Meeting an old friend

A man is a Social Animal involved in the intricacies of every social behavior he is expected to involve in. The richness of his social behavior lies in his varied actions which he is expected to behave in the Society-among his family, peers, neighbors, and most sensuous of all friendship. But his mind is a very complex part of the body, which keeps involving the man into varied activities, 24 hours a day.

In this hush and bush of your daily chores, one day you come across a person while you are in relax mood and enjoying the Exhibition in a Grand Hall at Park Avenue. He comes in front of you and suddenly speaks in a louder but a very friendly tone, hi, How are you? And you keep on looking at him. This gaze clearly states that you have been engaged so much in your personal affairs that you not only forgot him but also his name, and are now trying to recollect his name.

He asked you, “How are you? And you replied decently, I am very well, fine, Thank You. And then he will say, “I was longing to meet you but could not get time,” and you will reply “Oh! how sweet of you, even I was longing to meet you but I got so involved in the pursuit of my career that I did not get time to meet you. It was so hectic in the office that I did not have a single minute to even breathe”. This dialogue dictates your etiquette, though you have forgotten the name of your friend with whom you have spend so precious moments of your life, still you are not trying to show that you have forgotten him.

He is making out that you have forgotten him and he will say, “Hey! I think you have forgotten me, and why not, we are meeting after such a long time, so it is so natural that you may forget me.” I only remembered that we have studied together in school. He started talking of good old school days, when we enjoy a lot, have all the fun, played pranks on teachers and the crushes we had on the beautiful girls in our school and then he involves you so much in conversation that you forgot you don’t remember his name. All of a sudden from my mouth it comes out,  “Rick.”

He stops laughing and began to stare at me. I smelled that something was wrong with the name. He in a very low voice says, “Hello, I am David, not Rick.”, then only the name strikes in my memory and  I start cursing myself, that he remembered my name and every little things about mine, whereas I completely forgot his name and on the top of it dared not accept the failure to recall his name. I wants to apologize but the words stopped flowing from mouth and I became speechless. He understands the position and to ease the situation, he starts laughing. I asks for his apology and he accepted to give on one condition that in future I would be honest while portraying my feelings.

No doubt man feels very embarrassed if he forgets his old time friend but it is also true that with time generally memory fades in many human beings. This behavior in humans is explained by Rethinking Interference theory of G. E. Mueller and Pilzecker who claims that man has to involve in number of activities and his brain is thinking all the time.  With the passing time new experiences enter into the memory the older begin to erase because the process, which is involved in storing new memories generally disrupts the old consolidation processes, which could have traced the events of our lives remained in our memory storage. (Anderson Michael C, pp. 415-455).

WORKS CITED

Anderson Michael C. “Rethinking interference theory: Executive control and mechanisms of forgetting.” Journal of Memory and Language, 49(2003): 415-455

Brill A.A. “In The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1901) By Sigmund Freud” Internet.

Available: http://psychology.about.com/library/psychologyetexts/bl-everyday01.htm , July 30, 2007