What’s his name again, that one actor. In that one movie, you know… It’s on the tip of your tongue, but you can’t get to it. You see the asteroid in front of you, the spaceship, the bald actor with his mischievous smile. Oh yes, of course: Bruce Willis. Armageddon.
Why do we effortlessly say table and chair, hunger and thirst, even beauty and love, but keep looking for the name of that one actor, film or politician?
And is that actually true? Do proper names disappear more easily in the cobwebs of our brain? We ask Roel Jonkers, professor of neurolinguistics in Groningen. Neurolinguistics combines linguistics (how is language structured and how do people use it?) with neurology (how does the brain work and what sometimes goes wrong?).
“Yes, it is absolutely true,” says Jonkers. “A word like ‘table’ is much easier to recall than a proper name. Of course it matters how often you use that name. You usually know the name of your child or your mother immediately, while you really have to search for that actor.”
A thing with four legs
What are you looking for then? “In your mental dictionary,” explains Jonkers. That’s the collection of words you’ve ever learned. “If you want to say something, you start with the concept of it. You create a kind of mental picture,” says Jonkers. “So if you want to say ‘table’, you first form an image of a thing with four legs. You also activate other concepts related to this, such as chair and bed. Once you have chosen the concept ‘table’ from this, you activate sounds that resemble it. Hoist, hit, rave. Finally you say ‘table’. And all that in milliseconds.”
We all know that from a combination of EEG and MRI research, Jonkers continues. With the first you can see brain activity over time, with the second the activity in places associated with different aspects of language, such as sound, meaning and word order.
The word store resides in the temporal lobe, above the ear – in most people in the left hemisphere of the brain. “We also know this thanks to imaging research in people in whom certain brain functions no longer work properly,” says Jonkers, “for example due to a stroke, an accident or dementia. Depending on where the damage is located, those people have very specific language problems. We call that aphasia.”
A name is too arbitrary
But even healthy people sometimes search for words. That is quite normal, says Jonkers. Word finding is better with words that you use more often, and that you learned early in life. On that front, ‘table’, ‘love’ and even ‘politics’ clearly win over ‘Bruce Willis’.
“It also improves when you know more context about something,” Jonkers remarks. “More hooks on which to hang the word.” And that’s where the actor goes wrong: his name is too arbitrary. “It’s a coincidence that he’s called that. There are many more people named Bruce. There are also many more people who are bald.”
Jonkers himself can easily dig up ‘Bruce Willis’ since he read an article about the form of dementia that this actor has. “That interested me professionally. And that is now the hook for me.”
And you may not forget the actor’s name after reading this piece.