are you ever scrolling through tumblr and you have a thought and immediately lose it so you have to scroll back up to give your brain the conditions under which it originally created the thought so you can bring it back
That is actually how it works! Some psychologists refer to doors as “memory erasers.” I believe that it has carried into our modern technology. If you open a new tab, you might forget something, the same way you would as leaving a room, since your visuals are changing. It’s reasonable to expect that the same would happen with scrolling through content. 🙂
Check this out:
“The doorway effect suggests that there’s more to the remembering than just what you paid attention to, when it happened, and how hard you tried. Instead, some forms of memory seem to be optimized to keep information ready-to-hand until its shelf life expires, and then purge that information in favor of new stuff. Radvansky and colleagues call this sort of memory representation an “event model,” and propose that walking through a doorway is a good time to purge your event models because whatever happened in the old room is likely to become less relevant now that you have changed venues. That thing in the box? Oh, that’s from what I was doing before I got here; we can forget all about that. Other changes may induce a purge as well: A friend knocks on the door, you finish the task you were working on, or your computer battery runs down and you have to plug in to recharge.”
Source: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-walking-through-doorway-makes-you-forget/