Perry’s Memory Malfunction: Anxiety Not Age Likely Key, Experts Say
November 11, 2011
Admit it, Rick Perry’s 54-second brain freeze in Wednesday night’s GOP debate was riveting TV. Not because it was the death knell of the Texas governor’s presidential campaign as pundits predict, but because drawing a blank is a nightmarishly familiar experience.
Watching Perry, 61, search fruitlessly for the name of the third federal department that he declared he would abolish might even have caused opponents to feel a twinge of sympathy. After all, experts say that that, on average, people report one memory meltdown a week.
Still, it’s hard not to wonder how the governor of the nation’s biggest energy-producing state could forget a staple of his stump speech. That is, along with U.S. departments of commerce and education, he would put the Department of Energy out of business. His “oops!” didn’t quite cover his jaw-dropping lapse. He worked the talk show circuit on Thursday trying to improve on his explanation and save his candidacy.
Here’s what some of the nation’s leading experts on memory say about the mental mishap:
Perry suffered from “blocking,” a temporary inability to retrieve information that is available in memory, according to Harvard psychologist Daniel L. Schacter, the author of The Seven Sins of Memory. “Interestingly, blocking occurs most commonly for proper names, as was the case here.” Blocking can be increased by stress and by aging, he added, “although we can’t know for sure whether either one was a factor in this instance.”
Oddly enough, blocking tends to occur for information that is familiar, but has not been retrieved frequently or recently, he says.
Psychologist Bennett Schwartz considers Perry’s memory malfunction a genuine “tip of the tongue” state. A main characteristic of the state is that we are confident we know something, but can’t access it at the moment. “He knows he has retrieved the item before,” so that failing to retrieve it from memory only heightens the stress, says Schwartz, a professor at Florida International University and the author of Tip of the Tongue States. The cause for the memory failure, he adds, is that two competing systems are at work: one is spreading activation, or searching, across the brain while another, stress, is causing interference.
Numerous studies have shown, additionally, that recalling items within a category becomes more difficult as we progress through a list. In effect, the items we recall earlier make it harder for us to recall the ones we are still trying to retrieve.
What made Perry’s gaffe odd, says Ira Hyman, a professor of psychology at Western Washington University, is that “you would expect that something that is part of a stump speech would be easily accessed.”
Of course, even psychology professors like himself, Hyman says, commonly experience tip of the tongue states when they run into a student they know well as they walk across campus but at the instant can’t recall the student’s name. Fifteen minutes later, when the stress of remembering subsides, the name is recalled.
“It’s unfortunate for Perry” that his forgetfulness seemed to corroborate a growing perception that he is limited cognitively, says Hyman. “If Mitt Romney did it, the moment would be laughed off.”
“It’s obvious that he has a lot on his mind and is distracted,” says Elizabeth Loftus, a fellow of the Center for the Neurobiology of Learning and Memory and a professor at the University of Washington. She discounted age as a factor in the gaffe.
However, she did not rule out a lack of self-efficacy, or confidence, which is known to interfere with memory and could have come into play as a result of Perry’s previous poor debate performances. “Anxiety and preoccupation are not good for performance,” she adds. “I don’t like a lot of Perry’s policies, but I would rather see people go after him for his politics and plans than for this.”