No matter how old we might be, we probably all know the feeling of walking into a room like the kitchen and completely forgetting what we went in there for.
This bizarre occurrence is nothing to worry about reassures Professor Charan Ranganath, an expert in the field of neuroscience and memory, who explained the scientific reason why this happens in a recent appearance on the Feel Better, Live More podcast hosted by Dr Rangan Chatterjee.
Walking into the kitchen and forgetting why you’re there
In a video posted to Instagram to help promote the podcast episode (the exact order of the conversation in the podcast itself is slightly different), Dr Chatterjee asks his guest whether going into the kitchen and forgetting why you’re in there is normal or a potential sign of dementia.
“Oh that’s absolutely normal,” reassures Professor Ranganath who boasts more than 25 years of experience in the field of neuroscience and is a researcher at the University of California, Davis.
“It’s not usually a sign of dementia because if you walk into the kitchen, and you don’t remember why you went there and you walk back to the room that you came from, you’ll often go ‘Oh, that’s what I need,’” he explains.
Earlier on the podcast, Professor Ranganath touched on this topic when discussing ‘event boundaries’ which act like mental doorways to help our brain create and organize memories.
“You can see this when people change a room because suddenly what happens is your mindset changes as you go from one room to another,” he says. “Which is why we sometimes end up in the kitchen and say, ‘Why am I here again?’”
“That’s because of event boundaries,” continues the professor. “Because what happens is that when you change your mindset, your mental context shifts and now it’s harder to remember the things that happened in past contexts.”
Why Covid is a blur in our memories
Event boundaries, or the lack thereof, are also the reason why our experience of the Covid-19 pandemic can seem to be a blur in our memories.
“If you engage in a very predictable set of actions, what happens is that you don’t really form rich memories so well,” reveals Professor Ranganath. “You can see this, for instance, many of us in the lockdowns in the pandemic, we just had this very repetitive, predictable set of experiences every day because we were just stuck at home… staying in the same place, doing the same things, talking to the same people all day and all night.”
“So as a result, you didn’t have these big event boundaries, you didn’t have these big context shifts,” he continues. “So rather than having a very distinctive set of memories, you just had one big blur, one blob of experience.”
In addition to this, Professor Ranganath explains that while teaching during the pandemic, he would conduct polls with students, asking them whether they felt time was passing faster or slower over the course of a day – as well as over the course of a week.
His students reported that days felt like they were taking longer but weeks felt as if they were zooming by.
“What had happened was people had the sense of enormous monotony during the day and so as a result without that sense of event boundaries, time seemed to be moving at this glacial pace,” he reveals. “But then at the end of a week, you look back and you say ‘Well, what happened over the past week, I don’t even remember what happened,’ and so it felt like time was just slipping away.”
