people are not Pokemon

As a rule: I don't remember names. The verbalizations, the spoken syllables, are not a part of my experience of another person, so they get lost as extraneous information. The same applies to the written form of the names. These data are not part of my subjective visual, auditory, tactile, or olfactory experience of the other person... so they eventually get lost. Sometimes, the erasure is practically immediate.

At a job 20 years ago, I learned that in order to send emails to my coworkers with whom I had already worked for years, I needed to stand up from my cubicle, look down the hallway at the nameplates on the cubicle walls, identify their name, then sit down again and address my email to them. At my most recent job, I had supervisors who lived in other states, so I couldn't use the nameplate trick. Instead, I searched my email folders for topics that I knew we had discussed (a subjective experience of mine that was associated with the person), so I could retrieve their name and begin a new email conversation.

I couldn't remember my mother's name once or twice as an adult, although I'm sure that's the name I've forgotten less often than any other. I eventually retrieved the name (which I didn't associate with the person) by recalling a very old memory (which I did associate with the person) of me at a very young age learning to spell my mother's name. I've been told that I learned to speak/read at a young age. I don't remember that age, but I do remember a mnemonic device that I was proud of creating at that time. I already understood how to speak the name "Carole", but I had difficulty with the spelling because it was an unreasonable combination of letters. I knew how to spell "car", so I created an inappropriate 3-syllable pronunciation to help me remember: /kar-OH-lee/. By remembering the 3-syllable /kar-OH-lee/ word, I then knew to assemble the reasonable letters 'c-a-r-o-l-e' to produce the 2-syllable name "Carole".

Without going into such details, I usually explain this forgetfulness to others by stating simply that people are not Pokemon. I can remember the name of Pikachu, because every verbal utterance of that character is of the form /PEE-kuh-CHOO/. In essence, the name becomes part of my auditory experience of them. People, however, don't do that... as a rule. Many years ago, someone tried to popularize the idea of repeating someone's name many times during conversation with them, as a way to overcome exactly this limitation. I once experienced someone doing this process and stating my name at me repeatedly, and I thought they were being peculiar until I remembered that piece of advice and realized the learning that they were attempting to accomplish.

I'm not the only one. This article (free archive copy) provides a solid explanation:

"Studies like this one, from the Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, suggest that we’re better at remembering names than faces. In my case, the opposite is true. I’ll recognize a face, but their name escapes me. It turns out that one of the reasons is I’m not giving my brain a chance to process the information.

“The hippocampus is key to our ability to take two things that are not associated in our minds and put them together,” says Bradley Lega, associate professor of neurological surgery at UT Southwestern/Texas Health Resources in Dallas. When you meet someone whose name and face aren’t previously associated in your mind, your hippocampus plays an important role in putting these things together into a single memory. That gives you the ability to know how to address the person. The good news: Familiar names no longer depend on your hippocampus."

Bingo. Hippocampus irregularities are a known feature of autism, although how this brain difference affects behavioral traits within individual persons seems not to be clear cut. I'm certain this effect plays a role in my current dislike of shared-pronoun social protocols in English. Individually-assigned pronouns are now pro-names instead of pro-nouns, and as such will assuredly be forgotten. I'm still self-examining to tease apart the factors involved here, but the forecast doesn't look good for my future social experiences, given this new proname trend. I'd much rather share gender identity information, if that's really the goal. And I want to add a universal pronoun so that people like me can still participate socially without being rude.