Bruce Frankel
Available March 4, 2010 Pre-Order Now
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, 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,
Praise for What Should I Do with the Rest of My Life?
“Bruce Frankel’s upbeat, inspiring, timely book shows how taking a risk and fighting to find a passionate career — at any age — can reinvigorate your life...”
— Susan Shapiro, author of Speed Shrinking and Only As Good as Your Word
