一出门就忘事，不怨你

“这世界上有你知道的事情，也有你不知道的事情，已知与未知之间隔着一扇大门。”这是大门乐队(The Doors)键盘手雷·曼札克在解释乐队名称由来时所说的话。不过，这扇门可不仅只能用来解释乐队名字。

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.

我们都有过这样的经历，从沙发上起身想去做一件事情，可是去到那里的时候却抓头挠腮，忘记自己究竟是过去干什么的。这种事情太常见了。圣母大学心理学教授Gabriel Radvansky及其同事就对此进行过研究，他们的成果于2011年发表在《实验心理学季刊》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.

研究者称，走出门会制造一种心理“事件分界线”，在潜意识中让我们将经历的事情分开。所以，你坐在厨房桌边时，如果想着要去客厅拿一下咖啡杯，走进门的那一刻，大脑会自动将任务划分开来。因此你的大脑就短路了，忘了自己原本究竟要过来做什么。

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.

为了验证这种说法，圣母大学的研究者分别做了现场和虚拟实验。在虚拟实验中，受试者需要在桌上选择某些形状的物体，然后走到另一个房间，然后将手中拿着的物体换成别的东西。接着，研究者又在没有门的类似环境中做了同样的实验。

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.

比较两个场景的实验结果时，研究者发现受试者在有门的环境中更容易忘记自己原来的任务。

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.

接着，研究者又在现实场景中做了相似的实验。他们让受试者拿起一个物体，将其封入盒子中，然后从房间一头走到另一头，或者走到另一个房间(行走距离是相等的)。同样地，在有门的情境中，受试者更容易忘记事情。

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

等等，我们在说什么?噢对，在说门呢。

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.

这个研究似乎表示，我们的大脑会将某些地理分界线作为标记，将某扇门内发生的事情当成独立的任务，走出门时就将事情标记为“完成”。这在大多数时候是好事，因为我们无法同时记住所有事情。不过当我们想找车钥匙却找不到时，就可能会觉得大脑的这个功能有点烦人了。