Madden Mischief

Can trying to remember names of movie stars you see on vintage films on late night TV be a healthy form of memory exercise?  I believe so, which is why I call the cinematic workout TCMembering.

Since watching classic films can also act as memory steppingstones, what you’re doing is exercising your cognitive process.  Your TCMemberinga movie star’s name might also be safeguarding yourself from something much more frustrating–memory loss.

Watching old movies can support memory, cognitive function and perhaps even emotional health through such processes as reminiscences, and the curiosity that provokes probing’s into familiarity such as TCMemberingthe monikers of actors in old movies.

Yet some actors’ and actresses’ names are so abstract sounding, they often lack any direct semantic meaning or likenesses.  Or they can stand out and hit you like a ton of bricks or a cold shower splashing images so familiar they make their names gush to mind.

Take the actor I was watching in a film the other night on TCM that was driving me crazy until it suddenly rained down hard on my struggling, umbrella less brain—Claude Rains.

What a tonic is remembering and such an uplifting reward just for scratching your head.   Rains was a magnetic English and American character actor whose film career spanned nearly seven decades and is still very much alive and well on Turner Classic Movies channel.

I watched Claude so many times, but mostly many years ago when he was one of my favorite actors beside Humphry Bogart.  One of Rains’ close friends, Betty Davis, would describe him as witty, amusing, enchanting and brilliant.  I’d second and third that!

Ahh Memory!

When you meet regular people off the big screen who are far from movie stars, occasionally during those initial introductions your brain becomes more engrossed in things like their body language and facial expressions, as well as the social context in which the meeting occurred.  Then afterward, you might have to ask yourself, “what was her name again?”

Then there are distinct neural pathways to remembering names that become temporarily blocked when you try too hard to recall, then later when the pressure is off, they’ll suddenly pop out of the blue. Of if you’re a Republican, out of the red.

Still, I’m finding that those occasional name-retrieval lapses, while common in healthy adults, do tend to increase a bit as we undergo that relentlessly fatiguing process called aging. Oh well.

So, if you ever come across Claude Rains, who is appearing now on a much bigger screen called heaven, or anyone whose name you want to remember, it will help if you say that person’s name out loud a few times shortly after first hearing it.

And if you really must have it make a more lasting impression on your often choosy memory, try to link it to a visual image, say in Claude’s case, maybe to a raincoat or an umbrella.

Then keep practicing by saying the name during conversation like . . . “I just met someone who reminds me of . . . what was that actor’s name again who appeared with Bogart in Casablanca? 

“Oh, I can see his image now up in the in clouds?  I’ll bet it . . . Rains.”

Tom Madden, once an actor himself, loves to occasionally watch classic films on TCM, unless there’s breaking news on CNN, FOX News or NBC.  When he’s not watching television, he’s helping to provide the networks with news about his clients via the PR firm he founded when he left NBC, TransMedia Group. Before that he was Fred Silverman’s publicity wizard at ABC.  Today his daughter, Adrienne Mazzone, is now the firm’s dutiful, beautiful president and a wiz herself at making headlines.