C.P.W.

Why we Forget Names.

In the last years of his life the venerated Emerson lost his memory of names.  In instance of this many will remember the story told about him when returning from the funeral of his friend Longfellow.  Walking away from the cemetery with his companion, he said, “That gentleman whose funeral we have just attended was a sweet and beautiful soul, but I cannot recall his name.”  The little anecdote has something very touching about it,—­the old man asking for the name of the life-long friend, “the gentleman whose funeral we have just attended.”

When I saw Mr. Emerson a year prior to his own death, this defect of memory was very noticeable, and extended even to the names of common objects, so that in talking he would use quaint, roundabout expressions to supply the place of missing words.  He would call a church, for instance, “that building in the town where all the people go on Sunday.”

This loss of memory of names is very common with old people, but it is not confined to them.  Almost every one has at some time experienced the peculiar, the almost desperate, feeling of trying to recall a name that will not come.  It is at our tongue’s end; we know just what sort of a name it is; it begins with a B; yet did we try for a year it would not come.  One curious fact about the phenomenon is that it seems to be contagious.  If one person suddenly finds himself unable to recall a name, the person with whom he is talking will stick at it also.  The name almost always gets the best of them, and they have to say, “Yes, I know what you mean,” and go on with their talk.

I have never seen an explanation of this name-forgetfulness; but it is not difficult to find a reason for it.  What needs explaining is that names are so obstinate, and grow more obstinate the harder we try, while other things we have forgotten and are trying to recall generally yield themselves to our efforts.  Moreover, in other cases of forgetfulness we never experience that peculiar and most exasperating feature of name-forgetfulness,—­the feeling that we know the word perfectly well all the time.  This last fact, indeed, seems to show that we have not forgotten the name at all, but have simply lost the clue to it.

Now, let us inquire why this clue is so hard to find.  Scientific men who study the human mind and make a business of explaining thought, emotion, memory, and the like, have an expression which they use frequently, and which sounds difficult, but which really it is very easy as well as interesting to understand.  They speak of the association of ideas.  The association of ideas means simply the fact which every one has noticed, that one thing tends to call up another in the mind.  When you recall a certain sleigh-ride last winter, you remember that you put hot bricks in the sleigh; and this reminds you that you were intending to heat a warming-pan for the bed to-night; and the thought of warming the bed makes