“Kartik Parija prides himself on his elephantine memory, yet lately, names have begun to slip away. “I’ve had moments when I reconnect with someone from the pre-internet days, vividly recall our shared history but momentarily blank on their name,” says the 49-year-old entrepreneur from Bengaluru. He recalls awkwardly steering such conversations without naming the person, while his mind scrambles to retrieve that “fundamental piece of personal connection”. This lapse has emerged only in the past three years, he says. “It feels profoundly strange, like the fuzzy confusion after pulling an all-nighter before an exam.””
It could be any of us instead of Kartik. As the article shows, this phenomenon is quite prevalent today and has developed over the past few years. Like a lot of other things that have changed in our lives, this too can be attributed to our lives turning digital:
“The common thread in their experience of forgetting names is the influx of digital communication. Both describe how the flood of information has fragmented attention so much that even after regular, sometimes deep, conversations with people, they find it hard to fully register or retain that primary detail about a person: their name.
As communication shifts from verbal to textual in the digital age, we interact with far more people at once. But the cues have changed: instead of calling a name out loud, we open chatboxes after seeing someone’s content in a feed, type a few letters before their name auto-fills in a messaging app, or scroll to their chat in the inbox and ping them directly. The act of saying or mentally repeating a name has diminished, perhaps explaining why names slip from memory mid-conversation.
Mumbai-based neurologist Siddharth Warrier explains how a name carries auditory, visual (tied to a person’s face), and emotional cues, each stored in different areas of the brain and woven together during recall. “The more sensory hooks you attach to a name, the stronger your ability to remember it,” he says. Digital communication creates a kind of “sensory blindfolding,” explains Warrier, often reducing people to flat, two-dimensional entities and depriving the brain of the multi-sensory input needed to anchor a name in long-term memory.
Digital communication has given rise to a kind of cognitive offloading, or a shift of information and mental effort to a source outside the brain. Just as we stopped memorising phone numbers once our phones began storing them, we now rely on devices to remember names.”
Forgetting people’s names when you meet is not just embarrassing but also insulting to the other person. But even more worryingly, this could result in cognitive decline:
“…“The neural pathway of our brain’s recall network gets rusted. But once you oil it, it kicks back into gear.” However, the more stressed you are, the harder it is for the brain to retain and recall things, he says, because the stress makes the brain redirect its resources elsewhere….“Memory works like a network: the more you engage it, the stronger it becomes. And remembering names in particular helps reinforce our social memory, making it easier to maintain and navigate relationships,” he adds.”
So, we need to make conscious effort to keep our neural networks active and prevent cognitive decline.
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