Stop Losing Your Stuff

Can't find your keys again? Cognitive experts can 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 ten minutes after a favorite 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 focused 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.”