Video: Republican presidential candidate Gov. Rick Perry had an 'oops' moment at the GOP debate in Detroit Wednesday when he couldn't remember one of the three government agencies he plans to cut. (Nov. 9)
He pointed at his own head and laughed. Another candidate suggested that he was thinking of the Environmental Protection Agency, and Perry momentarily seized on that. But moderator John Harwood asked, “Seriously? Is EPA the one you were talking about?”
Perry acknowledged that it wasn’t.
“But you can’t — but you can’t name the third one?” Harwood said.
Perry made another spirited lunge at it.
“I would do away with the Education, the Commerce and — let’s see . . .”
Retrieval failure, again.
The governor despaired.
“I can’t. The third one, I can’t. Sorry. Oops.”
It would be the oops heard round the political world.
Diamond said the structure of the brain is partly to blame for a retrieval error. Language centers are not particularly close to memory centers — it’s like New Jersey trying to communicate with China.
Diamond said retrieval failures often involve new information. In Perry’s case, he’s been governor of Texas for more than a decade but has been running for president for only a few months.
“When we forget words, when we forget names, it is new information that has just not established strong links in our brain,” Diamond said.
And yes, it’s getting worse for all of us, he said — not just because some of us are getting into the more advanced age brackets, where the brain literally shrinks and the rust metaphorically builds up, but because we’re all increasingly saturated with information.
“We are doing so much now, we’re multitasking perhaps at a higher degree than ever before,” Diamond said. “We get into work, and we’re handling e-mails, we’re going to all the Web sites, we’re processing more information now than ever before. We’re asking more of our brains than evolution ever prepared us to handle. So every now and then we just drop the ball.”
MIT neuroscientist John Gabrieli stresses that a retrieval failure is due to a mental block that has to be cleared away, somehow, before you can find the word you want.
“It’s not that you can’t get there, it’s that something’s blocking that, some other idea or word has come into your head. Until you clear that other thing, it’s hard to get back to that piece of information that you really know,” Gabrieli said.
Aileen Pincusof the Washington-based Pincus Group, which coaches people on public speaking, said a good rule for speakers is to avoid lists. Even a short list, like the one that Perry tried to offer, can be a trap.
“It was self-entrapment,” she said. And when Perry failed the first time, “he started the list again.”
Brandt counsels people who worry about memory slips to relax, go on to something else and wait. The memory will resurface soon enough.
“The more you try to focus on it, the deeper your hole gets,” he said.
But that common-sense strategy — retreat, relax, wait for the systems to reboot — wasn’t an option for Perry. When he couldn’t find the word “Energy,” he couldn’t just say, “Whatever.” All he could do was twist and writhe in his deepening hole.
The Post Most: NationMost-viewed stories, videos and galleries int he past two hours
Live Q&A, Tuesday Noon ET
Gene Weingarten takes polls and chats about his recent columns.
| 11:00 AM | ComPost Live with Alexandra Petri |
|---|---|
| 12:00 PM | Chatological Humor: Monthly with Moron |
| 1:00 PM | Advice from Slate's 'Dear Prudence' |
| 1:00 PM | Eugene Robinson Live |
Featured Reads
Loading...
Comments