Stop Losing Your Stuff

Can't find your keys-again? Cognitive experts help you stop searching (and stressing)

- Angela Haupt

SASHA BRADFORD doesn't have time to lose things. She's a working mom with lots of hobbies, and when she misplaces her keys or leaves her purse at a restaurant, she becomes frustrated and irritable.

"It impacts me greatly," says Bradford, 35, a Washington, DC-based federal contracting officer. Bradford has attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), which, she says, makes her "prone to put things places and not remember where I put them."

Her angst is probably familiar to anyone whose phone is MIA a dozen times a day, or who can't find the TV remote until 10 minutes after a favourite show has begun. Such lapses might be accompanied by a nagging fear: Is something wrong with me?

Probably not, experts agree. "It's a common occurrence and certainly annoying," says Daniel Schacter, a professor of psychology and director of the Schacter Memory Lab at Harvard University. "Most of the time, losing things results from absentmindedness. That's a breakdown at the interface of attention and memory, where we're focussed on something other than the object we're going to lose be it the TV remote or a phone or glasses," he says. "We're thinking about something else, and then we never really encode the information into memory about where we've put the object, because we have other concerns occupying our attention."

That's not necessarily a bad thing, he says; we could be busy pondering something productive, such as a work task or what to make for dinner. Or there could be another innocuous factor at play: "It might be that I mindfully put something down somewhere maybe it's a book I'm reading and I know I won't be able to get back to it for a few days," he says. "And then I can't remember where I put it." This is a perfectly normal example of 'transience, or the decreasing accessibility of memory over time.