Mixed Up Tape

(WSJ illustration)

My late father-in-law would often call any one of his four daughters by another daughter's name. Otherwise as sharp as a tack, he would make this mistake frequently, so we were left with a bunch of implausible explanations: his daughters were not important to him, he was expressing his disappointment that he didn't have a son, they looked alike, etc.

Modern neuroscience has another explanation. [bold added]

Names are especially hard for the brain to learn and recall, according to Samantha Deffler, a cognitive psychologist at York College of Pennsylvania. Most people recall faces more easily, and common nouns roll off the tongue more readily as well.

In an iconic experiment from the 1980s, participants were shown a series of portraits and told each person’s name and occupation. In a twist, words such as “cook” and “baker” were presented as occupations to some participants and as names—“Mr. Cook,” “Mr. Baker”—to others. In what came to be known as the “Baker/baker paradox,” participants recalled the jobs better than the names.

The brain remembers information by linking new bits of data with existing information of similar meaning or context. That makes proper nouns, which are arbitrary “nonsense words,” harder to learn, said Neil Mulligan, a cognitive psychologist who studies memory at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Though it occurs nearly instantaneously, recalling a name is a multistep endeavor. A memory cue—perhaps a child’s backpack left on the couch—triggers a search for the child’s name. The memory system offers up multiple potential responses, then rejects all but the correct answer.

The ability to reject wrong responses gets worse with age, which is one possible reason older adults more frequently mix up names, Mulligan said.

Now that I'm in my 70's, I'm finding it increasingly difficult to remember names. What's also worrisome is that I had communicated regularly with some of these forgotten ones only two or three years ago.

I wish I could tell my father-in-law that I'm beginning to understand what he went through.