Photo Credit: Silas Kohler
It’s impractical, nearly impossible, to remember each detail of our daily lives.
So our brains compensate by making memory generalisations called:
Schemata
Which represent the ways in which the characteristics of certain events or objects are recalled, as determined by one’s self-knowledge and cultural-political background.
For example, instead of remembering every peach you’ve ever eaten, your brain creates a schema of peaches: hard, orange, sweet.
Not to be confused with:
Schema
Which, in social science, is a mental structure that an individual use to organize knowledge and guide cognitive processes and behaviour.
Thus the same thing happens with your keys.
Rather than recalling every instance of placing your keys on, say the kitchen counter, you create a “keys – kitchen counter” schema, so you have difficulty remembering the rare instances that don’t place your keys on the kitchen counter, basically the formula doesn’t match.
Let me know how often you lose your keys in the comment below.
