the basement (workshop, rec room), your brain has had to adjust multiple times. It’s no wonder you forget why you were going to the basement!
You can deploy this to your advantage by intentionally going through doors. E.g., “going outside” can reset your brain because you’ve gone through a door into another reality.
That makes sense. I have always heard people joke about it as a sign of getting old, but I have experienced this phenomenon since I was a child.
I think it happens most often when I go into a room because it was a fairly spur of the moment choice to go into the other room for some small task, that was stimulated by seeing something in the room I was previously in or associated with some task I was doing in that other room. So since the thought “I need to go downstairs and get…” was only half formed in my brain and my decision to go downstairs was little more than an impulse, I wonder if the fact that the thought hadn’t really “taken root” meant it was more likely to be pushed out by the resetting that occurred on entering the other room. If I had a well thought out list of things I needed to do, and entering the other room was required for that, I doubt I’d forget when I got there.
I have a similar experience. If I’m working on a project and a need a particular tool, I don’t forget it when I go through a few doors to the workshop. It’s more, as you say, when the thought is not fully formed.
When I go into another room or outside, I have a very definite purpose which I seldom forget. Recently, however, I have had the experience of not being able to think about anything else but my purpose when going outside. One day I was walking to a local shop while I was mulling over a problem that I had been trying to solve before going out. The outside world seemed so chaotic (though there wasn’t much going on there) that I had to just wait until I got back home to deal with the matter. As soon as I got back, I could think with absolute clarity and reached a solution. I hope that I am not becoming getting agoraphobia or something like that. I used to like going out for short episodes, but maybe those days are over.
*I hope that I am not getting agoraphobia or something like that.
That’s interesting, and points to another phenomenon. Our environment definitely has an impact on our ability to think clearly. I used to work for a company that had an office in Tampa, and I’d go down there a couple times a year. The conference room had a fabulous view of Tampa Bay. It was very hard to work in that room because the water was so distracting.
I’m currently trying to decide what kind of art I want in my home office. I spend a lot of time in this room, so I want it to be clean and functional, but also pleasant. Some art would simply distract me — like that window in Tampa. Some art is clearly depressing. Some is supposed to make you more creative, or thoughtful.
I’m not going to agonize over it, but I do want to have productivity in mind as I choose what to hang on the walls.
I’m a textbook case these last few months of the effect of going into different rooms Cleaning out a house after 32 years whilst preparing to move will do that to you. My brain is constantly re-setting with new tasks to do or think about.