There are many quirkish features to the way we are wired up, cognitively speaking. You must have mislaid a letter only to find it where you have looked five times! And I bet you have lost your car keys only to find them just where you left them! The latest lost and found item to test our sanity is our mobile phone! How easy it is to mislay that: then look for it and not see it right under our nose! But there is an explanation!
Mislay your keys or your phone and what happens on the back of that realisation? We tell ourselves with conviction that we have lost them. Most likely, there is our other voice within trying to convince us lamely that we have merely mislaid them, But the trouble is that it is not strong enough and gets shouted down by the voice asserting we have lost them.
What then would happen if we were to suddenly find them, remembering we have convinced ourselves that we have lost them? And we’ve done more than that! Now our head is fast filling with the realisation of the inconvenience and problems resulting from the inevitable loss!
What ever would happen if we found them right now? Wouldn’t we feel pretty foolish, because self-evidently we hadn’t lost them when we were certain we had?
So why is it we can we look in all the places we could have left them, not see them, only eventually to find them staring at us in one of those self-same places? Aren’t we all guilty sometimes for even feeling convinced that someone must have slipped them back there - when we weren’t looking - just to make us feel more foolish still!
But foolish or not, why did we have this blindspot in the first place? How could we have actually looked straight at the very lost item on each search and still not seen it?
The reason is depressingly simple - as well as disturbingly revealing on how we are wired up.
What happens is this: first, the keys we don’t have; next the dominant voice tells us we have lost them; then the subconscious part of our brain accepts the message unquestioningly and does its utmost to convince our conscious mind of that reality; then, worse, it convinces our whole psyche that to find them would not be a good idea, because it would not be believable to us! So quite literally, we don’t see them for looking at them!
So how do we find them eventually?
Don’t we tend to stop finally and challenge our current thinking? Don’t we, shake ourselves and tell ourselves as convincingly as we can, that we really can’t have lost them. ‘They must be there somewhere!’
In consequence we now go looking to find them, but without that dominant wish to prove we have lost them! And Hey!Hoe, we find them where we left them!
Oh! You might say, but some just give up and don’t go on that final search. What about them?
Yes I would agree. But it is amazing to me how – after a day or two, or a week, or a month later, many of those who did give up, then find them, you know, this time, when they weren’t looking!
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