the limits of knowing

[jlh]

But first: Does anyone want the three special EW True Blood covers? I got them free at work and am happy to ship out to someone who'd want all three. It's Anna Paquin with Moyer, Skarsgard and Manganiello in poses like American Gothic

Comments

[amyamy]

Definitely not an idiot for conflating names. Hell, when we killed Bin Laden and news reporters kept screwing up his name and saying Obama instead, there were several articles discussing the issue with linguistics experts and speech pathologists about how brains store information and how easy it is to make mistakes, particularly if a brain is already "primed" to retrieve certain information, as when one has recently heard a news store about someone with a different but similar name.

I also don't think it's at all your responsibility to know every context for every possible statement ever, not the least because it wouldn't be possible. It's also not necessarily got anything to do with age - I have a good friend at law school who I've known for two years and worked quite closely with on several projects whose name, to my chagrin and her annoyance, I regularly mistake for another mutual friend's. The problem for me is not about being forgetful or getting old or anything, it's just that my brain doesn't really store information about people properly - I don't think about people (or really, anything) as images of their faces or by name but as a sort of idea-concept, so while I always know the person I'm talking to, I often just have no idea what their name is.

[jlh]

The priming makes a lot of sense. Like, I don't really think about the Manning brothers all that often because I don't follow football, but I had just seen a little article about them five minutes beforehand.

It's that whole some contexts are more important than other contexts thing, I think! I'm easily swayed.

Maybe you need to make up an entirely different name for her. People give me nicknames all the time because my given name is so common.