14 DAY TRIAL // Losing something, be it one's keys, phone or the like, is nothing if not frustrating. According to one team of University of California, Berkeley researchers, the brain copes with such situations by rolling out so-called search parties and making them look around for the lost object.
More precisely, it mobilizes areas that are typically in the business of keeping a close eye on other issues and forces them to focus on the lost object instead.
In other words, the brain activity of people who are busy looking for something is fairly different from the brain activity of people who are simply going about their business.
Because of this, those who are trying to find something appear oblivious to anything else but that object, sources say.
The researchers have discovered that the brain switches and re-purposes areas of the mind in this manner by asking several volunteers to pin down some items on a computer screen and monitoring their brain activity while they were doing so.
A detailed account of this research and its findings was published in the journal Nature Neuroscience.