Have you ever entered a room and completely forgot what you were doing, or why you even entered the room in the first place? You're not alone. In fact, for the last 20 years, a Notre Dame scientist named Gabriel Radvansky has been searching for an answer as to why this happens. Amazingly, he believes he and his research team have come close to solving the problem.
Radvansky used three rooms of his lab to test participants ability to remember what they were to doing as they passed from room to room. In the experiment, passing through a door and into a new room caused participants to answer more incorrectly to the questions! This means that, for whatever reason, passing through a door made people forget what object they had just carried through it.
The name for this phenomenon is "event boundary". Basically, our brains tie events into our environment, or a room that we are in when the events occurred. By moving to a different room, our brain basically puts the events and thoughts from the first room into a file, and tucks it away. When we enter the second room, our brain starts looking at the "file" for the second room!
