When it comes to names, I am inclined to forget them. I am certainly not the first person to have made such a claim, but far be it from me to suggest what may be their personal causes (and I think it likely that they have not thought on the subject very often, except to trifle at pointless conversation with others upon forgetting their name). For myself, I have a theory. It fits into my world view. I am often hesitant to put to words any of my world views, as constricted and misrepresented as my words written or spoken often are.
In order to understand why I forget names, it is important to make clear exactly how I forget them. Most often I forget the names of acquaintances, those people whom I’ve only met with a handful of times. While they in all likelihood have provided a name to me on each account, still it slips from me. I find that I focus on finding their name, and it evades me. This has been noted many times before by numerous individuals.
However, it is in the way that my mind strays that perhaps suggests something less often brought to light. I am convinced that the mind holds in inventory all that it knows about a person, but that inventory is arranged in ways that are difficult to consciously control. When I consider a mere acquaintance (as opposed to a long time friend), a list of their person appears in my mind. Their figure, mannerisms, speech pitch, tone, and patterns, their common mode of dress, etc. are all things that present themselves in a sort of branching paradigm of features that coalesces in my mind as their person. These are the features that my mind takes into consideration when I meet them and that my mind carefully stores away. The name that may be connected to them, then, does not appear in this list. It is stored elsewhere. Attempts to recollect it accesses the wrong parts of the brain. Instead of locating the minute entry of their name (and it is never truly forgotten, as it will come back to you at some later moment), these other parts that have stored the more important features of that person are instead accessed. This shows that name storage is NOT made hierarchically important in the mind’s normal processes (at least, not for me).
My explanation of why it is stored elsewhere is when I must speak of my aforementioned world view. In this facet of my view, I state that names of people both first and last are the least significant feature they possess. Immediately, what passes for the aristocracy in these days around the world would rebel at this notion. Their names are of excessive importance to them; especially their last names. Others in the same mode of thinking would be comprised largely of those of famous fortune in television, musical performance, what have you. That these are the individuals that would most strongly have cause to oppose my claim does not bear upon its validity negatively. Quite the opposite, actually, as my regard for these floating names be-speaks their everlasting tendency to be the hollowest of individuals that walk this earth.
That more aggressive than logical concept aside, I continue. Aside from the rich and famous, what would an individual prefer that I come away with upon encountering me, that I remember a handful of letters arranged just so, or that I remember their figure, their gait, their aura? Clearly, my mind has already attributed a kind of automatic approval of making the name least important. And yet, upon having one’s name forgotten, many will remark, “He didn’t even remember my name.” The ‘even’ here emphasizes what I believe to be a widespread fallacy, the undue importance given to names. I have often considered my own name as a perfunctory excess. I know it as well as I know anything about myself, and yet, its simplicity offers no insight into my being.
It is for these reasons, I believe, that I sometimes mix up the names of my better known friends. In nearly every case, the names mixed up are of individuals who bear a striking similarity to each other (in my mind) in a number of ways. I may mix up a name on visage alone, or on a mode of humor, a method of argument, etc. These are the deepest of potential insults, and yet, what they really convey is my exact knowledge of their being. The connection between one and another has to have occurred in those parts of my brain that hold the features of people I meet. For two, out of the so many in that sea of individuals I have been acquainted with, for these two to have been unique enough to offer that slippage is rare, and therefore noteworthy.
In short, I endeavor to encourage people to stop feeling down, foolish, ashamed of your failure to remember the names of people. Rather, embrace the complex mechanisms of your mind, resting secure knowing that to you, a name is nothing more than a bauble, shiny for a time, then shortly forgotten.
