Hello everyone. You are here to learn some
fact in 3 mins. Have you ever had an experience
like this? Last week, one of my friends asked
me to have a lunch with him. When I nearly
leave my home, I noticed that: Oh no! I lost
my key! I spent half an hour searching every
bag, every pocket, but I still can’t find
it and I just gave up. After a day, I have
forgotten that I have lost my key. And when
I go take a shower, you guess what. There
it is! It is in the toilet! Things will only
appear when you don’t look for it! Why does
this unlucky event always happen?
One of the reasons is that your focus is trapped
by your thought when you are looking for your
item. Most of the time when you are searching
for something, you search for it very urgently.
With such a time pressure, your mind will
try to work efficiently by searching only
at the most possible areas. You will search
your bags, pockets and everywhere that your
past experiences told you where the key should
be. But this thinking shortcut, or actually
it is called schema, will as a result trap
our focus. If my key is in my bags and pockets,
this strategy works perfectly fine but when
things doesn’t happen as usual, focusing
too much on bags and pockets will result in
missing other possibilities, like the toilet.
Although I have no idea why my key will be
in the toilet. Anyway, we focus too much on
only a few areas when we look for something
so when things aren’t there, of course we
cannot find it. On the other hand, when we
don’t look for it and take a step back,
we will walk around and accidentally reach
those unpredicted area. This is when we feel:
“wow things appear only when I don’t look
for it”.
Yet, recall your past experience, does the
above unlucky event really happen frequently
in your life? Do things only appear when we
don’t look for it? I bet that you found
your toothbrush, your phone, your wallet and
most of the stuff you are looking for. “Things
appear only when we don’t look for it”
is just a rare occasion. Then why will we
have such a misconception that the statement
is fairly accurate? The reason comes to how
our brain stores our memory. While these occasions
are that rare, our mind will put extra focus
on this kind of experience. We will form a
deeper memory about it and hence recalling
these unlucky events will become relatively
easier. With our common sense, we know that
events that are easy to recall doesn’t mean
it frequently happens. However, our mind is
too stupid to differentiate both memory and
we just assume they are the same. So even
it is not true to say that things always appear
only when we don’t look for it. These memories
are just too strong that cause us to overestimate
its occurrence.
You have now learned why we misbelieve that
things appears only when we don’t look for
it. Don’t stop your learning by subscribing
this channel so you can always learn something
in 3 mins. This is 3 mins Fact. Thank you
for watching.
