In the interest of reassuring blog readers who fear they’re losing their marbles when they become forgetful, I thought that I’d post a link to a report on the effect of moving from room to room.

Any person of a certain age starts to fret that they’re succumbing to early-onset Alzheimer’s, when they can’t recall someone’s name or why they came into a room. I’ve wondered if absent-mindedness was more commonly found among writers. After all, we sit staring at our computer screens for ages, lost in the lives of our created characters, then we’re expected to magically return to reality as if we can instantly recall what it was we’re supposed to be doing.

This happened to me a few months ago, when I found myself standing in the bathroom without an inkling of why I’d gone in there. It wasn’t for my normal business, for I was running on empty, so I returned to my laptop to continue submitting to literary agents. After several minutes of typing, I cottoned-on to why I’d stood looking at my bathroom cabinet, for I had a painful hangnail that was catching on the keys as I typed.

D’oh! I went back through to get the nail-clippers to ease my discomfort. This jaunt takes me through two doorways, which is more than enough to disrupt my memory banks, at least according to this report :

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-walking-through-doorway-makes-you-forget/

Treating myself like an idiot, and heading the problem off at the pass, I now keep a spare nail-clipper hooked over the edge of my pen jar next to the computer.