一出門就忘事，不怨你

“這世界上有你知道的事情，也有你不知道的事情，已知與未知之間隔著一扇大門。”這是大門樂隊(The Doors)鍵盤手雷·曼札克在解釋樂隊名稱由來時所說的話。不過，這扇門可不僅只能用來解釋樂隊名字。

We've all had the experience of getting up to do something, only to arrive in another room scratching our heads as to why we ever got up from the couch to begin with. It's such a common conundrum that University of Notre Dame Psychology professor Gabriel Radvansky and his colleagues set out to research it. Their findings were published in 2011 in the Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology.

我們都有過這樣的經(jīng)歷，從沙發(fā)上起身想去做一件事情，可是去到那里的時候卻抓頭撓腮，忘記自己究竟是過去干什么的。這種事情太常見了。圣母大學(xué)心理學(xué)教授Gabriel Radvansky及其同事就對此進行過研究，他們的成果于2011年發(fā)表在《實驗心理學(xué)季刊》上。

The researchers learned that walking through doorways is a mental "event boundary" of sorts, one that divides our experiences in a subconscious way. So, when you're sitting at your kitchen table and you decide to retrieve your coffee mug from the living room, the act of passing through a doorway causes compartmentalization of the tasks in your mind — and you forget the very reason that caused you to set out on your short-circuited mission in the first place.

研究者稱，走出門會制造一種心理“事件分界線”，在潛意識中讓我們將經(jīng)歷的事情分開。所以，你坐在廚房桌邊時，如果想著要去客廳拿一下咖啡杯，走進門的那一刻，大腦會自動將任務(wù)劃分開來。因此你的大腦就短路了，忘了自己原本究竟要過來做什么。

The Notre Dame team used both live and computer-based experiments to test these concepts. In the virtual environment, test subjects picked up shapes on a table, carried them to another room, and then swapped them for a different object. They repeated this process in a similarly sized environment where there was no doorway.

為了驗證這種說法，圣母大學(xué)的研究者分別做了現(xiàn)場和虛擬實驗。在虛擬實驗中，受試者需要在桌上選擇某些形狀的物體，然后走到另一個房間，然后將手中拿著的物體換成別的東西。接著，研究者又在沒有門的類似環(huán)境中做了同樣的實驗。

When the scientists compared results from the two scenarios, they saw that subjects tended to forget things much more frequently in the environment that featured — you guessed it — doors.

比較兩個場景的實驗結(jié)果時，研究者發(fā)現(xiàn)受試者在有門的環(huán)境中更容易忘記自己原來的任務(wù)。

Then, they set up a similar test in a real-world setting. Subjects picked up an object, concealed it in a box, and then either walked across a room or through a doorway to another room. (Both distances were the same.) Again, the doorways seemed to increase forgetfulness.

接著，研究者又在現(xiàn)實場景中做了相似的實驗。他們讓受試者拿起一個物體，將其封入盒子中，然后從房間一頭走到另一頭，或者走到另一個房間(行走距離是相等的)。同樣地，在有門的情境中，受試者更容易忘記事情。

Wait, what were we talking about? Oh yes, the doors.

等等，我們在說什么?噢對，在說門呢。

The studies seem to indicate that our brains use certain boundaries as markers of sorts, and doorways cause us to process one task and file it away as "done." Most of the time this is a good thing since we can't possibly remember everything at one time. But it does present a problem if we haven't found our car keys just yet and are looking around for them.

這個研究似乎表示，我們的大腦會將某些地理分界線作為標(biāo)記，將某扇門內(nèi)發(fā)生的事情當(dāng)成獨立的任務(wù)，走出門時就將事情標(biāo)記為“完成”。這在大多數(shù)時候是好事，因為我們無法同時記住所有事情。不過當(dāng)我們想找車鑰匙卻找不到時，就可能會覺得大腦的這個功能有點煩人了。