JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:
Let's say you've lost something important, like your passport two days before you have to travel. You've retraced your steps, checked every shelf and drawer and still nothing. What do you do? Life Kit's Malaka Gharib has some tips on how to search better.
MALAKA GHARIB, BYLINE: Finding missing items isn't a matter of looking harder. There's an art and a science to it or, if you're my grandma, a prayer to St. Anthony, the patron saint of lost objects. It can be stressful to lose something important. You're frazzled, you're frantically turning your house upside down to find it, and you forget where you've looked. But there are ways to make your search faster and more efficient.
One way is to think about the features of the object that would really make it stand out in its environment. Arryn Robbins is a cognitive psychologist at the University of Richmond, and she specializes in visual search.
ARRYN ROBBINS: Its visual features - like color, shape, texture, size - memory for where the object is most likely going to be. And that information in memory is used to direct your attention.
GHARIB: Robbins used this tactic recently when she lost the back of a rose gold earring on a carpet in a similar color.
ROBBINS: So I had to think about, OK, what would set my earring apart from this carpet that would allow me to find it? Well, my earring is shiny. It would reflect light. And so as soon as I thought about that, like, almost instantly, I saw it.
GHARIB: This might seem like an obvious tip, but when you're stressed, it's one you can easily forget. Let's say you have no idea where you parked in the parking lot. Instead of looking at every car that's the same color as yours, just focus on one distinguishing feature, your bumper sticker.
The next technique you might want to try is a little kooky. Reenact how you lost the object in the first place. The behavior of how it falls, lands or moves as you act out the scene may provide clues as to where it might be. Demian Garcia is a metal detectorist based in Northern California. People contact him to help them find jewelry they've lost. Garcia uses this tactic when clients lose a ring because they've throw it out a window or across a room, usually during an argument.
DEMIAN GARCIA: An example of that was - is that a couple were pulled over on the side of the road, and she tossed the ring out in the passenger seat. And she kept going, it's right there. I threw it straight out the window right there.
GHARIB: Garcia wondered, was it right there? He wanted to test the theory. So he took a cheap ring, tied a long red ribbon onto it and asked the woman to throw the ring out the window again, like she did with her wedding ring.
GARCIA: Well, she threw it three times in a row, and it never went straight out the window like you would think.
GHARIB: He said it actually went flying back behind the car. Using the strategy, he was able to find the woman's ring. Yay, Demian.
The last technique is heavy duty. Divide your space up into sections, then search each section thoroughly. Robbins says grid search, as it's called, is one form of systematic search. It's sometimes used in search and rescue as a last resort to find missing people. But it can also be a useful tool if you're looking for something in a messy room where your missing object's distinctive features may be hard to spot.
ROBBINS: And so in this case, you might imagine that your search environment, whether it's a room or an office space, is like a grid. And you want to cover each square in the grid, maybe top to bottom, left to right.
GHARIB: Robbins says the general idea is to come up with a strategy to be thorough without having to remember every location you've already looked at. You don't necessarily have to measure out a grid. Just imagine breaking down the search environment into smaller units - sections of a room, pieces of furniture - then search those units in an order that makes sense to you.
ROBBINS: It's going to be slow, less efficient, but it's going to ensure that you find the thing that you're looking for.
GHARIB: Happy searching.
For NPR's Life Kit, I'm Malaka Gharib. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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