Why
Names Are So Easy to Forget
Nice to see you
again, Suuu...Sandra? Samantha? Jennifer. Sorry.
By Olga Khazan in The
Atlantic
Once, at a party, I was introduced to a
friend of a friend. We shook hands, I told her my name, she told me hers. Then
she did something that I was ever so grateful for.
"Hang on," she said.
"Can you say your name again? I wasn't really listening."
She saved me from having to
later—possibly even at the same party—sheepishly admit that I, too, had already
forgotten her name.
An informal poll of fellow Atlantic
staffers confirmed my suspicion that this is something that happens to even the
most kind and conscientious among us. No sooner does someone utter the most
fundamental factoid about themselves than the information flees our brains
forever.
There are a few reasons why this
occurs:
- The
next-in-line effect: When you encounter a group of strangers with
outstretched hands, your mind turns into a scared 9-year-old at the school
talent show. You're not watching the other contestants; you're practicing
your own routine. The process of both preparing to take in the others' names
and to say your own, as Esther Inglis-Arkell explained at i09, is so taxing
that you don't devote any brain power to actually learning the new names.
- You're
not really that interested: Maybe you're just making an
appearance at this party and are planning to abscond shortly to a superior
kick-back. Your level of interest can impact how well you remember
something. "Some people, perhaps those who are more socially
aware, are just more interested in people, more interested in
relationships," Richard Harris, professor of psychology at Kansas
State University, told ScienceDaily. "They
would be more motivated to remember somebody's name."
- A
failure of working memory: There are two types of storage in
the brain: Long-term and short-term. The short-term variety is called
"working memory," and it functions like a very leaky thermos. It
doesn't hold much and it spills stuff out all the time. "You can hold
just a little bit of information there and if you don't concentrate on it,
it fades away rapidly," Paul Reber, a psychology professor at
Northwestern University, told me in an email. "Information like
a name needs to be transferred to a different brain system that
creates long-term memories that persist over time."
- Names
are kind of pointless: To answer the famous question,
there's not much in a name, frankly. It doesn't actually tell you
anything about the person you're meeting, and thus it doesn't give your
brain anything to cling to. Steve may love parkour, but he'd love it just
as much if he were Samuel or Sheldon. "Human memory is very good at
things like faces and factual information that connects well to other
information you already know," Reber said. Steve's waxing
enthusiastic about his trasseur training sticks in your brain
because it adheres to other information you already know. Wasn't District
13, that French parkour movie, really awesome? And hey, remember that
time you studied abroad in Paris? All those little connections
help solidify the memory of who Steve is and what he does.
The name, meanwhile, "is both completely
arbitrary and somewhat familiar (for common names) and ends up neither
connecting to what you already know nor standing out as unusual," Reber
said. "So you get this funny phenomenon where you can remember lots about
a person you recently met—everything except their name (this happens
to me all the time)."
So the next time you'd like to excuse
yourself for forgetting someone's name without offending the person, just say
something like, "Oh sorry, I was just overly concerned with telling you my
own name to remember yours. But to be fair, your name isn't actually that
interesting to me, and besides, it's inconsequential in the grand scheme of
things."
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