A Name To Remember
“Martin, it’s so great to see you again!” The woman enters the milonga, beaming, and trots towards me. I recognize her face but can’t remember where I saw her, or whether we danced. I can see it’s different for her, so my first line of defense is not to settle on a name, remembering the time I exclaimed ‘Carlijn!’ to an Elaine. “It’s been a while!” I say – my second line of defense. She lifts her arms in a welcoming gesture, and we hug. My brain stumbles around the chaotic cabinet of dances and faces that is my memory. “You don’t remember my name, do you?” she says. “If God wanted me to remember your name, he would allow me a better brain.” She tells me her name, we laugh with some relief, and a few seconds later, it evaporates.
The subject was the poor state of my neocortex. “I read somewhere that most of us can’t have more than150 meaningful social relations,” she said. “Quite a few people wonder if they can even have a single one,” I observed. “This guy Dunbar found this number, 150. Our brain doesn’t have more active memory. Passively, we remember hundreds more. Faces, too. But names don’t mean a lot to us. There’s no logic to someone being named Elodie, Amara, or Maeve.” She was right; no logic whatsoever. My name is Maarten, as was my grandfather’s and many other men in our family; no need to remember! When in doubt, try Maarten. Our son’s name we picked because we knew a few nice guys with that name.
“How many tango dancers does a tango organizer meet annually? Five hundred, a thousand, outside family and friends?” she wondered. “True, it’s a losing game. Nowadays, I forget names of people I worked with intensively, just weeks ago. Half an hour or a day later, I suddenly remember them, out of nowhere. I sense people feel hurt, though, when their name doesn’t stand out to me. So I keep working at it. In my early tango days, I brought a booklet with me where I would jot the names of followers on a sketched map of the milonga so that I could say Hello Anna next week. I tried memory hooks like ‘Ester from Essen’ or ‘Paulina from Poland’ – these dancers actually suggested those hints themselves. But I can’t require Karolina to move to Krakow just because she lives in Bydgoszcz – try to remember that, by the way.”
“How about name tags?” “Well, we can encourage dancers to bring their own personalized name tags and put them anywhere they want. Anywhere! It shouldn’t be like some IT conference. I can think of fascinating places to put them… In the meantime, I’ll work harder! For example, linking their name to their profession: Yolanda the yoga instructor, or some other thing you notice, like Sassy Sarah.” “You only remember women’s names?” “Certainly. Men, I don’t even try. They don’t remember my name either. I also use other tricks, like repeating a person’s name when they introduce themselves, or asking them how to spell their name.” “What if it’s Sandra? Can you ask if it spells with an S or a Z?” “No, but that’s an excellent way to make sure that she’ll remember your name.”