The next time you are traveling and staying in a hotel, I ask you to notice a little quirk of human memory. For some reason, most people find it remarkably easy to remember their hotel room number. When they check in, they hear the number spoken out loud by the staff member who hands them their key and that is enough to firmly imprint it in their memory for a certain period of time. And, nerd that I am, it is this “certain period of time” that I find interesting.

After you check into a room, you probably spend a bit of down time before you go out again. Chances are that you never even give a second thought to what room you are in—you are already in it so why think about it?

Had you checked in during the late afternoon, after you rest you most likely go out for errands, a walk, dinner, etc. When you return, you probably don’t even have to glance at the little paper holder that the key-card came in to get the correct number—you simply go straight to your room. Aside: Heaven forbid that any hotel still uses metal keys!

If you are like me, when you leave your room you always check to make sure the door is securely shut. Admittedly, the room number is often right there on the door so it reinforces your memory, but most of the time the correct number is already lodged comfortably in your brain—which makes it easy to remember when you have to sign the hotel restaurant bill or when deciding which floor to choose when you are back in the elevator.

After that, you have what I call “memory momentum.” In the same restaurant the next morning for breakfast? No worries, it is now child’s play to fill in the room number when the waiter or waitress brings the check. Out for a day’s worth of meetings? Not a problem, for when you return for you simply pull the card from your wallet and open your door. No matter how long your stay, you are good to go

You are likely thinking that I should have had a role in the movie Revenge of the Nerds for even thinking about something so geekish as this. At the very least, you are saying “Ok, what is so big about this? Well, perhaps not a big deal, but it does reveal a lot about some of the ways our memories are working even if science cannot yet fully explain the how and why.

I have asked a lot of my colleagues about this particular quirk of remembering room numbers. These are men and women who have over thirty years of constant travel under their belts and have spent, quite accurately, thousands of nights in hotel rooms. This means they are in one hotel room one night and at another the next. Yet there never seems to be much “interference” with the previous night’s room number and the process flawlessly repeats itself. I don’t have a steel trap for a memory, but I cannot remember (no pun intended) after check-in of ever having to again see what room I was in—nor have most of my colleagues.

Ah, you say, but these are frequent travelers. True, but I also hear this from many infrequent travelers. This means that being a road warrior does not come with special mental skills, but seems to be something we are all equipped with.

Now what is really amazing about this is the following: Have you ever checked out of a hotel in the morning, gone to a business meeting or event, and then headed off to the airport? I would wager that once you are seated in the aircraft or, at the very latest when you are checking in to your next night’s hotel, that you then have no idea of the number of the previous room in which you just stayed. Here you were, going strong by having mastered this number, but now it seems to have gotten up and left our memory!

Obviously, this is an example of short-term memory at work, but I cannot find any serious research as to this hotel room number phenomena. Naturally, there have been tons of scientific investigations into memory, but this hotel situation seems to be neither fish nor fowl—neither a short-term nor a long-term memory. It is sort of a mental Goldilocks arrangement of being just right.

We are all familiar with the challenges that short-term memory pose as they can be both simple and frustrating. You usually don’t pull out a pen and paper when your spouse tells you to bring in something from the garage. Surely you would not forget something as simple as that—except when you do and now find yourself standing in the garage trying to remember why you are there in the first place!

If she tells you to get some things from the grocery store however, you probably make a list. There is an indistinct line at the boundary between short and long-term memories that is different for each person. Notice how you can clearly remember things from your childhood but cannot tell me what you had for dinner last night?

The mind seeks context when it encodes memories and this shapes how, and even where, they are stored. This contextual structure is still a mystery to scientists, but it seems to have many elements, including trauma, that dictate how events are processed.

I certainly don’t pretend to delve in this short narrative into the mechanics of memory as there is much good reading and viewing available. I recently listened to a Great Courses presentation on this topic, for example, and found it to be time well spent. The nice thing is that one not need to be an expert to appreciate the mysteries of what we can, and cannot, remember.

We humans often tend toward hubris and so we think that we are always “just this close” to explaining behavior and the mind. But smart people like behavioral scientists, psychiatrists, and even behavioral economists, gently remind us that we are actually quite far from understanding all the complexities of the mind. The good news though, is that these scientists are cracking on with their research and we will, one day, be able to read about what they discover.

In the meantime, we have these little quirks such as the “hotel room number” phenomena as amazing markers of our human makeup. Now if I could only remember where I put that room key-card!

Happy New Year and stay average for 2019!