Apparently, its best to do all your learning and test taking in one room and never walk though another doorway in your entire life. Well, not really. But it does look like doorways and environments have a very real affect on your brain.

While it sounds like something out of a weird science fiction movie, new research about the affects of doorways found that the innocent-looking portals are actually nasty little thieves when it comes to stealing your memory, or at least inhibiting it.

The study, published recently in the Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology by University of Notre Dame Psychology Professor Gabriel Radvansky, suggests that the actual physical act of passing through a doorway, either entering or exiting, serves as an “event boundary” in the mind. The mind, which in some ways can be said to work like an exceptionally complex organic database, uses doorways to separate episodes of activity and file them away for storage.

According to Radvansky, the problem is with the recall aspect of the brain’s filing system. His research builds on previous science that shows memory and recall are affected by environment, that information learned in one environment, say a particular room, is retrieved better when the retrieval occurs in the same context or location.

Radvansky conducted three experiments in real and virtual environments. His test subjects, all college students, performed simple memory tasks while crossing a room and exiting a doorway. Radvansky found that the doorways actually affected the students’ ability to remember.

In one experiment, Radvansky tested the earlier research that tied memory and recall to environments by having students perform the simple memory tasks while walking across a room, exiting the room through a doorway, and passing through several more doorways that lead the students back to the original room. Even though the students’ memories should have benefitted from the familiar environment, no memory improvement was recorded. Turns out going through that first doorway did all the damage.

Unless architects figure out a way to build a world without doorways, it looks like we’ll all be stuck with the little slacker forklift operators who work in the gray, squishy warehouse of our brains.