why do we suddenly forget things when we enter a new room/pass through a door?
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The brain is contextual. Different contexts require remembering different things. Eg: while cooking you need to remember to keep the fire going, while out in the woods you need to look out for tracks.
Moving room is a context switch. You’re in a new place now, so your active memory dumps things to load information more relevant to the new context.
It’s called the Doorway Effect. You can google it and find quite a lot of material. It’s pretty common. It’s a weird quirk of human memory: walking into a different space kind of seems to reset the brain/memory for some reason.
It hasn’t ever happened to me. But I’ve heard/read of it many times before.
Seems like it’s due to the sudden much greater amount of new information.
This can replace things in the short term memory if current storage isn’t enough.
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