Where did I put my pants? A frustrating loss — in my own home — had me wondering if I’d lost my mind. But part of the answer was right in front of my face, writes Cathrin Bradbury.
I recently lost a new pair of pants. They were excellent pants: French navy, with the hard-to-find fitted calf and an unexpected cuff. I wore them for three days straight and developed an intense fondness for them, so losing them was upsetting enough. But I lost my pants. Which made losing my mind seem like the more pressing problem. It felt important to find both.
A University of Aberdeen study decoded “optimal foraging” based on rapid eye movements, which meant searching cluttered places instead of the neater areas humans prefer to look, but my house was uniformly tidy so I crossed that off the list.
“It’s interesting that your friend Gillian is a Buddhist.” It was time to bring in the scientific big guns to assist in the search for my pants, so I’d called Nicole Anderson, a senior scientist at Baycrest’s Rotman Research Institute in Toronto. I told her that Gillian, who is both a Buddhist and a Buddhist scholar, had an astonishing memory for most things except misplaced objects. She described losing them as “a gap in time or missing time.
And here’s the even better news from science: attention failure, unlike memory failure, is not related to age. The behaviour that presages dementia looks more like getting lost in your own neighbourhood or repeating yourself over and over in the same conversation with no awareness that you have done so.
“Stress or trauma can also contribute to attention failure,” said Anderson. “If you were experiencing any of that.” It’s a beautifully written and thoughtful piece, about the much more important loss of her father. I quote her here, because what she discovered aligned with what I was figuring out about my pants. “Regardless of what goes missing, loss putsin our place; it confronts us with lack of order and loss of control and the fleeting nature of existence.”
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