Completely true. And funny, because any actor who memorizes lines could tell you that.<p>Seriously -- if you memorize lines in your apartment and you've got them down pat, then you show up to your class/theater/set/audition and suddenly you have difficulty remembering them.<p>Because -- and this is common knowledge in acting -- your brain has subconsciously associated the lines with your apartment.<p>Which is why, once you've memorized the lines at home, you then take a walk and practice and re-memorize them again. Then while you're on the subway you practice and fix them again. And when you show up early to your class/theater/set/audition you spend 10 minutes practicing them <i>again</i>, to associate them with the space where you're performing.<p>You just have to. It's how memorization works. For whatever reason, it's associated with your mental location.<p>Same reason that when plays are on tour, they try to have a full rehearsal run-through in each new theater before a performance. You need to associate your memory with the new theater and fix your mistakes during rehearsal, not during performance.
I think this is a cheap optimization the brain uses. Every time our location changes, it clears short term memory to have a fresh slate and be aware in the new situation. Think of it as setting up a new stack frame.<p>I think it evolved so that a caveman could exit the cave and immediately forget what he was thinking about before and be fully aware, watching for predators and looking for food. He can start climbing a tree and suddenly the whole word is that tree and that task.<p>Nowadays that's why we walk into another room and can't remember why we went there, or we open the fridge door and can't remember what we wanted. I turn on my phone to do something, but somehow the phone itself is a new context and I end up doing something else.
Lots of brain connections work with one sense controlling how another is processed. In a car you can talk to a passenger all day and drive fine. But answer your phone, and suddenly you're absent and distracted.<p>I experimented to find out why. When I was talking to a friend in the passenger seat, I held up a card to prevent myself from seeing the passenger out of the corner of my eye - and suddenly I was absent and distracted.<p>Maybe its because when we don't see someone we're conversing with, we have to create a mental model of them to compensate. Because we're built to see the people we interact with, and our brains may just work that way. And the work of creating the mental model interferes with driving (prevents processing of the alternate mental model of the road situation?)<p>Anyway, for what its worth.
Somewhat off-topic: I have this weird problem that if I close my eyes and imagine walking towards a doorway and going through it, I can't. I can get pretty close to the door, but just can't go through it. It's like the brain doesn't compute for some reason.