Skipping the unnecessary details, yesterday I was home alone and as i prepared to leave my house I put something down but when I turned around to retrieve it a few moments later it was no where to be found. I did a moderately thorough search and yet somehow it had vanished. I chalked it up to just one of those things, and left my house. When I returned several hours later I opened my top desk drawer (which I distinctly recall checking) and there it is was in plain site, not even hidden under anything. Now this isn’t the first time something like this has happened it me, or to anyone else i assume. From my experience its considered, like I said, “just one of those things.” So here’s the question: Are millions of people simply making completely normal mistakes (e.g. I recalled checking the drawer but didn’t in actuality) or is something else going on here? Something not accepted as empirical evidence by the general public, and hence dismissed. Just off the top of my head, quantum mechanical effects, spiritual disturbances, psychic powers? Anyone?
In my case, they always end up being mistakes, although I will state that I often blame everyone else in the house first.
Two happened today. I put my coffee in a bookcase when I saw my shoe was untied, and then forgot where it went. Since I never put it there, I looked all over and got a new cup. Later someone mentioned it and I recalled the sequence.
My son just now couldn’t find the measuring cup. We went through every cupboard and winged it by guessing the amount with a 10oz. coffee cup. When we put the dirty cup in the sink, there was the measuring cup, and he said “Oh yes, I just used it for the other ingredients and put it there.” We had both overlooked it in our searches.
They (and you and I) are making perfectly normal mistakes. Consider the number of places a small object can be hidden in a room–do you really think you will remember specifically looking in each of them? For that matter, for obvious locations there’s always the subconscious urge to think “If it were there, I would have seen it”, or to recall looking there on past occasions for various objects–if it’s such an obvious spot, then you’ve surely looked for any number of things there in the past.
Memory, especially memory for minutiae, is a slippery thing. If someone followed you with a checklist of hiding places while you looked for something, you’d probably be surprised how many “obvious” places you never bothered to look.