Same thing if you never know where you parked your car.
It’s so annoying, even infuriating, when you’re late and can’t find your keys. But Dr. Michel Cymes has a very simple trick to make sure this doesn’t happen to you again. And it works for losing your keys, your car, your checkbook… for everything.
Before getting to the heart of the matter, let’s remember that it’s not necessarily worrying to no longer know where you put your keys. As Bruno, a geriatrician who is followed by more than 60,000 people on Instagramlosing keys is not a sign of “memory” loss as such. Sometimes people who start losing their personal belongings worry about these memory lapses and the possibility of the onset of Alzheimer’s disease. “We don’t lose our memory as we get older. In fact, we lose our attention and that’s normal.” he explains in a video made with Dr. Cymes. This is what happens when you lose your keys. “When we put our keys down somewhere, we do it mechanically, we don’t necessarily “pay attention” to the fact that we put our keys down and then we say that we forgot. In fact, it’s a lack of attention and not a lack of memory.” Rather reassuring, right?
But then how can we make up for this lack of attention and find our keys or, better, stop losing them? “There’s a trick for that,” answers Michel Cymes and it’s very easy. “If you put down your keys and you never know where you put them or when you parked your car, if you no longer know which street or which spot in a parking lot, by doing it you say it out loud.” Concretely, you have to say out loud: “I put my keys on the coffee table in the entrance.” So you have memorized the action because you have concentrated on forcing yourself to say it. In the same way saying “I parked my car in space X” Or “i parked my car on street x” to find it easily. Try it and you will see, it works!