Whether it’s car keys or your wallet, it’s far easier to lose something than find it again.
Photo: Caitlin Regan/Flickr
Malaka Gharib lost her passport at a crucial moment.
She was due to take her new husband to Egypt to meet her family there, and without a passport, she would not have been able to go.
“I felt like I was going to lose my mind,”
In the end, she did find it wedged between her bed and the wall. Who knows how it got there, but it did inspire her to take a deep dive into evidence-based techniques for finding lost things.
Gharib is the digital editor of NPR podcast Life Kit. She recently did an episode on the science behind the best way to search for misplaced keys, phone or anything else.
“Science knows. Researchers know. Professionals who search for things for a living – detectives, metal detectorists – they know how to look for things. Where is their advice for the regular people?” Gharib told Sunday Morning’s Jim Mora.
Here are Gharib’s techniques for finding lost stuff:
Relax
“If you are stressed, your attention narrows. You become like you have tunnel vision when you’re stressed and that’s not [helpful] when you are trying to look for something.”
However, she acknowledges that telling someone “to relax” is a “horrible thing to tell someone when they’ve lost [something].”
“Take a deep breath. Widen your attention span to be able to be able to take information in.”
What are the unique qualities of the object?
Reflect on the physical attributes of what you’ve lost and what the elements are that will make it stand out. Gharib used the example of a recipe she had seen in one of her cookbooks but couldn’t remember what cookbook it was in.
Rather than go through each one of the 1000 or so books on a shelf in her kitchen, she needed to figure out what the name of the book was and what it looked like. She Googled the recipe and found the title of the cookbook it was in. The book had a bright orange spine.
“Then I only looked for orange spines on my bookshelf and I found it immediately.”
This technique could be applied to, say, finding a white sedan in a carpark with lots of other white sedans.
“What you do is say to yourself ‘Wait, I know that my car has a bumper sticker’ and so you’re going to focus on the bumper sticker.”
Quiz yourself
“You’re going to ask yourself questions like a detective would.”
People often lose wedding rings, Gharib said. If that’s what you are looking for, think of places and moments where you interact with that object.
“Was I washing my hands? Was it putting on lotion? Did it slip off? Was I playing golf and it swung off my finger as I was playing? Do I usually fiddle with it when I’m in the car?
Look in all those places.
Recreate the movements of the object
When the object last broke contact with your body, could it have rolled somewhere else?
“The behaviour of how the object falls, lands or moves as you act out the scene may provide clues as to where the object might be,” Gharib wrote in an article based on the Life Kit episode.
Grid search
This is a systematic search to use when the previous techniques have not yielded any fruit. Divide your search area into a grid and search each square of the grid methodically.
“It’s very slow. It’s very inefficient, but you will hopefully find your object.”