I read an interesting article the other day about a study on the human memory. It turns out that walking into another room and forgetting what you came in there for is not a symptom of stress or bad memory; it is simply the way the human brain stores information.
In the study scientists had both online and offline subjects take an object, place it in a box where they couldn’t see it, and walk across a room. Once they reached the other side of the room, they had to tell what the object was by memory. All the subjects passed that test, but when they put a doorway in the center of the room and walked the same distance through that doorway, many of them could no longer remember what they held.
Why is that? Well, scientists think it has to do with the way the human brain prioritizes memory. Your short term memory only has a certain amount of space. Your brain thinks that what is in the new room is more important to remember than what was in the old room. The old room is ‘old data’ that is purged to make room for new.
Of course, you can always remember what you need to if you repeat it to yourself or write it down, but I thought it was interesting that the same phenomena happened both online and off. Even when playing a game, a doorway triggers memory purging. Now, that says something powerful about the human brain, doesn’t it?
You can read the whole article here: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=why-walking-through-doorway-makes-you-forget
Paul and his wife Julie both spend quite a bit of time coming up with ideas, blogging, and researching all things related to childcare. They take care of all the necessary information related to “babysitters”. He personally think his blog will help finding information on all things related to a babysitter.