Where are those darn keys? Tricks for remembering where you put things

Albert Stumm, MDT/AP

With a scarf dangling from your coat pocket and gloves left behind at the coffee shop, winter creates more opportunities to lose things — not counting misplaced keys at home or those exasperated moments searching for your phone when you say, “I just had it!”

Try not to beat yourself up. Even Mark McDaniel, who has studied human memory and learning for almost 50 years, recently left a hat under his chair at a restaurant — something he rarely wears.

“I should know how to remember to remember, but at the moment, you don’t think you’re going to forget,” said McDaniel, professor emeritus of psychological and brain sciences at Washington University in St. Louis.

Luckily, there are strategies. If you can remember to implement them, here’s how to stop losing things.

Daniel L. Schacter, a Harvard University psychology professor and author of The Seven Sins of Memory, said losing things is something everyone is prone to, especially when life circumstances pull attention away from the present.

Rather than having a bad memory, it might be “a breakdown at the interface of memory and attention,” Schacter said. “That’s what’s responsible, based on research and personal experience, for many of the memory failures that result in losing things.”

Memory occurs in three phases in the brain: encoding, storage and retrieval. Schacter likened losing your keys to drivers who arrive at their destination safely without remembering the drive.

In both cases, the memory of the action is not encoded because people were thinking about something else, making it harder to retrieve later.

“You have to do a little bit of cognitive work,” Schacter said. “At the time of encoding, you have to focus your attention.”

It also helps to reduce what you need to remember in the first place.

Schacter suggested identifying problem items such as your phone, wallet or keys and creating a structure that becomes automatic with practice. He always leaves his reading glasses in a specific spot in the kitchen. When golfing, his phone goes into the same pocket of his bag.

If there is a noticeable increase in losing things compared to the recent past, particularly if accompanied by other memory problems that interfere with daily function, it might be time to see a doctor, Schacter said.

McDaniel said the brain remembers better when it receives several bits of information that can later be connected — a process known as elaboration.

One way to stop losing objects you don’t habitually use, like a hat, is to say out loud where you put it when you put it down.

“Saying it out loud creates better encoding because it makes you pay attention, and the verbalization creates a richer memory,” McDaniel said. [Abridged]