Lost Glasses and the Amazing Human Brain

The brain is an amazing organ. I have often marveled at how it can deploy indirect strategies to jog its own memory, like when you can’t remember something so you begin recalling related subject matter that you think might trigger the lost information. Well, my nimble brain did something similar today. This morning I was super multitasking. Cooking food for the dog, vacuuming, preparing my lunch, putting dishes away, taking out the trash, and about a dozen other things all overlapping in a blur of unconnected tasks. I had my computer glasses hanging from the neck of my t-shirt which are special blue-blockers I simply cannot live without. Suddenly, when I went to check email, my glasses weren’t on my desk? Where could they be? I had also run to the supermarket and so was worried they may have come off while I was loading groceries, or did they get knocked off when I had to lift my dog (the smartest dog in the world) https://timothywiney.substack.com/p/worlds-smartest-dog

out of the driver’s seat and return him to the back seat behind the partition he jumps over to ostensibly try his hand (paw) at driving (he does this every, single, time)? Did I snag them when I lifted my trash can into the dumpster? Could they be in or near the dumpster at the end of my street? I traipsed back to investigate and found nothing. They could have been inside the dumpster, but I rationalized it was a low probability since dumpster diving was a bridge too far, and smelly, at this early stage in my investigation. I didn’t know where they were, but I surmised my flurry of morning activity probably caused them to fall off someplace unusual since they weren’t in any of their usual locations. I also knew that if I didn’t find them within the next 10-20 minutes, they would be lost forever, and I told my wife as much. Somehow I knew they were in the most improbable of places and the only way I would find them would be to trace my steps, a near impossibility give the atypical helter-skelter flurry of unrelated activities I had engaged in in such rapid succession. Could they have fallen inside the vacuum cleaner whose filter I just changed, or into the garbage can where I dumped the old filter, a filter now in the aforementioned dumpster? The possibilities were endless. So where were they? As I imagined, they were in fact in a place where I never would have found them in time to do me any good. Earlier in the morning, I was looking for a power strip to plug in two appliances on the kitchen counter. I have a chest of drawers in my office whose bottom two drawers are almost never opened, both because of what they contain (power strips and adapters) and because the drawers derail from their tracks every single time I pull them out. Today I resolved to fix these annoying drawers after they both predictably derailed but then quickly got side tracked (pun intended) by dogfood boiling on the stove. And there it was, the memory so scarring, I had blocked it out, like Napalm in Vietnam (ok maybe not quite that scarring)

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It was only seeing the bottom two drawers askew and incompletely shut that I remembered my earlier struggle at all, and you guessed it, my glasses were among the jumble of wires in the bottom drawer amongst all those tangled power strips! So you see, had my brain not given me the ‘it’s now or never’ signal, I never would have found them because glasses don’t ‘turn up’ from such an unlikely location.