There you are, sitting on your couch watching a movie when suddenly you decide you want popcorn.

So you get up and cross the room to the kitchen, but the moment you cross the threshold between the two rooms,

bam, you suddenly stop in your tracks, you glance about the kitchen in confusion like Gandalf in the minds of Moria,

unable to remember why you came here in the first place.

Your mind is a blank, wiped clean.

I'm no memory of this place.

You return to the living room, resume your movie, and bam, it all comes back to you as if nothing happened.

You get up again and the whole cycle begins anew.

If this has ever happened to you, then don't worry.

You aren't going crazy or suffering from early onset dementia, or if you are, don't worry about it.

Soon you won't remember, you can't remember anyway.

But what is happening here?

What is it about walking through a doorway that prompts our brains to suddenly erase our

short-term memory?

Well, sit back, keep your great matter focused, and let's dive into the fascinating science

behind the doorway effect.

While our day-to-day consciousness may appear like a continuous experience, only interrupted

by a few hours of unconsciousness when we go to sleep every night, this is not in fact how

we process reality.

We're constantly bombarded with so much sensory information from second to second that our brains must work overtime to sift out and condense only the most relevant information to prevent us from becoming completely overwhelmed.

One way our brains do this is by combining various events, sensations and other details, into self-contained episodes, a birthday party, a wedding, a business meeting, etc.,

this process is known creatively as episodic memory, and along with semantic memory,

...