The other day I couldn’t come up with the name Jane Goodall.
Of all the names, that’s not one I thought I’d ever struggle to recall. Jane Goodall!! I sat for a while, picturing Jane. Thinking about the amazing work she did with chimps. Remembering the criticism lobbed at her by scientists for giving her study animals names. Envisioning the famous photos of her as a young woman crouched alongside a chimp family, or with her hand reaching out graceful as a dancer’s to a curious baby. Recalling how she gently befriended animals few had ever seen in the wild, much less observed up close.
I even remembered the name of her non-profit—Roots & Shoots!—and basked in the memory of interviewing her about it for National Geographic.
But her own name remained just out of reach. I went through the alphabet. I thought of people I know to make sure she didn’t share one of their names. Nothing helped.
This went on for a good four or five minutes, a long time in this context, until finally, finally, it hit me like a brick to the forehead: JANE. And Goodall of course followed immediately, as it does once there is another word to hang your hat on.
Why is it that often we can remember details about something but not the label itself, the thing that most directly points to the thing? Even something or someone meaningful to us—in this case a hero of mine, an influence on my career path—can be lost in the dense stuffing in our brains.
Memory is strange that way.
We’re all familiar with the “tip-of-the-tongue” phenomenon—when you know but can’t quite say the name of that actor in that movie or that restaurant downtown or the name of that neighbor who lived one floor up and would drunkenly pound on the door cussing and yelling at you and your brother to make less f*&#ing noise. (Actually, that one I know: Mr. Johnson. His name was Mr. Johnson.)
I’ve learned that the answer lies somewhere between memory and language and taps into how the brain retrieves different types of data. Pulling up details about a person and retrieving his or her name are related but distinct mental processes, and as we all well know you can successfully do the first without completing the second. That’s partly because the information surrounding the person likely has existing associations in our brains. It’s referred to as the Baker/baker Paradox: The term ‘baker’ pads the memory with clues—think bread, ovens, warmth, butter, that big white hat. A guy named Baker? Not much to work with (unless he happens work in a patisserie). The brain has a harder time drumming it up.
Think of this way, as I now do: Retrieving a name is really retrieving a sound, right? Which is part of a three-step process, if I may oversimplify: First you have the concept or meaning (or person) in mind, and second you pull the relevant word from your mental Rolodex. Part three, the sound retrieval that lets you utter the name, is where we falter the most: The tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon is that breakdown between the second and third events. You know the answer, you just can’t spit it out.
It’s no wonder we love nicknames: They add real information to an otherwise arbitrary utterance. I’ll bet if five guys walked into a party together, you could easily pick out “Freckles” while Paul could be any of the other four.
Connections between a word’s meaning and its sound turn out to be vital to our remembering it, while those connections can go weak with age and infrequent use. In a study of this phenomenon, phonological priming—having the participants who are experiencing a tip-of-the-tongue moment read words aloud that are similar to the target word—gave a significant push toward the correct answer.
Why we struggle more with proper names than common nouns, especially as we age, must be that association versus arbitrary sound thing at work again—for many of us “dermatologist” (“derm” being meaningful) would be easier to recall than “Greg.” It follows that “rheumatologist,” which to the average Joe doesn’t house any meaning, is a hard one to pull up—at least in my experience.
Association helps explain why I always remember that the guy from upstairs screaming at our childhood selves is Mr. Johnson. His name I can link to something specific—another definition for the word “Johnson.” In fact, I think his first name might have been Peter, which tracks.
Regardless, it’s likely in this case I was holding onto and even locked in on “Jane Goodall” just fine, with all the peripheral details intact. I really did know what her name was! Where my brain sputtered was in putting the sounds together and letting them fly. An utter failure, if I may.
