Psychedelics and the 'Doorway Effect'

Psychedelics are known to make everyday objects and experiences more intense and noticeable – everyday things become something worth commenting on. Part of this is related to the general meaning-enhancing effect of psychedelics. One of these intensifying effects of psychedelics, which I think has been underdiscussed, is the experience of moving from one room (or space) to another. Normally, we don’t register this experience as significant or worth noting, even though, of course, changing environments when sober can affect our mood and thought process.

On psychedelics, however, changing environments can have a noticeable effect on one’s emotions and curiosity. Matt Stone, co-creator of South Park, notes this when he describes taking LSD before attending the Oscars, along with fellow South Park co-creator Trey Parker. After Parker recounts being in the limo, arriving at the Oscars, and Stone adds, “If you’ve taken acid, you know that one of the trippiest parts of when you’re on any psychedelic is transitioning – when you go inside to outside, or outside to inside, like that ‘Ohh, we’re in a different space’, and I will never forget the moment getting out of the limo.”

To shed some light on this aspect of psychedelics, I think it can be useful to refer to a strange psychological phenomenon known as the ‘doorway effect’. While this effect relates specifically to memory, the mechanism underlying it may help to explain why transitioning between spaces – especially when this involves going through doorways – can be so novel on psychedelics.

The doorway effect is a psychological phenomenon in which short-term memory loss occurs when going through a doorway or transitioning from one space to another. We’ve all gone into a room and asked ourselves “Why did I come in here again?” That’s the doorway effect. It’s an outcome of how human attention and memory work. The doorway effect occurs when our attention moves between different levels, such as when we move from one distinct room to another or from indoors to outdoors, which are separated by a clear dividing line (a doorway). The forgetfulness arises because of how our memory depends on the environment we’re in. The psychologist Tom Stafford explains this as follows in a piece for the BBC:

Imagine that we’re going upstairs to get our keys and forget that it is the keys we came for as soon as we enter the bedroom. Psychologically, what has happened is that the plan (“Keys!”) has been forgotten even in the middle of implementing a necessary part of the strategy (“Go to bedroom!”). Probably the plan itself is part of a larger plan (“Get ready to leave the house!”), which is part of plans on a wider and wider scale (“Go to work!”, “Keep my job!”, “Be a productive and responsible citizen”, or whatever). Each scale requires attention at some point. Somewhere in navigating this complex hierarchy the need for keys popped into mind, and like a circus performer setting plates spinning on poles, your attention focussed on it long enough to construct a plan, but then moved on to the next plate (this time, either walking to the bedroom, or wondering who left their clothes on the stairs again, or what you’re going to do when you get to work or one of a million other things that it takes to build a life).

And sometimes spinning plates fall. Our memories, even for our goals, are embedded in webs of associations. That can be the physical environment in which we form them, which is why revisiting our childhood home can bring back a flood of previously forgotten memories, or it can be the mental environment – the set of things we were just thinking about when that thing popped into mind.

 

The doorway effect occurs because we are changing both the physical and mental context, that is, moving to a different room and thinking about different things. The change of context causes the forgetfulness, given that memory is highly context-dependent. Indeed, we know this from a wealth of research. For instance, state-dependent memory refers to the fact that it’s easier to recall a memory if you’re in the mental state you were in when the memory was formed (we’ve known since the 70s that people find it easier to recall memories when drunk if those memories were formed when they were drunk; if sober, it’s harder to recall those memories). I’ve suggested this can be one reason why it’s so hard to recall psychedelic experiences, such as DMT experiences, when sober. However, the reality of state-dependent memory may also mean that psychedelic memories can be recalled more easily, such as when entering psychedelic or altered states of mind again.

Boundaries allow us to compartmentalise our experiences into different events, which makes it easier for us to recall them later on. And these boundaries don’t just have to be physical; state-dependent memory implies that these boundaries can be psychological as well, such as the boundary, or distinction, between sobriety and intoxication. These ‘event boundaries’ also help distinguish what is important in one situation from what is important in another situation. Thus, when a new event begins, marked by the crossing of a boundary, for example, we have a tendency to discard information from the previous event because it might not be relevant anymore. For instance, our desire to find our keys is connected to being in the living room – a desire that is interrupted when we enter the kitchen (even though we decided to go there to look for the keys).

It’s worth noting, however, that some studies have challenged the generalisability of the doorway effect; in other words, doorways do not always cause forgetfulness. Previous research found that crossing physical boundaries (e.g. moving from one room to another via a doorway) or non-physical boundaries (e.g. imagining going through a doorway, or even switching between one desktop window to another) results in forgetfulness. Conversely, newer experiments (using both physical and virtual environments) have found that moving through doorways has no significant effect on immediately forgetting items of recent significance.

Yet there is an important detail that may help explain why this newer research didn’t find a doorway effect. Jessica Mcfayden and Oliver Baumann, who were involved in the research, provide some analysis of the study in an article for The Conversation. They underline that their “finding more closely resembles everyday experience, where we most often forget what we came into a room to do when we are distracted and thinking about something else.” So they ask, “Why is our result so different to the powerful doorway effect reported by previous studies?” Their answer:

We believe it’s because we designed the rooms to be visually identical. There was no change in context, and there was no surprise by how the next room looked. This means it’s not so much the doorway by itself that causes forgetting, but more about the change of environment.

Imagine you are in a shopping centre. Taking the lift from the car park to a retail level should lead to more forgetting than taking the lift simply to move between two retail levels.

The authors also note that their team’s findings “suggest the more we multitask, the more likely our memory will be flushed out by doorways. We can only hold a certain amount of information in mind at a time. When we’re distracted by thoughts about other things, our working memory can more easily become overloaded.” A solution to the so-called doorway effect, therefore, is to multitask less, or maintain a focused mind. Mcfayden and Baumann emphasise, nonetheless, that the doorway effect is an outcome of an effective strategy:

In most cases, our tendency to segment our lives into distinct events is actually advantageous. Our information capacity is limited so we can’t remember too much information in one go.

Thus, it’s more efficient for us only to retrieve information about the current situation, rather than remembering all the information from everything we’ve recently experienced.

How the Doorway Effect Relates to Psychedelic Experiences