
The “Doorway Effect” – forgetting why you entered a room - edwinksl
http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20160307-why-does-walking-through-doorways-make-us-forget
======
kartan
I lived in a one-room (plus bathroom) apartment for half a year. It was an
awful experience. The apartment was very well designed with nice furniture and
very very centric. But it felt claustrophobic.

I have lived since then in similar apartments, equally small, but with at
least 2 rooms (living room and bedroom). It feels so much better.

At first, one-room looks like is going to be better. There is more space as
you don't have inner walls. But when you play games, watch tv, cook and sleep
all in the same room it feels that there is something wrong.

Getting up in the morning, leaving the bedroom and going to the living room
makes a big difference. The context-switching is welcome. It is also easier
when going to sleep.

~~~
neuland
I lived in this kind of studio apartment for 2 years and didn't have any of
the issues you describe. There was a discussion recently about airplanes with
no windows and I felt similarly. I just don't really get anxiety about
enclosed spaces.

Coincidentally, I work remotely from my home and I think that this contributes
to why I like it. A lot of people have trouble working and relaxing in the
same space. But I don't have an issue with it.

Not sure what all that adds to the conversation. Maybe I'm the weird one, and
this is a normal feeling. But I just wanted to say this is not a universal
thing necessarily.

~~~
DenisM
It might yet get worse with age.

------
cyberferret
For me, it is "new browser tab" effect these days. I will often be reading a
website, then think "Oh, I must research this thing they are talking about" or
else I will remember some other thing that I have to do online, so I will open
a new browser window in the background.

But then I will get distracted by something else on the current web page - for
even a few seconds - and when I go to the new tab to do what I had planned to
do, I sit there in complete blank befuddlement, staring at the empty page and
wondering what on earth I was supposed to look up.

~~~
spython
Especially with the "top sites" or "highlights" feature of contemporary
browsers, that in essence show different doors, invite into other worlds as
soon as you open a new tab. So instead of going where you wanted to go you get
disoriented by all the offerings.

Can't not link to my blog post Open tabs are cognitive spaces [0] that deals
with the browser as the place you externalize your cognition to.

[0]
[https://rybakov.com/blog/open_tabs_are_cognitive_spaces/](https://rybakov.com/blog/open_tabs_are_cognitive_spaces/)

~~~
jodrellblank
I have wanted what you describe, before, at the OS level. Why should groups be
limited to just browser tabs? If my task involves some editor windows and some
CLI windows and some whatever, why can't I have a virtual desktop grouping it
all together?

Basically, a VM per overarching task.

------
21
How about some reproduction first.

I'm sorry, but we live in an age where decades old famous social sciences
experiments are proved to be frauds.

I have stopped giving any credit to the various "scientific study proves X
does/is Y in psychology/social sciences/diet". Every day we have a new "eating
red cookies in the morning" makes you "less likely to lie" study.

~~~
dmos62
There's a problem that's increasingly relevant here on HN. It's commentors who
only read the headline and leave a comment that is irrelevant and inadequate
more often than not. I do wish we as a community would respond more to this.

To respond to this particular comment, which hardly deserves a response: this
isn't a study, none one of the listed assertions are made. This is a short,
free-form article that presents an interpretation or examination of some
aspects of our intellect.

~~~
21
I did read the article. And it is based on a scientific study. And it was
discussed previously on HN.

[https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-walking-
throu...](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-walking-through-
doorway-makes-you-forget/)

------
tniemi
I personally think that people unconsciouslly hated the start menu of Windows
8 because of this phenomenom. You open it and the whole screen changes. Worst
possible UI.

~~~
drb91
As someone who just started using windows for the first time, doesn’t the
little search box essentially replace the start menu? How are people expected
to find their app—manually clicking through a bunch of menus to one they are
looking for? Assuming they have NOT pinned it to the dock at the bottom.

~~~
whoopdedo
That's the thing, you're new to Windows and thus are learning the optimum way
to use the interface as it is now. And yes, just hitting the Windows key and
typing is the easiest way to get what you want. But that wasn't always there,
and when it was it wasn't the best way. Existing users had grown accustomed to
picking what they wanted from a list. It was this disruption in their workflow
that upset people.

In Windows 95 and NT 4 it was indeed horrible and there were as many
complaints about the original start menu as there was the full-screen one.
This was mostly handled starting with Windows 2000 by having the first few
icons in the menu be frequently used items. The things you use 90% of the time
were no more than two clicks away. (One if you pin it to the task bar.)

Search was added in Vista but was unreliable because the word matching wasn't
predictable. Today I was having to use regedit on Windows 7 and the icon
wouldn't be shown until I typed the 'd'. Windows 10 improved a lot, though I
still am befuddled why it decides to show or not show certain things.

Also, it's further confused by their being two searches. The box you see when
you press the Windows key or icon isn't the same as the Cortana bar. Add to
that that opening a link to a website from there will always send you to Edge.
It's easy to be skeptical about what Microsoft will do with search in the
future. How will you feel if in three years they do away with the search box
that you've become accustomed to?

~~~
kpil
Typing something you know is there, is awesome if you know what you are
looking for.

The traditional hierarchical tree that _showed_ you what was available, by
grouping them into narrower and narrower groups, is awesome if you _don 't_
know what you are looking for, as exploring is neigh impossible.

Guessing search terms in wider and wider circles is very unsatisfying.

~~~
drb91
Thanks, great explanation! Makes sense.

------
npunt
This is the same phenomenon as when you open your phone and for a brief moment
you don't remember why you did.

With phones its worse because all the pretty icons confuse and beckon you to
fall back on opening whatever app you habitually open when bored.

This property of our cognition is why we should better scaffold intentionality
into our devices, though that is an difficult design challenge.

~~~
meko
I fight the 'pretty icons' syndrome by using monochrome / white on black icon
theme. It really helps.

~~~
cimmanom
I've grayscaled my phone too... but when tired, I can almost physically feel
the attraction of icon shapes that my brain links to dopamine rewards. It's
awful.

------
cjcampbell
Call it ADHD or what you want, but I tend to experience this a bit more than
most people I know. Applying to tech, it's the number one reason Windows 8
didn't work for me. The loss of context when the start screen took over was
too disorienting.

~~~
ThrustVectoring
Working with a couple coworkers is pretty frustrating because their window
management strategy is switching rapidly between active OSX screens with the
whole wipe animation too.

~~~
have_faith
This is my setup. Single app/window full screened and sliding between them. I
like to focus on one thing at once. Tiling window managers are cognitive
overload for me, too much going on at once.

~~~
jacobush
I tried but I die a little each time the swipe animation happens. The Amiga
way worked great for me. 1/60s switch time, no animation, fullscreen. Wish
MacOS could do away with the animation. Is there a way to config that?

~~~
quicklime
I'm not sure if there's a way to completely remove it, but you can make it use
a faster, and different (fade instead of slide), animation.

System Preferences -> Accessibility -> Display -> Reduce Motion

~~~
rogual
This works, but -- infuriatingly -- also disables the window motion when
opening Exposé, which makes that feature _more_ disorienting.

------
egypturnash
Ever since I learnt about this, I have made a practice of saying what I'm
doing out loud as I leave one room and enter another one to do the thing I
want to do. So I have that moment of "I walked through a door and flushed my
brain's to-do cache", but it's quickly remedied by the fact that I loaded up a
few words describing what I want to do the instant before I stepped through
the door into the longer pipeline of brain-to-mouth.

It helps me, at least.

------
Bizarro
I'm not sure about this article. For as bad as my memory has always been (and
especially bad for being a programmer), I don't have many "why am I in here"
moments.

It does happen occasionally, but as someone who is thinking about "work-on-
the-fly" wherever I am, I think I'm just accustomed to noodling over work (or
other background processes) "in the background".

Since lots of us are engineer-types, are we more apt at that background
processing and then when we hit our primary target (in here to look for keys),
we're able to shit into primary focus mode?

Now if I'm searching for keys, noodling over some design in the background,
and then my wife pops me with a question while I'm lumbering through the
house, then I'm in trouble;)

------
tejtm
My wife refers to this as "Male refrigerator blindness"

It is also why I prefer the NASA mission control approach to monitor layout

~~~
crooked-v
> It is also why I prefer the NASA mission control approach to monitor layout

Could you elaborate?

~~~
tedmiston
You don't have to context switch desktops because you have so many displays
that everything you need is already visible.

~~~
nickjj
Funny enough I recently wrote about this topic in the context of sticking with
80 characters per line when writing code[0]. There's a section on "Context
Switching Sucks". I've always fantasized about having all of the walls in my
home office as being monitors.

[0]: [https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/80-characters-per-line-is-
a-s...](https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/80-characters-per-line-is-a-standard-
worth-sticking-to-even-today)

~~~
sowbug
The way I put it to colleagues is that my big monitor is mine, not yours. If
you write wide code, then you're taking up space I'd use to tile.

------
reallymental
It's context switching, I face this daily due to my OCD. The damn doorways are
always a problem.

I'm not very well versed on this subject, but have there been any experiments
conducted with a doorway in the middle of a basketball court or a field?

I'm sure that would mess me up for a good couple of minutes as well. It's not
just doorways that lead to a different room, it's just the fact that there's a
doorway present, that changes my context of things.

Maybe I'm the weird one.

~~~
WiseWeasel
I'd watch doorwayball.

I'm picturing basketball with a slightly larger court, a canvas wall suspended
down the center strapped down around three doorways evenly spaced from the
edges, six players per team on the court, and maybe some round padded
platforms centered behind the free-throw lines for extra terrain strategy.
There'd be some kind of rule similar to dribbling to prevent standing in
doorways; something like, you can only stop or take more than two steps in a
doorway zone if you've got the ball.

------
UncleEntity
I don't even need a doorway, I can easily forget what I was up to between
thinking "need keys" and walking over to where the keys live.

Kind of annoying TBH...

------
okket
A human 'context switch' seems to be equally expensive as for a computer.

~~~
mlthoughts2018
And yet we design open-plan offices around the central theme that people
working in a concentration-demanding field should orient their every moment of
work around the assumption that not only are context switches costless, but
that “collaboration” only happens if everyone is constantly preemptible
according to the capricious judgment of managers and other colleagues who are
not in a position to even judge the importance of the current task the person
being interrupted is working on.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
>"[Y]et we design open-plan offices around the central theme [...]"

Surely the theme is control and superiority. You go in the cube farm so that
someone can control you and remain superior over you. I doubt people do it
because they did time and motion studies and found it more conducive to your
particular work?

~~~
mlthoughts2018
Sure, but then you are not paid for productivity, and we should speak plainly
about this.

------
owaislone
This happens to me quite often and lately, it has started to creep into my
computer usage. I often forget why I opened a new browser tab.

------
hapnin
I'm old and now believe in the hereafter. I walk into a room and ask myself,
"What am I here after?"

------
moogly
There must be something wrong with me, because I don't recognise myself in
this at all. I'm not sure I've ever experienced this.

~~~
sxv
Marijuana can solve this for you.

~~~
Bizarro
haha

------
dlwdlw
Doors trigger our minds loading screens. Memory is loaded from disk. Old
context is ejected new is injected. The ego or “i” concept is allotted small
attention/memory to carry over stuff. If attention is lost in the middle, the
background swap can happen subconscioslu and something you thought you placed
nearby can be moved.

------
gymshoes
I think this effect happens of the many distractions in life.

Whenever I open a new tab it shows a list of the most popular search trends. I
forget what I was supposed to search because fomo.

To combat this I have a to do list app where I conveniently list all
distractions and forget about them. It's easy too because I know I have that
saved for later.

------
fredley
According to _The Meaning of Liff_ , I have always thought of this as
"Woking".

[http://tmoliff.blogspot.com/2012/06/woking-participial-
vb.ht...](http://tmoliff.blogspot.com/2012/06/woking-participial-vb.html?m=1)

------
barcoder
If something is troubling my mind I will walk through a door and voila! My
brain has found something else to think about.

------
hangtwenty
This thread is a great example of why I love hackernews. It's these curious
ones.

------
erikig
I'm pretty sure I've suffered from this from the moment I was born

------
mylons
also an interesting effect with psychedelics

------
eruci
I usually forget why I exited

