“The Doorway Effect”: How Doorways Affect Your Brain The Moment You Walk Through Them

It happens to all of us. You walk downstairs because you left your pair of reading glasses in your study. As soon as you get downstairs, you forget about your glasses and instead start to switch off lights and do whatever else catches your attention. Then when you’re back upstairs again, you realize you’ve forgotten to get the glasses!

Another scenario: you’re tidying up your study and decide to get the rubbish bin from the kid’s bedroom. You walk into the kids’ bedroom, forget the rubbish bin and start tidying the kid’s room! Then you walk back to your study, and realize you’ve forgotten about the bin!

We blame our minds for being “absent”, but scientists have now proven there is a trigger for this type of temporary amnesia. According to research scientist Gabriel Radvansky from the University of Notre Dame, walking through doorways has the effect of resetting the focus of our brains.

Derived from studying cognitive behaviour over the past 20 years, Gabriel Radvansky and his team calls this phenomenon “event boundary” – the ability for our brains to compartmentalize events and associate them with the environment or the room in which they occurred.

“By moving from one room to the next, the brain effectively creates a “mental file” containing all the information about the first room, and what you did there, and tucks it away. It then starts to focus on the second room.”

In other words, whenever you pass through a doorway, your brain “starts a new page.” It creates a new holding area to record new experiences associated with the new room. Unless you live in a completely door-less home, Radvansky’s team says there’s no medical cure for this. The only way to overcome this mental effect is to train yourself to be mindful of your purpose as you walk through doorways, and make a conscious effort to remember why you went there!

If you are in the middle of typing an email or tidying up your desk, it is best to finish your task before leaving the room, as you are sure to lose your train of thought the minute you walk through a door!

DOORWAYS AND FENG SHUI

The results of Radvansky’s research has striking parallels with what Feng Shui practitioners have intuitively known about the science of space for centuries, that doorways have a profound effect on our mind and our behaviours! Feng Shui compass methods reveal detailed insights about how energy changes its nature from room to room, and these effects are triggered as soon as we walk through doorways. This is why the practice of Feng Shui places such a lot of emphasis in the directional arrangement of doorways within a home. Getting this right is vital for channelling, shaping and creating good energy in a home!

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Feng Shui practice goes deeper into the analysis of how chi moves through doorways and space. It provides us with powerful formulas and guidelines on deciding how our entrances should be built. The arrangement of doorways in relation to our sleeping and sitting positions, for example, can either bring supportive energy or create damaging vibes for us.

If you are designing your office or study, you don’t want to place your desk in a way where the doorway is behind your seat! At home, you also want to avoid having your dining table face the toilet door. In your bedroom, you should always avoid sleeping with your feet pointed at the door – Feng Shui practitioners call this the “death” position!

But the most important doorway to ensure you get right is the main entrance doorway. When you walk through your main entrance, your brain resets its focus and tunes into “family” mode. It makes a mental shift from public space to private space; hence it makes sense that auspicious main doors put you in an auspicious frame of mind, while inauspicious doorways put you in a negative frame of mind the moment you step into your home!

THE ENERGY OF DOORS IN 2019

In Feng Shui, the direction from which energy flows through your main door determines the kind of energy your house enjoys. In Feng Shui language, we call it luck, and the time dimension of Feng Shui gives us annual readings of the type of luck brought by our main entrances depending on the compass sector and direction they face. Thus it is important to check the energy of your main door each year and ensure that good energy is enhanced and negative energy is transformed.

DOOR DIRECTIONS THAT BRING GOOD ENERGY FOR THE YEAR OF 2019: