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Lost her passport two days before a big international trip. Getting a new passport expedited would cost her hundreds of dollars, and she wasn't sure if it would even get to her in time. You can imagine how stressed I was. I mean, the last time I saw my passport was on the bed.
But I retraced my steps about a dozen times and nothing. She was so stressed about the missing passport, she even took off work to look for it. I mean, I was really frazzled, I tore up the house, and I was checking the most random places like the bathroom cabinets. That experience made Mullick a think.
You know, there has to be a more methodical way of finding lost objects. Right, I mean, like, what's your researchers know? And what about people like detectives and search and rescue responders? How do they hunt stuff down? On this episode of LifeKit, how to find the stuff you've lost?
And we're not just going to tell you to look harder if you've lost something. Mullick will bring you useful techniques to find things that don't have an air tag on them. Whether that's something sentimental, like a class ring, or something valuable, like an envelope
“pull a cash, or something you need to cross the border.”
And I'll reveal how I finally found my missing passport.
Country singer and rapper Shibuzi wants us to remember our history accurately. A cowboy image, you know, we tend to think that was just a white man, you know, on a horse with a cowboy hat, but, you know, one in every four cowboys were black. On the Sunday story from up first, Shibuzi talks about his latest album and the Black Roots of Country Music.
Listen to the Sunday story and the MPR app, or wherever you get your podcast. This season on Planet Money Summer School, we have drilled for oil in Norway. We've smuggled products in the North Korea. And now we make it to our seventh continent, Antarctica. That's right, big for me.
Mr. Penguin, speak for me. Another sound of Antarctica, that's a reporter trying to interview a penguin. We'll explain on Planet Money Summer School. Listen on the NPR app, or wherever you get your podcasts. Okay, so you're driving to work, or you're on a walk, or you're at the gym or whatever,
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So after I called my boss and told them I wasn't coming in, I went into my bedroom, where I lost my passport, and I turned it upside down. I remember feeling so overwhelmed that I wasn't looking carefully in the room. That's exactly what you want to avoid when you're looking for a lost object. This is take away one.
“Your attention is like a spotlight, and you need to be able to point it at the task at hand.”
To do that, you've got to relax, which I know is the last thing you want to hear when you've lost something important. Aaron Robbins is a cognitive psychologist at the University of Richmond, and she specializes in visual search. She says that stress clouds our ability to focus. Stress can have a couple of different types of effects on us.
Imagine you're highly distracted because you're thinking about something that's coming up, like a big international trip that you're packing and getting ready for. That type of distraction, that mental distraction, is taking away attention or resources from the task at hand. So I was already frazzled when I was handling my passport to begin with.
Then I realized I lost it, which was my second layer of stress.
In terms of visual processing, when you are stressed out, do you have that sort of fighter flight response kicking in, that sympathetic nervous system is kicking into gear, your heart is beating, a little faster, you might get a little sweaty because you're anxious. What that does is it actually narrows your attention. So if your attention is like a spotlight, you could increase the size of that beam or shrink it down. When it's narrow,
it's almost like you're having tunnel vision. On one hand, that can be great. You're able to process your environment with a lot more detail. But to some degree, you need your attention sort of expanded. In order to get the gist of your search environment, to know where to put that
Spotlight next.
It helps to take a breath kind of calm the body down because it really is your body response to that stress that's causing that restriction and attention. Once you've come down and centered yourself again, it's time to start hunting. Take away, too. If you've lost something
“important, think about the features of the object that would really make it stand out in the environment.”
Aaron says it'll make your search easier and more efficient. When you are looking for objects,
you're using a bunch of different cognitive processes in your brain. But the two most important
ones are memory and attention. You're going to rely on your memory to remind you what the lost object looks like and it's likely location. It's 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. Say you're looking for a white sedan in the parking lot. To find it, you're not going to look at every single car in the lot. Your attention is going to be directed
to cars that are white, that are sedan shaped. You're going to skip over the black SUVs and that helps you save time. This is what scientists call attentional guidance. It's the process of moving your attention toward areas in your environment where you'd most likely find your object, including important features of your object and where you tend to keep the object. It's something we do all the time without even realizing it. When we look for a toothbrush in
the morning or favorite coffee mug, you only realize you're looking for something when it becomes challenging. For example, when you're looking for a white sedan in a parking lot full of white
“sedans. So in that case, you have to really think about what would make this object stand apart”
in the scene. What are some distinctive features of this object? Maybe you have a bumper sticker that sets it apart. Erin used this tactic recently when she lost the back of a rose gold gearing on a carpet in a similar color. So I had to think about, okay, what would set my earring apart from this carpet that would allow me to find it? Well, all my earring is shiny. It would reflect light. And so as soon as I thought about that, it's like almost instantly I saw it.
Okay, so you've tried this technique and you still can't find what you're looking for. Time for take away three. Think about the likely scenarios of how and where your object got lost. Damian Garcia is a metal detecting enthusiast. For more than a decade, he's been using his metal detector to help people where he lives in northern California, find their lost jewelry in some pretty challenging environments, parks, beaches, roads, his track record is impressive.
Over the years, he says he's helped recover some 50 lost objects for folks. When people pay him to find a lost object, he charges around 25 to 35 bucks a search. He starts off by asking them
“questions. Do you have any locations that you put it normally? Have you lost it before?”
Is it falling off before? Well, doing something, you know, some people say, oh yeah,
it always slips off when I'm in my car and I play with my ring while I'm driving.
Then he goes through typical ways people lose rings off their hand. He's got a lot of experience in the behavior of rings as you can imagine. Did you throw anything away that day? Were you doing with cold water? Did you put on lotion somewhere? And one of my favorite ways that Damian helps people find their lost jewelry without the use of a metal detector is to recreate the scene. An example that was is that a couple were pulled over to a side of the road and she
tossed the ring out in the passenger seat. Side note, Damian says a scenario happens a lot. Couples get into an argument and one of them takes off their wedding band and checks it out the window and anchor. The then they make up and then they can't find where they threw their ring. So they contact Damian. If you have going, it's right there. I threw it straight out the window right there. Damian wondered, was it really 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. Well, she threw it three times in a row and it never went straight
out the window like you would think. It went flying back behind the car because of her arm going out the window makes her hand throw it towards the back of the car. So it went back about 20 feet to the rear of the car going on a different direction. Using this technique, he was able to find the woman's ring. Yay, Damian! So the next time you lose something, try recreating the potential movement of the object. I should have done that with my passport.
I could have taken something similar to it, like a little booklet or something, laid it on my bed the last place I saw it and it could have ruffled the duvet covered
Down to see where something of that size and weight might have landed.
found it was not that far from my bed actually, more on the exact spot later. At this point in
“your search, you probably looked in some pretty obvious places, now it's time to change your perspective”
and scour elsewhere. This is Take Way 4. Michael Hout is a cognitive psychologist and the director of the vision sciences and memory lab at New Mexico State University. He specializes in how people find things and where and why people move their eyes. He was telling me about this experiment that one of his students did. She had participants look for objects in a campus courtyard and she found that people tended only to look at the ground when they searched. So they're not looking
up. They're just kind of walking in a straight line and sweeping back and forth with their head in their eyes and front of them. This is different from how search and rescue responders and law enforcement operate. These professional scander environment in 360 degrees. That means looking down, looking up, looking left and right, crouching down to change your perspective,
turning around to view things that weren't visible to you when you first approached them.
“He says if you've lost something, you need to engage in these kinds of perspective changing behaviors”
too. That also means looking in unexpected places. So if you can't find your keys in the places where you normally leave them, your purse, your pocket, the entryway table at the front door. You also have to then sort of force yourself to look in the low probability areas. I think sometimes people put their keys in weird places or they drop them or someone moves them. Search and rescue responders use this technique when they look for missing persons in the wilderness.
Instead of just looking on a trail for clues like footprints or a cell phone,
they look up at the trees and off the beaten path. A windbreaker that someone shed when they were
getting hot, for example, might have been picked up by the wind and blown into a bush or a tree. When I was looking for my passport, I actually checked inside the fridge. I know the sounds far-fetched, but maybe I was holding it, intending to put in my backpack. Got hungry and then brought it into the kitchen with me? No. I did not find it in the fridge. But it was still good that I did that anyway. This exercise is all about breaking out of the way you would normally
search for something. And that takes a little bit of additional effort to sort of force yourself out of the routine that you might automatically use to look for something. More tips from life kit in a moment. This week on Wayway. To tell me, we talked with our panel, Julianne Nicole Johnson, Peter Gross, and Tignitarra about the new trade war with Canada. I can't imagine maple syrup being any more expensive, like it costs as much as a car,
like the stroke? What kind of car are you buying? Don't miss our full conversation and the rest of our games, listen to the wait wait, don't tell me podcasts in the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts. At this point, if you've looked in some weird places and you still can't find your lost object, it's time to bust out a more serious search technique. Take away five, divide your space up into sections and then search each section thoroughly. Aaron says grid search, as it's called,
is one form of systematic search. It 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 objects distinctive features may be hard to spot. It's going to be slow, less efficient, but it's going to ensure that you find the thing that you're looking for. 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. Aaron says the general idea is to come up with a strategy to be thorough with
“it 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 order that makes sense to you. Aaron says you are likely going to forget where you searched, so have a way to remember the places you already sifted through them. When I lost my passport in my bedroom, I deployed a similar strategy. I divided the room into sections and I put a post-it note where I had already looked. Aaron thought that was an
excellent strategy, but did I find my passport with this method? No. Looking back on my journey to find my passport, I realized I did one thing right. I was persistent. That's our final takeaway. Take away six. Be persistent. Daryl Ellis is head of A1 Detective Agency in Illinois. He's been a private investigator since 1996. His whole job is to find stuff. People, to say, serve them legal papers,
Sometimes physical items like vintage cards and important documents.
to be a good detective. If I had to use one word, I would say tenacity. It's my client asking me
“to do a former service forum and I try to do my best to locate anybody that they're requesting me”
to locate. Daryl can spend hours doing surveillance, following targets, taking photos of them, logging their whereabouts. Weeks tracking down information about the location of a specific individual. I'm looking for a gentleman now. I've been looking for a month and we've pulled out all the resources kind of locate him. Been a five or six addresses and he hasn't lived there. Daryl says he'll keep looking as long as his clients want him to, but Damian says sometimes they give up before he does.
Sometimes they don't have the patience and they're, you know, an hour into two hours into it
and I'm on my hands with knees and crawling through bushes and stuff and they're looking at me
like, you don't have to go anymore looking and you don't, you know, they're kind of like,
“I guess it's gone and I just don't know. I don't, I don't give up until I'm satisfied.”
So if you've lost something you really care about, keep going. Don't lose hope. When I was looking for my passport, I remember sitting on my bed and looking around the room. At this point, it was about three p.m. and my brain was fried. There were post-it notes everywhere. I'd emptied all the drawers in my cabinet to see if the passport was in there and I just had this moment of clarity. The passport has to be near the bed. It has to be because that's where I last
side and I don't remember taking it anywhere else. So I pushed the mattress off the bed and where did I find it? Wedged between the wall of the bed and the side of the mattress. Hallelujah! Reflecting back on that wild, wild search, I truly believe that if I had these tips, I just gave you, I would have found it a lot faster. And listen, if you don't find the object you're looking for,
“hold on to the fact that you tried really, really hard to find it. That's what Damian does.”
It may help to know that I did my best to look for it, you know, and not to spend time looking in areas that I have looked. And you know, maybe it will show up someday. Or if not, you know, you did the best you could. Let's recap. Take away one. Your attention is a spotlight. You need to be relaxed so you can widen your beam and stay focused on your search. Take away two. Speed up your search by identifying
the qualities of your missing object that make it stand out from the environment. Take away three. Search the obvious. Think about the likely scenarios of how and why your object might have gotten lost to begin with. And where it might be. Take away four. Change your perspective. Professional finders like search and rescue responders don't just look at the floor. They look behind. They look above and they look off the beaten path. Take away five. Create a systematic way of
searching for your lost object. Divide your room into a grid, search each square thoroughly,
and use post-it notes to mark where you've already looked. And finally take away six. Don't
give up. Be persistent just like our detective and our metal detecting enthusiast. And you'll hopefully find what you're looking for. That was LifeKit's digital editor, Monica Greed. For more LifeKit check out our other episodes. We've got one on improving your sense of direction and another on strengthening your memory. You can find those at npr.org/lifekit. And if you love LifeKit and you just can't get enough,
subscribe to our newsletter at npr.org/lifekit newsletter. Also we love hearing from you. So if you have episode ideas or feedback you want to share, email us at [email protected]. This episode of LifeKit was produced by Margaret Serena. Our visuals editor is CJ Rekalon. Megan Cain is our senior supervising editor and Lauren Gonzalez is our executive producer. Our production team also includes Andy Tagle, Clare Murray Schneider, and Sylvie Douglas. Engineering Support comes from Quacie Lee.
I'm Mary El Sigadra. Thanks for listening. How will a historically unpopular president navigate a midterm election season that may leave him with a lot less power? Stay caught up on the latest news with Trump's terms, the podcast where we curate npr's coverage of President Trump and short episodes focused on a single story.
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Billionaire Mark Cuban has stared into the belly of the beast of America's health care system.
“I mean it's so bad you can go through a long list of really quality hospitals and they don't”
know their costs. So can Medicare for all be a solution? We take a hard look at the cost of the
program along with U.S. health care itself. Find this and hear more stories from the indicator
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