I think that I am forgetting things. Not the long-term memories burnt by many seasons of recollection into my mind, but just simple tasks. Yes, I'll look that up/find that now, I think, right after I have put this t-shirt away. With the t-shirt neatly laid in a drawer, my mind instantly serves up a blank. I have forgotten the thing I planned to do just two minutes earlier! It happened again only ten minutes ago, and prompted the writing of this post.

I read, about a year ago, in a short psychology paper, of a theory about this kind of forgetting. It argued, fairly persuasively in my opinion, that we lose knowledge across thresholds, such as entrances between rooms. We get up for the purpose of doing something in another part of the house and once we cross the threshold of the space we are leaving into a new one, we are prone to forget what we intended to do.

The article surmised that this was the result of the way our ancient brains behaved. In aeons past, our ancestors would often be in mortal danger just around the corner, just out of sight. The brain learnt the survival technique of shelving whatever was our immediate purpose in favour of clearing our senses for action in the new environment. I can see how you might set up some clinical experiments to test this theory. Meanwhile, I will lean on this sturdy hypothesis to justify my, er, my, um...