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The Wisdom of Psychopaths
In this engrossing journey into the lives of psychopaths and their infamously crafty behaviors, the renowned psychologist Kevin Dutton reveals that there is a...
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As I get older, why does my memory for names seem to deteriorate?
—Tony Karger, U.K.
Paul Reber, a psychology professor at Northwestern University, answers:
Forgetting someone's name is a common misstep. The structure of memory explains why you can often recognize the person's face and even come up with other details, such as where and how you met, but the name remains elusive.
We are often only able to piece together elements from a past event. When remembering what you had for dinner one week ago, for example, you can probably picture yourself sitting at a table with a plate of food in front of you. You can likely recall whether you were alone or with others or whether it was a casual night in or a fancy affair. Your brain, however, offers only crude brushstrokes. It does not create as complete a picture as a video recording would.
Vivid, accurate memory is actually a hard trick to pull off for the human brain. Our brain is not wired like a camera; it is composed of billions of neurons that perform many jobs besides remembering. During memory retrieval your brain cheats, filling in the gaps to concoct the most likely scenario. Let us say you remember sitting around the dining room table with friends. You conclude that you were eating roast chicken and mashed potatoes—your go-to menu when hosting guests. Your brain doesn't store a full picture of the evening, but recalling one aspect of the night can cue other elements, ultimately generating a full picture. This process of association is useful for filling in the blanks; however, it can also be unreliable, which explains why eyewitness accounts are surprisingly error-prone.
With names, the problem is that they are usually arbitrary. The fact that you met Tom on the sideline of a soccer field means he probably has a child the same age as yours, likely lives nearby and might have a job common to people in your area. All those elements create a reasonable picture of Tom, except none of these clues offers hints about his name. It could just as easily be Dick or Harry.
As we age and our memory starts to function less well, names are most likely among the first things to escape us. You can use tricks to help remember, such as rhyming the name with an object. What is easiest, however, is to keep in mind that everyone has difficulty with names, so you can be less embarrassed when one eludes you and less critical of others when yours escapes them.
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13 Comments
Add CommentDear Mr REber, I thought you might be amused by something I read about many years ago. It seems that in the Poynesian islands the problem. actually the embarrassment of forgetting names led to a really critical social crises. Iy seems that at ome time the people used to make journeys by boat to many different islands. Sometimes they would encounter people whom they had not seen for years or decades. The ability to remember names never became an issue. What each person would do when greeting the other would be to say their own name. Voila! problem solved. How many people who crossed streets to avoid an awkward encounter would have enjoyed meeting an old friend.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI've used this approach for decades, and it works only half the time. I come up to the person whose name I don't recall, say my name, and they are supposed to say their name back. All is well. Half the time, they don't reciprocate and I'm left in the position of them knowing my name, while I still don't know theirs.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI did have one encounter with a particularly dense individual. I walked up to him and said <my name>. They exclaimed, quite incensed. "I'm not <my name>." So, afterwards, not only did I not know his name, he still didn't know mine!
The answer to this dilemma is to not worry about remembering the person's name, but to just say: "What was your name again?" If they are upset about this response then.........let them be upset. People worry too much about being.....so called........ embarrassed.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisGood story!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSo - the reason why I will have difficulty remembering names is because I forget them. Very good analysis, SciAm!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisNo, no, no! The reason you forget names is because you have difficulty remembering them!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIgnore it, it's only the result of drugs and alcohol of our youth.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI've heard that the reason people forget names, in general, is that when they are introduced,they are focused on making sure the other person remembers their name instead of learning the other person's name.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisPerhaps this effect worsens as you get older because when you are younger, there is a social advantage to remembering the names of authority figures - teachers, employers, etc. (or rather, a social disadvantage to not remembering them), and that counterracts the self-centeredness.. When you reach a certain age,you are no longer dependent on these authority figures,so no need to remember names. (You may depend on people in government organizations who are nameless, however.)
A trick I have learned to help with memory is, after you are introduced, say "Nice to meet you *other person's name*". That helps with transferring the name into long-term memory.
After living abroad for more than a decade, everyone I meet these days is only vaguely similar to the person I knew fifteen or even twenty or more years ago. Most of my contemporaries have gone grey and some are even bearded, whilst the ladies have, well, gotten, um, bigger.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe names don't always come to the tongue right away, so I chat on about all the things and people we shared experiences with in common. That seems to work, because long after they've gone on their way, usually the name will pop into my head unannounced.
M Curmudgeon/Null - Thanks for the clarification.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAs we get older, in general, we have difficulty to remember name. It is my experience.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisS. N. Tiwary
DIRECTOR
I'm so bad with names that I have a habit of warning people that I'll probably forget their name. Oddly enough that has doubled the rate of my remembering names.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSometimes people put "mental blocks" on some names so those names do not get hated by people that do not have goods for those names. It is not always a poor memory that causes one to forget a name, there may be a mental block placed by another person to protect the names of people good.
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