Searching for something is an activity with which we are all quite familiar. Perhaps because the search itself is apt to seem a waste of time, there are a number of strategies that we adopt in order to minimize our efforts. Not all of these strategies are particularly logical or rational ones. For example, we may keep looking in the kitchen drawer for a pair of scissors, convinced that that is where they should be, long after there is sufficient evidence to show that they are not there. There may also be times when we choose an easy place to search for something, ignoring the fact that we did not lose or leave it there. An apocryphal example is the story of the professor who defended searching on the wrong side of the building for spectacles that fell out of the window by pointing out that the windows on the other side had thorny bushes growing underneath. In short, many of our searches have a rather frustrating, irrational quality to them.