Dr. Alan Castel

speaker

1,246 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 13 Jul

Dr. Alan Castel’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

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And by their nature, names used to be descriptive of person's occupation.

Someone's a baker, we call them Mr. Baker.

But that's of course evolved with time.

And names, you know, I tell people if you can't remember someone's name, that's probably a natural forgetting.

But you remember if you had an interesting conversation or you remember if you can trust them, that's probably more important.

So then to engage our kind of knowledge base so that we can remember names, we need to make this arbitrary link.

And so I tell people my last name is Pastel, Castel.

You know, Castel rhymes with pastel and my grandfather used pastels, let's say.

And so people can then make this link.

But like you say, that's effortful.

It takes time.

It takes time away from kind of the essence of something else we could talk about.

And it also leads to these kind of predictable memory errors.

So people say, oh, I remember his name was Pastel, when in fact it's Castel.

So I think we have to almost trick our memory into remembering things that might be somewhat arbitrary.

And that becomes more pronounced as we get older.

There's more Davids, there's more Andrews, and it's just more interference.

And so to get around that, we have to use deliberate practice, retrieval practice, use the name several times.

But I tell my students, whose names I often forget, that I'll still remember topics we've talked about or how they felt about something.

And I think that's more important than sometimes just remembering a name.

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