So why do doorway have such an impact on our memories? Life is a continuous stream of events and it is thought that the brain has a special way of dealing with this. What it does is to break the events up into separate scenes. The beginning and end of these scenes is often marked by a doorway. When we open a door and pass into another room, the brain considers that the previous scene is finished and so it files the scene away. We have trouble recalling a decision that was made in a different scene because we are no longer focusing on the events.