Sex Sleep Eat Drink Dream by Jennifer Ackerman

Author:Jennifer Ackerman [Ackerman, Jennifer]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

It's early evening. You've arrived at your party and begun to mingle in the crowded room, launching into a lively discussion with a colleague. Though you've had only a single glass of wine, your mind fails you when an acquaintance approaches: In the midst of introductions, you temporarily blank on his name. It's there, tantalizingly, on the tip of your tongue, but you can't for the life of you retrieve it, and you stand awkwardly for a moment before mumbling, "You two know each other?"

William James described this failure as a kind of intensely active gap in our minds: "A sort of wraith of the name is in it, beckoning us in a given direction, making us at moments tingle with the sense of our closeness and then letting us sink back without the longed-for term." It's one of the "seven sins of memory" described by Daniel Schacter, a psychologist at Harvard University. Schacter's research suggests that this particular active gap is rooted in the absence of meaning in most proper names, which he calls the baker/Baker effect. If I tell you I'm a baker, he says, I'm giving you information about what I do and how I spend my time, which helps build a house of memory. If I tell you my name is Baker, I'm just providing a meaningless term. This means that the memory is isolated, bereft of mental ties or links, and so is vulnerable to temporary forgetting.

Here's where some kind of association strategy may come in handy, linking a name with an animal or object. Or perhaps a technological solution to the dilemma, like the one devised by Hewlett-Packard: a special cell phone headset fitted with a small camera that focuses on your field of vision and connects via the cell phone to your personal computer, where it accesses a database of photos and names. Once it fixes on a face, it jogs your memory with a vocal prompt.

We often forget names; we rarely forget faces. Survey the sea of people at your party, and you can spot those you know in a fraction of a second. This gift for instantly recognizing familiar faces in different contexts, regardless of view, age, light, and pose, is an astonishing perceptual achievement. Machines generally fall short at the task. "Real world tests of automated face-recognition systems have not yielded encouraging results," writes Pawan Sinha of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. By way of example, he cites one test of face-recognition software designed to identify passengers with terrorist links. The system had a success rate of less than 50 percent, and some fifty false alarms for every five thousand passengers.

The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein called the face "the soul of the body," and Shakespeare called it "a book where men may read strange matters." No, wrote Milan Kundera, the face is only an "accidental and unrepeatable combination of features. It reflects neither character nor soul, nor what we call the self." In any case, faces are a currency of social exchange, and the ability to recognize them is a vital skill.

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