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. 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).”
【记不住别人的名字 不是你的错】相关文章:
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