By Chris Cosci

The mind works in mysterious ways. As children, we fill our minds with all sorts of useless information. As we grow older, we recognize that the mind has limited storage space. By the time we're adults, there's barely enough room left for the simple minutiae of our daily lives. The mind can't store the knowledge of what we ate for breakfast because the space is filled up with lyrics to songs we haven't heard in over 10 years.

This phenomenon is often witnessed in parking lots. As soon as we step away from a parking lot and inside the store next to where we parked, our mind immediately discards the location of our car in favor of retaining our locker combination from high school. When we leave the store, we join the other lost shoppers who have been desperately looking for their car for the last fifteen minutes.

Maybe the solution is to always have a child with you. After all, their minds are still relatively empty and have plenty of room for this information. Twenty years later, they won't be able to remember the date of their next dental appointment, but they'll always recall that you parked your car in Row G, Aisle 12.

I always thought it was bad enough forgetting where your parking spot is. However, I recently managed to trump this achievement with a mind-blowing experiment in memory failure. It started on a normal Sunday evening. I was driving to a teaching job in a fairly unfamiliar town. I had only been there once, but the directions were pretty simple. On this evening, about one block from my destination, the road was closed for a street fair.

I was detoured to another section of the town, where I ended up driving around for about fifteen minutes looking for a place to park. When I finally parked, I realized that I had five minutes to find my building. I started walking in the general direction, eventually spotting a landmark shopping center I remembered from my first visit. I made it to the teaching center just in time. I finished my class two and a half hours later, and left to drive home. And that's when it happened.

As I stepped out of the building, I started walking back to the general area where my car was parked. After about one block, I came to the stark realization that I had no idea where my car was. I don't mean that I couldn't find the exact spot - I couldn't find the street. I was lost in a small town with no clue how to find my car.

In a parking lot, you can at least take comfort that your search is limited to the confines of the lot itself. A parking lot is just one, self-contained space filled with cars - including yours. My situation was more like being unable to find the parking lot.

It didn't help that the streets in this area didn't cross each other in a simple grid-like pattern. Instead, they all curved around each other, intersecting at crossing circles, and wrapping around in a complex web. And if that wasn't enough, the streets occasionally changed names. What was called South Station Complex here was called Great Neck Road just one block later.

After fifteen minutes, I saw a cop sitting in a parked car on a street corner. But what was I going to ask him? "Excuse me, have you seen my car?" I couldn't even give him my license plate number because I certainly don't have room for that in my head. With nowhere left to turn, I finally approached him and said, "I can't find my car. I parked it just past a traffic circle, somewhere on an overpass or something like that."

Despite my certainty that he was going to test my sobriety or call for backup, the cop kindly pointed me in a general direction. I thanked him and followed his suggestion. Sure enough, he led me straight to the area I was looking for. After completing a full circle around the area, I finally spotted my car.

Perhaps I was so concentrated on finding my building that I failed to think about getting back to my car after class. Maybe it was just my unfamiliarity with the area that confused me. Then again, it might just be that my mind didn't have room to retain this important information. Nonetheless, I did eventually find my car - and I still remember how to defeat King Koopa in Super Mario Bros. So who am I to complain?