Find your lost keys faster with these techniques

Finding missing items isn't a matter of "looking harder." There's an art and a science to it. The next time you misplace your wedding ring, try these strategies to hunt it down. They'll make your search process faster, smoother and calmer. Life Kit digital editor Malaka Gharib talks with visual search experts, a metal detector enthusiast and a detective about their best tricks for finding what's lost. This episode originally published October 31, 2024. Follow us on Instagram: @nprlifekit https://www.instagram.com/nprlifekit/?hl=en Sign up for our newsletter here. https://www.npr.org/newsletter/life-kit Have an episode idea or feedback you want to share? Email us at [email protected] mailto:[email protected] Support public media with NPR+ and enjoy perks for over 25 podcasts like this one. This show’s perks include sponsor-free listening and convenient playlists of popular help topics like personal finance, getting healthy, and more. Learn more at plus.npr.org http://plus.npr.org/. See pcm.adswizz.com https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences. NPR Privacy Policy https://www.npr.org/about-npr/179878450/privacy-policy

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• 0:01Speaker 00

  This week on Up First, the midterms less than 15 days away. President Trump, Vice President J.D. Vance, and former President Obama all crisscrossing the country, rallying voters in key races from Michigan to Georgia to North Carolina. Join us every morning as we guide you through the home stretch of this election season up first on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 0:24Marielle Segarra?

  You're listening to Life Kit from NPR.

• 0:32Marielle Segarra?

  Hey, everybody. It's Marielle. A few years ago, our digital editor, Malaka Gharib, 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.

• 0:46Speaker 02

  You can imagine how stressed I was. I mean, the last time I saw my passport was on the bed.

• 0:51Marielle Segarra?

  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.

• 0:59Speaker 02

  I mean, I was really frazzled. I tore up the house, and I was checking the most random places, like the bathroom cabinets.

• 1:06Marielle Segarra?

  That experience made Malaka think, you know, there has to be a more methodical way of finding lost objects.

• 1:12Speaker 02

  Right. I mean, like, what do researchers know? And what about people like detectives and search and rescue responders? How do they hunt stuff down?

• 1:20Marielle Segarra?

  On this episode of Life Kit, 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. Malika 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 full of cash, or something you need to cross the border. And I'll reveal how I finally found my missing passport.

• 1:59Speaker 03

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• 2:51Speaker 04

  Hi there. I'm Brittany Luce. And not to brag, but I host a really fabulous podcast. It's called It's Been a Minute. I love making it, and I think you'll love listening to it. Over the last year, hundreds of thousands of listeners have been tuning in. And I gotta say, if you haven't yet, you're missing out. Listen to the It's Been a Minute podcast from NPR today.

• 3:18Speaker 02

  So after I called my boss and told him 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 enough.

• 3:30Marielle Segarra?

  That's exactly what you want to avoid when you're looking for a lost object. This is takeaway 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. Erin 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.

• 3:58Speaker 05

  Stress can have a couple of different types of effects on us. So imagine you're highly distracted because you're thinking about something that's coming up.

• 4:06Speaker 02

  Like a big international trip that you're packing and getting ready for.

• 4:10Speaker 05

  That type of distraction, that mental distraction, is taking away attentional resources from the task at hand.

• 4:16Speaker 02

  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.

• 4:24Speaker 05

  In terms of visual processing, when you are stressed out, you have that sort of fight or 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.

• 4:45Speaker 02

  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.

• 4:59Speaker 05

  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.

• 5:08Speaker 02

  So take a moment to widen that beam.

• 5:15Speaker 05

  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 in attention.

• 5:24Speaker 02

  Once you've calmed down and centered yourself again, it's time to start hunting. Takeaway two: if you've lost something important, think about the features of the object that would really make it stand out in the environment. Erin says it'll make your search easier and more efficient.

• 5:39Speaker 05

  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.

• 5:48Speaker 02

  You're going to rely on your memory to remind you what the lost object looks like and its likely location.

• 5:54Speaker 05

  It's visual features like color, shape, texture, size, memory for where the object is most likely going to be. And that information and memory is used to direct your attention.

• 6:07Speaker 02

  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.

• 6:14Speaker 05

  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.

• 6:24Speaker 02

  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 a 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.

• 6:53Speaker 05

  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.

• 7:06Speaker 02

  Erin used this tactic recently when she lost the back of a rose gold earring on a carpet in a similar color.

• 7:12Speaker 05

  So I had to think about, okay, 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.

• 7:31Speaker 02

  Okay, so you've tried this technique, and you still can't find what you're looking for. Time for takeaway three. Think about the likely scenarios of how and where your object got lost.

• 7:42Speaker 05

  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.

• 7:58Speaker 02

  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 a search. He starts off by asking them questions.

• 8:11Speaker 06

  Do you have any locations that you put it normally? Have you lost it before? Has it fallen off before while 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.

• 8:26Speaker 02

  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.

• 8:34Speaker 06

  Did you throw anything away that day? Were you dealing with cold water? Did you put on lotion somewhere?

• 8:41Speaker 02

  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.

• 8:49Speaker 06

  An example of that was is that a couple were pulled over the side of the road, and she tossed the ring out in the passenger seat.

• 8:57Speaker 02

  Side note, Damian says this scenario happens a lot. Couples get into an argument, and one of them takes off their wedding band and chucks it out the window in anchor. But then they make up, and then they can't find where they threw their ring. So they contact Damian.

• 9:13Speaker 06

  And she kept going, it's right there. I threw it straight out the window right there.

• 9:17Speaker 02

  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.

• 9:30Speaker 06

  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 a different direction.

• 9:48Speaker 02

  Using this technique, he was able to find the woman's ring. Yay, Damian.

• 9:54Speaker 02

  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 I could have ruffled the duvet cover down to see where something of that size and weight might have landed. Because where he ultimately found it was not that far from my bed, actually. More on the exact spot later.

• 10:22Speaker 02

  At this point in your search, you've probably looked in some pretty obvious places. Now it's time to change your perspective and scour elsewhere. This is takeaway four.

• 10:31Speaker 05

  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.

• 10:56Speaker 07

  So they're not looking up. They're just kind of walking in a straight line and sweeping back and forth with their head and their eyes in front of them.

• 11:05Speaker 02

  This is different from how search and rescue responders and law enforcement operate. These professionals scan their environment in 360 degrees. That means...

• 11:15Speaker 07

  Looking down, looking up, looking left and right, crouching down to change your perspective, turning around. Around to view things that weren't visible to you when you first approached them.

• 11:27Speaker 02

  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.

• 11:44Speaker 07

  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.

• 11:56Speaker 02

  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 cellphone, they look up at the trees and off the beaten path.

• 12:07Speaker 07

  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.

• 12:17Speaker 02

  When I was looking for my passport, I actually checked inside the fridge. I know this sounds far-fetched, but maybe I was holding it, intending to put it 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.

• 12:41Speaker 07

  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.

• 12:50Speaker 02

  More tips from Life Kit in a moment.

• 12:53Speaker 07

  Stay tuned for the following announcements and messages from our sponsors.

• 12:57Speaker 02

  This episode's sponsor is HubSpot, which offers the following message: What if instead of updating your CRM, your CRM updated you? No catching up on manual edits, no more guesswork. HubSpot's self-updating CRM keeps your customer context current and helps you understand what to do next. So, marketing builds more demand, sales wins more deals, and customers keep coming back. Learn more at hubspot.com. This message comes from Midi Health. Most women never get real answers about their hormonal health. Midi is changing that with virtual care covered by most major insurances. Understand your hormones. Visit joinmidi.com to book your first visit today.

• 13:39Speaker 02

  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. Takeaway 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'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.

• 14:12Speaker 05

  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.

• 14:29Speaker 02

  Aaron 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. Aaron says you are likely going to forget where you searched, so have a way to remember the places you already sifted through. 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'd 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

• 15:12Speaker 02

  passport, I realize I did one thing right: I was persistent. That's our final takeaway. Takeaway 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, but sometimes physical items like vintage cards and important documents. I asked him what it takes to be a good detective.

• 15:43Speaker 04

  If I had to use one word, I would say tenacity. It's my client asking me to do a perform a service for him. And I try to do my best to locate anybody that they're requesting me to locate.

• 15:59Speaker 02

  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.

• 16:10Speaker 04

  I mean, I'm looking for a gentleman now. I've been looking for him for a month. And we've pulled out all the resources, kind of locate him, been to five or six addresses, and he hasn't lived there.

• 16:21Speaker 02

  Daryl says he'll keep looking as long as his clients want him to. But Damian says sometimes they give up before he does.

• 16:28Speaker 06

  Sometimes they don't have the patience. And they're, you know, an hour into it, two hours into it, and I'm on my hands and 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, well, I guess it's gone. And I just tell them, no, no, I don't, I don't give up until I'm satisfied.

• 16:56Speaker 02

  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 3:00 PM, 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 saw it. 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,

• 17:39Speaker 02

  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.

• 17:53Speaker 06

  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 had looked. And, you know, maybe it'll show up someday. Or if not, you know, you did the best you could.

• 18:23Speaker 02

  Let's recap. Takeaway one: Your attention is a spotlight. You need to be relaxed so you can widen your beam and stay focused on your search. Takeaway two: Speed up your search by identifying the qualities of your missing object that make it stand out from the environment. Takeaway 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. Takeaway 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. Takeaway 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

• 19:07Speaker 02

  where you've already looked. And finally, takeaway 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.

• 19:22Speaker 02

  That was Life Kit's digital editor, Malaka Greed. For more Life Kit, 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 Life Kit and you just cannot get enough, subscribe to our newsletter at npr.org/lifekitnewsletter. 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 Life Kit was produced by Margaret Serino. Our visuals editor is CJ Ricolon. Megan Cain is our senior supervising editor, and Lauren Gonzalez is our executive producer. Our production team also includes Andy Tagle, Claire Marie Schneider, and Sylvie

• 20:03Speaker 02

  Douglas. Engineering support comes from Kwasi Lee. I'm Marielle Segarra. Thanks for listening.

• 20:24Speaker 02

  Stay tuned for the following announcements and messages from our sponsors. This message comes from iXL. iXL's Level Up Diagnostic gives immediate benchmark results along with personalized action plans that link directly to iXL's skill practice. More at ixl.com/npr. This episode's sponsor is HubSpot, which offers the following message: What if instead of updating your CRM, your CRM updated you? HubSpot's self-updating CRM keeps your customer context current, so you can win more deals. Learn more at hubspot.com.