The Location-Based Brain

door 212 (Photo credit: Aunt Owwee)

Ever forget to grab your keys from the living room, but when you go to grab them you end up forgetting what you were forgetting in the first place, your car keys. As a waiter, and a human being, this interesting phenomenon happens to me all the time. Interestingly enough, there's a reason behind it, and it has to do with the door, well mostly just he location, but the door appears to be a trigger.

We store information in our brains not unlike the way computers store information in folders. For us though, each room is a folder and when you leave, or walk through the door your brain is wiped and you load up data about the new room.

This explains why often when I leave the dining room at work with a drink order and enter the pantry, I “blank” and make the walk of shame back to the table to get the order again. Writing the order down in the first place would be a de facto solution, but it makes me look amateur and I've been around the scene long enough for the comparison to be offensive.

Apparently there's little I can do other than saying what I need out loud as I walk through the door. This isn't a problem with my memory itself as you might think. I don't really mention it (mostly because nobody believes my scores), but I've taken IQ tests (real ones) and a big ticket item on many are wrote memorization (aka short-term memory) and I generally score over-high on those portions.

So, the next time you change rooms and can't remember what you've forgotten, go back to where you work, because you probably didn't forget, your brain just loaded a different chunk of data and unloaded the chunk with the important stuff you've forgotten but can't remember.