Lost in Dallas: a short story

"I’m looking forward to seeing you tomorrow in Dallas", I texted my cousin Jason, a 40 something father of two teenagers. "Do you want to get together for dinner?"

He texted back: "I've lost my mother! She walked out a couple of days ago and we can't find her anywhere!!"

Oh my god. I knew that she wasn’t well, having suffered from schizophrenia for much of her life. Jason’s father had been taking care of her, but he passed away last year. Like any worthy son, he moved her from Houston up to his house in Dallas, becoming her caregiver.

"I'm so sorry Jason." I texted back, figuring that we won’t be seeing each other on my trip down to Dallas tomorrow, which I’m going because some months ago I was invited to give a talk there. I had planned to take my mom with me, thinking that it would be good to have a small family get together.

The next day comes and my 83 year old mom and I make our way (slowly) through the airport. She prefers that I get her a wheelchair as it makes it easier to board the plane, and indeed we get to sit in the front row, with her taking the window seat and me taking the aisle, and a young lady joining us later in the middle seat. I take out my computer and start working on the talk that I'm supposed to give, and the young lady takes out her crochet needle and starts working on what I later learn is a sweater. She asks me about the slides on my computer, and I ask her about her crocheting, and my mom joins in, mentioning that she loves to knit. She has brought sandwiches and gives the spare one to the young lady. I close my computer and put it away in the pocket in front of me and spend the rest of the flight engaged in the conversation.

As we are landing, I text Jason and ask about his mom. He replies "I found her! A policeman found her walking barefoot and took her to the hospital. She's been there for three days as Jane Doe."

“Oh my god that’s wonderful”, I text back. We make plans to meet later that day and have dinner together.

The university has sent a driver, and he takes us to the hotel, which is only about 10 minutes away. We check in and go to the room and unpack. That's when I realize that I can’t find my computer. “I must’ve left it on seat pocket on the plane!”, I hysterically tell my mom.

In my mind I’m going over the possibilities. Perhaps the cleaning crew found the computer, in which case it would be stored somewhere in the airport. But the plane was late, and they were boarding immediately after we deplaned, which makes it more likely that the computer and the plane are now on the other side of the country.

A million things are going through my head. I can buy another laptop. I can give a chalk-talk. I kick myself for not having backed things up for more than a week. But that won’t help now as I don’t have the backup here with me. That conversation with the crocheting lady distracted me. But honestly, I really want to blame my mom, who is sitting with me in the hotel room calmly having a cup of tea.

Using my phone, I search for information on what to do if you’ve done something stupid like this and learn that if the airline finds the computer, they will take it to the lost luggage office at the airport. There is a phone number and I call them, only to get their answering machine. I leave a message.

The hotel has a pool. I’m going nuts, so to reduce the stress I go for a swim. Then with nothing to do, I collect my mom and we take a ride back to the airport. There is a line at the lost luggage counter, I can hear the phone ringing and no one answering it. We slowly make our way to the front and the lady says “I’m sorry, but no one has turned in a computer.” “Please give us a call later tonight.” I want to scream “but you don’t answer the phone!”, but silently turn and head back to the car.

We go back to the hotel and have a cup of tea. I realize that it’s the uncertainty of not knowing that’s hard to take, boiling up my anxiety. Indeed, I’d be happy to pay someone a few hundred dollars right now just so I would know whether the computer is going to be found or not. It’s an illogical thing to do because knowing about the outcome in advance will have no impact on the outcome, yet I’m willing to pay for it just so I wouldn’t have to suffer not knowing. But why is it that not knowing something can produce anxiety?

Emma Pierson and Noah Goodman at Stanford University have studied this phenomenon. In 2014, they ran an online study where volunteers were asked to imagine being locked in a room for an hour. At the end of the hour there was a chance that they would win or lose an amount of money. Would they prefer to be told at the beginning of the hour whether they will be winning or losing?

They found that people craved advance information, and this desire increased with the probability of winning or losing, especially as the stakes increased. Indeed, people were willing to pay for that information, despite the fact that having advanced information had no bearing on the outcome. Pierson and Goodman explained this behavior by noting that information allowed people to plan for the future, and this was valuable because we have limited cognitive resources. Knowing the outcome in advance allowed us to plan for how we would conduct our affairs after the key event revealed itself.

Bilal Bari and Sam Gershman followed up this work in 2024 with a similar study, replicating the Pierson and Goodman results. They found that if there was a good chance that we would earn $1000, we would be willing to pay to find out at the beginning of the hour, but we would rather avoid knowing if there was a good chance that we would lose money. Bari and Gershman then performed psychological testing on the subjects to assess their susceptibility to anxiety and found that the subjects with high anxiety traits exhibited a greater desire to pay for the advance information. That is, people who suffered from anxiety placed a higher value on the information that would inform them of the outcome.

For me, knowing if they would find my computer or not relieved me of the various conflicting plans that I would otherwise have to carry with me until the event. That relief, that lifting of the dark cloud that was consuming my thoughts, is what I was willing to pay for.

Fortunately, distraction arrives in the form of my cousin and his two beautiful kids, which he’s been raising pretty much on his own. You see, it’s not just his mom that has schizophrenia, it’s also his wife, a brilliant physicist whom he had to divorce a few years ago. Despite the separation, he takes care of her as well. I can’t find words to tell him how much I admired his love of family.

He picks us up and we go to his house. I ask about the search for his mom. He says “I was out driving the neighborhood each moment of my waking hours for 3 days. I knocked on doors, put up flyers, called the police and the hospitals.” “I was just going out of my mind.”

He continues: “The police wanted a doctor’s note saying my mom had dementia. Apparently, they don’t search for a missing person with schizophrenia.” “And the hospitals said they had no one under with that description in the emergency room.”

Then he says: “You know who helped me the most?”

“Who?” I ask.

“The homeless. They would give me a hug, and sometimes cry with me. They understood what it meant to be lost.”

“So how did you find her?” I ask.

“The city hospital had her in their psychiatric ward. She eventually calmed down to the point where she could tell them her name and they contacted me.”

“Oh my god. I’m so glad she’s OK.” I reply.

“I decided that as long as she’s in the hospital, let’s have them do some of the routine stuff that she should’ve done years ago, you know, mammogram, etc., before I bring her home.”

As we are talking, his daughter, who is perhaps 12, is making tea, while his son, who is maybe a year or two older, is cleaning the kitchen. The kids are running the house, which perhaps is not surprising given the situation with their mom and grandmother.

We go out to dinner, and as we are waiting for the check, I step outside to call the airport. Once again, it’s the answering machine. On the drive back to the hotel Jason suggests, “let’s try the airport.” We drive over and as they wait in the no-parking zone, I go over to the lost luggage office. There is no one around, except for the lady behind the counter. I walk over and ask if the cleaning crew happened to have found my computer on the flight down from Baltimore. She glances down to the counter and keeps looking down. I follow her gaze and shout “That’s my computer!”

References

Emma Pierson and Noah Goodman (2014) Uncertainty and denial: a resource-rational model of the value of information. PLOS ONE. DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0113342

Bari, B. A., & Gershman, S. J. (2024). The value of non-instrumental information in anxiety: insights from a resource-rational model of planning. PsyArXiv Preprints. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/hwm78