Total Recall (?)

This kind of thing is happening to me more and more frequently, and it’s quite disturbing.

I try to remember the name of a famous actor and, although the face is clear in my mind, I can’t for the life of me remember the name! This happened only the other day, as I was driving home from work. I was trying to remember the name of a well known Italian-American actor who is quite short in stature, bald and talks with a New York accent. I think his name has a D or a B in it. But I couldn’t remember the name for toffee!! His film credits include comedies such as Twins (with Arnold Schwarzenegger) and Other People’s Money. He also played the Penguin in one of the Batman movies. That much I knew.

Can you work out who it is?

During my drive home, I tried an old memory recall trick I have used before to remember song titles. I went through the letters of the alphabet, trying to see if thinking about each letter and its associated names would help me to recall the name I wanted. A: Arnold, Arnie (NO!), B: Ben, Bill, Barry, Bloody can’t remember!!!!

I got through the whole alphabet before arriving home, and eventually gave up. So what was I to do? This name was still stubbornly stuck there just beyond reach behind the membrane of my memory. So, I did what we all do nowadays when we can’t remember a basic fact: I looked it up on the Internet!!

And, after just a few clicks on the Internet Movie Database, I found the actor I was looking for. And it was.........Danny De Vito!!

And yet, I had gone through the letter D and V, and nothing came to mind that was remotely like Danny or De Vito. At least I got the Italian bit right!

I have had many similar experiences with several other major names such as George Clooney, Kevin Spacey, and the other fella. Also, disturbingly, I could have sworn on a number of occasions that I read of the death of a famous actor, only to find the said actor alive and well and starring in the latest blockbuster! This has happened with Brian Cox, John Hurt...

So, what is going wrong with our memories? I say ‘our’ not just to defer blame, but because I believe this is happening to all of us in this fast-paced, high data-load 21^st Century of ours.

And I have a theory to explain why these memory lapses occur. It’s because slowly but surely, over the last 100 years or so, we have developed more and more technologies for storing our experiences outside our brains.

As a result, we no longer have to commit all of our information to that rather old-fashioned piece of natural wetware called the human memory. We have invented tape recorders, video recorders, cameras, video cams, Mp3 players, mobile phones, CD players and all the rest of it. And now, thanks to digital technology and the rise of the Internet, all of our data and experience can be stored in such humongous quantities and yet can be retrieved so easily. So it’s not surprising that I keep forgetting the names of famous people, because I know I have a backup system readily available in the form of some miracle of modern technology.

I mean, how many of you can remember all of the phone numbers in your mobile phone’s contact list? Probably none of you, because you don’t have to remember the number – just type the name of your contact and hey presto, the call is made!

Being one of those people who was young before mobile technology became so much a part of our lives, I often try to think what life was like before we had all this stuff. And you know what?

I can’t remember!