Are we Googling away our brain power?
January 31st 2011 17:21
By Susan Schwartz, Postmedia News January 31, 2011
After watching the movie Juno the other night, I lay in the dark trying to think of the name of the actress Jennifer Garner always reminds me of: She's older, but with a definite resemblance.
Her first name is Gina: I remembered that but I couldn't for the life of me think of her last name. She'd played a dog walker in The Accidental Tourist. Tall, with a great smile. Married at one time to actor Jeff Goldblum. And there had been other husbands -- two? -- before she settled down with an Iranian-American plastic surgeon and had three children, including twin boys. She'd played the first female president of the United States on television. I remembered all that, but not her name. Grr.
Sometimes when I'm trying to remember a name or a word -- and it is more often than I wish -- I go through the alphabet in my head a few times. Just saying the letters to myself can help. But no luck this time.
I could have got out of bed, Googled The Accidental Tourist and had the name in a flash. I used to do it often, use Google to recall the names of writers or movies or books that were on the tip of my tongue or to break a stalemate -- like the time one of us thought it was Matthew McConaughey in Sweet Home Alabama and the other was pretty sure it was Josh Lucas. (It was Lucas.)
I have visions of Google somehow overriding those connections and, in so doing, rendering them vestigial, obsolete -- the way the advent of digital watches meant there were kids who never learned to tell the time by looking at a watch face with actual numbers and rotating hands, who don't get what clockwise means. Obsolete the way Velcro on kids' shoes has surely meant there are people who can't tie bows properly.
To this day, I remember the joy that surged through me when I was able to tie my own laces for the first time.
Google is amazing in so many ways, but I wonder: Does it make you lazy?
So I didn't get out of bed: I tried to conjure the name from the recesses of my memory but it stayed there, lurking in the shadows.
I thought of A Horsey Name, a delightful 19th-century short story by Anton Chekhov that opened with a Russian general with an agonizing toothache who did not want his tooth pulled. His steward told him of a man able to relieve people of their toothaches by simply turning to the window and spitting: he lived in another city but could cure people by telegraph. So the general sat down to compose a telegram to him.
Now the steward knew this conjuror's first name was Jacob, but for the life of him, he could not remember his last name -- except that it was common and had something to do with a horse.
A hilarious back-and-forth ensued as he tried to recall it -- "Is it Mayres? No, it isn't Mayres: wait a bit, is it Colt? No, it isn't Colt . . . just a second: Horseman, Horsey, Hackney. No, it isn't any of those."
Everyone who worked for the general began, frantically, to come up with names. "Horses of every possible age, breed, and sex were considered," Chekhov wrote.
To no avail. In the morning, the dentist was sent for, and he pulled the tooth. On his way out in his gig, he encountered the steward, muttering horsey-sounding names. He asked to buy a load of hay -- at which point the steward turned and dashed to the house "as if a mad dog were after him," and shrieked to the general in delight that he'd remembered the name: Hayes.
At last, I fell asleep. When I woke up the following morning, I called on my brain for the name first thing and, remarkably, there it was: Geena, not Gina. Geena Davis.
Had that been the problem, that I was misspelling her first name in my head? Or in perseverating as I had in trying to remember the name, did I prime some pathway in my brain? I don't know.
But I do know that, in that moment of remembering, visions of synapses firing danced in my head and a shower of sweet relief washed over me.
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