I’ll Never Forget … What’s Her Name?

You really haven't forgotten - You're Just asking the wrong question

Dec 04, 2023

My guess is that something like this has happened to you. You are talking with someone about a movie, like Pretty Woman, and all of a sudden you realize that you cannot remember the leading lady’s name! You say, “You know who she is. She is tall. Very popular. Brownish hair. Has been in a lot of hit movies like this one with Richard Gere. Shoot. I really like her. Why can’t I remember her name?!” Then you recall that her brother is Eric Roberts, and it hits you. “Julia Roberts!” you exclaim with relief and pride!

I have been through this many times. Often the name would pop into my head a few days after the conversation while I was doing something unrelated. This was intriguing but also confusing and a little frustrating, until I stumbled across a book that explained the mechanisms by which the brain remembers things.1 It all started to make sense to me and changed the way I interact with my memory.

Image generated by DALL-E (it took many combinations this time)

My new process is this. If the name does not immediately come to mind, instead of focusing on her picture in my head and stressing over her name, I relax and mentally ask a question like “Who was the lead actress in Pretty Woman” and then let my brain do its magic, trusting that the answer will eventually appear. Sometimes it shows up right away, and sometimes it is hours later, but it eventually shows up. I usually try to help things along by recalling different pieces of information related to the person, and with each piece I feel one step closer to remembering the name. Here is why.

The brain doesn’t remember Julia Roberts per se. It remembers a bunch of stuff related to her that eventually gets connected to form the thought or concept of Julia Roberts. It happens so effortlessly that we don’t realize the amazing connection activity that is happening in the background. Here is how that process might happen in our Pretty Woman example.

The concept of a movie is in one part of memory. The concept of a leading lady is in another. The concept of a woman is in another. Julia Roberts exists in another. The movie Pretty Woman is in another. If I asked myself to recall the female lead of Pretty Woman, my brain will connect the woman concept, to the movie concept, to the leading lady concept, and then to the Julia Roberts concept. Because I asked my brain to focus on the female lead for the movie, it came up with Julia Roberts. If I had asked for the male lead of the movie, it would have come up with Richard Gere by following a similar set of connections but related to the concepts of a movie, a man, a leading man, and Richard Gere.2

Each of these individual concepts exists in our brains in different places that are literally interconnected. I want to say this again because it is a really important concept: There is a literal connection between these different memory places in the brain that, when activated as a group, lead to Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman.

By the way, the connections work in both directions! We could start at Julia Roberts and get to Pretty Woman or start with Pretty Woman and get to Julia Roberts, which depends on what we are looking for.

You can practically apply this capability by focusing your brain to connect in a specific direction. This is done by asking a question like “What was the name of the person with the office next to mine when I had my business in Austin?” Your brain will automatically start searching related connection paths until it finds the answer. That is why I don’t stress about getting the answer to questions like this, as long as I am sure that I knew the answer at some point. I simply ask the right question, reflect on everything I can immediately recall related to the question, and then let the brain do its thing. In the background it will keep looking and connecting and eventually arrive at the answer. How many times have you recalled something a few days after you initially tried to remember it? Now you know why. A key aspect of this is to not simply focus on the name but allow (welcome actually) all its related information to show up. Your brain is picking those connections for a reason, so simply watch it work. It is interesting.3

When trying to recall something, I often say, “We just pulled a neuron, now let’s see what pops up.” My brain will usually go where it needs to go to recover what I want to remember. It is interesting to see how things are connected under the hood.

The physical basis for these concept interconnections is the reason why there is so much talk today about new learning as being the best way to retain mental capacity as we age. When we learn we make new physical connections between concepts and expand the use of our brains.

A baby’s brains makes connections like crazy because everything is so new for them, and it may slow down over time, but neuroplasticity appears to happen at any age so stretch your brain a little and learn something new.4

On the other hand, when we simply repeat a mental process over and over again, we aren’t creating new learning (connections), but instead we are merely strengthening the connections we already have. If any of these well-developed connections gets lost due to a stroke or other injury, then there are no backup connections to pick up the work. The connections have to be re-created which takes time and new learning. On the other hand, if there are previously created backup paths, then those backup paths will start to pick up the work load done by the former primary paths and eventually become stronger. It is sort of miraculous, I think.

More about all this to come …

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