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Page 74
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 you think of poor President Garfield's sickness, during which they
tried to cool his room with ice. Each of these thoughts (ideas) has
evidently called up another connected--associated--with it in some way.
This is the association of ideas: it is a law that governs almost all
our thinking, as any one may discover by going back over his own
thoughts. Perhaps an easier way to discover it will be to observe the
rapid talk of an afternoon caller on the family, and see how the
conversation skips from one subject to another which the last suggested,
and from that to another suggested by this, and so on.
Just this association of ideas it is which enables us to recall things
we have forgotten. Our ideas on any subject--say that sleigh-ride last
winter--resemble a lot of balls some distance apart in a room, but all
connected by strings. If there is any particular ball we cannot
find,--that is, some fact we cannot remember,--then if we pull the
neighboring balls it is likely that they by the connecting strings will
bring the missing ball into sight. To illustrate this, suppose that you
cannot remember the route of that sleigh-ride. You recall carefully all
the circumstances associated with the ride, in hopes that some one of
them will suggest the route that was taken. You think of your
companions, of the moon being full, of having borrowed extra robes, of
the hot bricks--Ah, there is a clue! The bricks were reheated somewhere.
Where was it? They were placed on a stove,--on a red-hot stove with a
loafers' foot-rail about it. That settles it. Such stoves are found only
in country grocery-stores; and now it all comes back to you. The ride
was by the hill road to Smith's Corners. It is as if there were a string
from the hot-bricks idea to the idea that the bricks were reheated, to
this necessarily being done on a stove, to the peculiar kind of stove it
was done on, to the only place in the neighborhood where such a stove
could be, to Smith's Corners; and this string has led you, like a clue,
to the fact you desired to remember.
We can now return to the question asked above: In trying to recall
names, why is it so difficult to find a clue? After what has been said,
the question can be put in a better form: Why does not the association
of ideas enable us to recall names as it does other things? The answer
is, that names (proper names) have very few associations, very few
strings, or clues, leading to them. It is easy to see this; for suppose
you moved away from the neighborhood of that sleigh-ride many years
before, and in thinking over past times find yourself unable to recall
the name of the Corners where the store stood. The place can be
remembered perfectly, and a thousand circumstances connected with it,
but they furnish no clue to the name: the circumstances might all remain
the same and the name be any other as well. The only association the
name has is with an indistinct memory of how it sounded. It was of two
words: the second was something like Hollow, or Cross roads, or
Crossing; the first began with an _S_. But it is vain to seek for it: no
clue leads to it. Were it the ride you sought to remember, many of its
details could be recalled, some of which might lead to the desired fact;
but a name has no details, and it is only possible to say of it that it
sounded so and so, if it is possible to say that.
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