Absent-mindedness
"Most events of absent-mindedness—forgetting where you left something or wondering why you just entered a room—are caused by a simple lack of attention," says Dr. Daniel Schacter, a distinguished psychologist and memory scientist." You're supposed to remember something, but you haven't encoded it deeply."
"Encoding," Schacter explains, "is a special way of paying attention to an event that has a major impact on recalling it later." Failure to encode properly can create annoying situations. If you put your mobile phone in a pocket of a jacket, for example, and don't pay attention to what you did because you're involved in a conversation, you'll probably forget where exactly you put your mobile phone. Your memory itself isn't failing you. Rather, you didn't give your memory system the information it needed.
As many people accept, women have slightly better memories than men, possibly because they pay more attention to their environment, and memory relies on just that. Yes, visual cues can help prevent absent-mindedness. But be sure the cue is clear and available. If you want to remember to take a medication with lunch, put the pill bottle on the kitchen table—don't leave it in the medicine chest and write yourself a note that you keep in a pocket.
Lack of interest can also lead to absent-mindedness. "A man who can recite sports statistics from 30 years ago may not remember to drop a letter in the mailbox," says Zelinski, a scientist from New York University. There are many cases in life where women can remember prices of bags of different brands while they tend to forget the specific place where they put their bags.