Nominal Aphasia: Problems in Name Retrieval

Summary

It happens to all of us occasionally. As you walk down the hallway you see a familiar face—someone you have recently met—you reach into your brain expecting a complicated series of synaptic firing to bring forth the name person in front of you only to be disappointed. Although you know it is there in the recesses of your mind, you cannot summon the name of your new acquaintance. You settle instead for the ubiquitous nod and the word “hello”. Where failure to occasionally recall the name of new acquaintance may feel uncomfortable, it typically does not create huge difficulties. For me this scenario happens all too often. Names of acquaintances and friends of less than a year’s duration frequently elude me at pivotal movements. Although my problem with name recall is worse for personal names, I also occasionally experience difficulties recalling the name of specific objects or “common names”. Indeed my friends and colleagues are familiar with me using the most round-about ways to identify specific people or objects. Physicians and psychologists have several clinical terms to describe this word-finding problem. Anomia is one general term for problems with word finding or recall that occurs with no impairment of comprehension or the capacity to repeat the words; the terms anomic and nominal aphasia are also used. (1) My problem recalling names, both of people and of things, led me on an investigation of the mechanisms by which the brain stores and retrieves this information, and how names are stored and summoned. I was also particularly interested in how malfunctions in the brain’s name retrieval system arise when there has been no physical trauma. It is important to understand that articulating names is merely the final stage in a series of complex processes. Before names can be retrieved from the brain, they must be learned and stored. There are three different components of memory: immediate/sensory memory, short-term memory (including working memory—memory that cons...