The phenomenon of walking backwards to remember a lost thought
Solution 1:
I'm having difficulty finding more convincing supporting evidence, but I'm happy with the content. From HiNative (amended):
- Can retrace your steps have a figurative meaning? [nuriavivo ]
- Yes. You could say: I thought about my day [...] I retraced my steps.
You didn't physically go back and walk through your day all over [...] you 'walked through your mind' to replay your day. [SCLCJ]
- Yes, it means to remember what you did earlier. Usually so that you can remember where you put your keys (or any other lost object). [Chook 15]
Here is a quote from a novel, the figurative use forced by the phase ('sit knitting') construction:
- He sat retracing his steps and that's when it hit him ....
[G Lusby: Serial]
No doubt backtrack can be used in a similar way, but care needs to be exercised in utilising this sense; the default figurative sense (listed first by Collins and Macmillan) is 'to withdraw from an undertaking / stance ...'.
Solution 2:
Here's a scientific fact: Walking through doorways causes forgetting.1
Psychologists call this phenomenon the "doorway effect." Your small notion to, for example, go to the kitchen for a vitamin is apt to get cleared from your working memory buffer as you experience an "event boundary"—the literal passing through a doorway here—and your brain prepares to handle new information.
Though there is plenty of anecdotal evidence that returning to the room you came from can jog your memory, research shows that the notion of "context-dependent memory" does not play out in this situation.2
Maybe that's why this room-return-memory-jog phenomenon doesn't have a name.
Whether it's real or not, I'd be quite surprised if walking backwards yielded any better results than turning around and walking forward—at any speed.
In the meantime, maybe we can just call it . . . a do-over.3
1 How walking through a door wipes your memory
2 Walking through doorways causes forgetting: Further explorations
3 Just for fun