Why mediums have so much trouble with names

This problem seems to be very common with mediumistic communications with the deceased. An example from the work of one of the most famous and most investigated mediums, Leonora Piper:

"From the 1922 book “Past and Present with Mrs. Piper” by Anne Manning Robbins, a friend of Leonora Piper - on page 49 of the book we start to read an interesting sketch of life after death, told in trance on May 24, 1904 by Leonora Piper through automatic writing (which the book states was used almost exclusively by Piper between 1903 and 1908, rather than verbal trance speaking). The source dictated as if it were some deceased spirit:

"And the feeling of ecstasy is beyond description, and no spirit that ever returned to earth could begin to describe it for the understanding of the mortal mind. And then I was surrounded by friends, by acquaintances, by old war veterans, by my intimate friends whom I know, members of my family and all, surrounded by them, welcoming me. Why, I felt as though I should be enveloped by them, the delight was so great, but when I tried to call them by name I was at a loss to do so. They had to tell me who they were. I knew their faces, not one failed to me. I knew them and understood them well. I saw them and recognized them, but to call them by name, believe me, I could not. And when I tried to speak I found instead of it being an effort and difficult for me to speak, I found that my thoughts were understood, actually understood, and their thoughts were returned to me. There was a perfect communion between us.""

This account is very much in line with the following hypothesis: The reading, writing and understanding of words, especially names, must be a neural process, the function of certain brain structures. Naturally they no longer support the spirit or soul after it has left the body. Accordingly, when out of the body in other spiritual realms, the spirit would have great difficulty in naming names. This is because absent the neural brain structures the consciousness or awareness or idea of the identity of a unique person can no longer automatically be associated with the sound of the persons name and the shapes and identifications of the letters making up the name.

The spirit would be aware of and identify another spirit through direct psychic perception, telepathy or other paranormal modalities - sense their essence so to speak, and have no need for names.

This example was apparently an account by a discarnate person of his initial experience of being greeted after his physical death, communicated through Leonora Piper. Piper was still mostly in body and had fully functioning linguistic neural processing, but the being she was receiving the communication from did not, causing the name difficulty. 

This simple hypothesis would seem to explain one of the more puzzling characteristics of the communications coming through psychic mediums - their often great difficulty in getting names correctly.

The occurrence of very numerous cases of this problem in mediumistic communications with the dead would seem to be strong evidence of the truth of the hypothesis - they fit it to a T. The hypothesis presumes the survival of some aspects of the former human personality, in order for the communication to occur. By extension perhaps the confirmation of the prediction of this hypothesis could be considered yet another piece of evidence for survival.

This would also appear to be another fairly strong piece of evidence against "super-psi" as an explanation for mediumistic communications with the deceased. Why would the subconscious mind of a medium choose to fake a phenomenon that would be later explained as an expected artifact of the nature of the physical brain, spirits, and the psychic communication chain?

That seems very reasonable. I share the view that human language is one of the functions of the brain.

There is another aspect too. In the context of past lives, each person will have had many human identities and names. Those people we know may have shared many lifetimes with us, in many roles, so that for example, roles such as mother or uncle may be considered temporary rather than part of a being's identity. Though there may be some sort of identifying feature, it may not be a label as we are used to it.

Does this same phenomenon occur in NDEs?

I wonder if part of it is brain structure but also locality? Consider reincarnation cases as well, where the proof lies in the naming of the past life.

Would also be worth looking into whether Intermission Memories confer that sense of namelessness or at least disassociation with names in mortal life.

This only sort of works, facial recognition is also a well known and established brain function that can be lost in rare cases. So you can't really say that people don't remember names because its a brain function. they also shouldn't remember faces either if that were the case. So the question then becomes why one but not the other?

Typoz's reasoning mostly solves this even from my own experience. All the people I consider my friends, including me, who have all had many many lives together and generally speaking live in what would be considered the inbetween state, save for one shot incarnations like the one I'm in now, all have what we'd consider "true names". Names and identities that are stable across incarnations or other changes. I guess you could think of them like base preferences, even though there's no reason for someone to look a certain way, be a certain gender or species, or have a certain name, its just what we most identify with at this point.

Certainly it is true that its far more useful to identify someone via their energy signature alone than any sort of name, look, or other conventional thing. Especially once things like shapeshifting, possession or equivalent gets involved and people have gendered base names. I always find it a little weird that the whole forgetting name thing happens until I remember that most people here aren't used to their base experience being "up there" with dots of incarnations the way I am at this point. So I could easily see it being a new novel thing for them that they might not know how to deal with in the same way.

Part of that is because, generally, there's nothing really preventing someone who lives "up there" from just coming down here and being just as physical as everyone and everything else, and vice versa, without  needing to incarnate or die to do so. The planes or however you want to think of them really aren't all that separate. Though that doesn't mean they're necessarily so seamlessly connected you can just walk from one to the other. Typically any true separation is an artificial construct of some type that usually has a reason to be there.

Does this same phenomenon occur in NDEs?

I wonder if part of it is brain structure but also locality? Consider reincarnation cases as well, where the proof lies in the naming of the past life.

Would also be worth looking into whether Intermission Memories confer that sense of namelessness or at least disassociation with names in mortal life.

On NDEs: I would defer to Tim for expertise in this area, but my impression is that this phenomenon isn't much encountered in these experiences. I think that this would at least partly be expected under this hypothesis, since the NDE account is being given by the returned experiencer his/her self, and the NDEer is back in his body, with fully functioning neural systems including the ones responsible for associating awareness of a unique person's identity and his spoken and written name, for instance. Since he actually is the NDE experiencer, using his fully functioning brain he naturally associates the identities of the encountered loved ones with their names. 

I don't recall accounts where the NDEer remembers not being able to name a deceased loved one encountered in the spiritual dimension, while undergoing this experience.

On NDEs: I would defer to Tim for expertise in this area, but my impression is that this phenomenon isn't much encountered in these experiences. I think that this would at least partly be expected under this hypothesis, since the NDE account is being given by the returned experiencer his/her self, and the NDEer is back in his body, with fully functioning neural systems including the ones responsible for associating awareness of a unique person's identity and his spoken and written name, for instance. Since he actually is the NDE experiencer, using his fully functioning brain he naturally associates the identities of the encountered loved ones with their names. 

I don't recall accounts where the NDEer remembers not being able to name a deceased loved one encountered in the spiritual dimension, while undergoing this experience.

Bit of an old reply, but, remember that during NDEs, even when one meets deceased relatives, a lot of people say they don't talk using words. Is done like telepathically. Perhaps that would lead into why mediums are not good with names. People don't really HAVE names in whatever realm they're in, people just 'know'. Only time I know about people not being able to name deceased people they see too is when they don't know who they were in real life, like a relative they never met.

Bit of an old reply, but, remember that during NDEs, even when one meets deceased relatives, a lot of people say they don't talk using words. Is done like telepathically. Perhaps that would lead into why mediums are not good with names. People don't really HAVE names in whatever realm they're in, people just 'know'. Only time I know about people not being able to name deceased people they see too is when they don't know who they were in real life, like a relative they never met.

The angle here though is that the person having the NDE supplies the name. The deceased person may not supply their own name. It reminds me of a related topic, where a person meets some being and declares it to have been Jesus or someone significant like that, the name is almost always supplied by the experiencer, not by the being.

Drawing on past discussion we've had on the Skeptiko forums, I wonder if the afterlife might be akin to the ideal of "post-symbolic" VR ->

POST-SYMBOLIC COMMUNICATION IN VIRTUAL REALITY

"The first prerequisite for post-symbolic communication is shared virtual reality. The second is an ability to create a world quickly and easily while one is in virtual reality. This ability doesn't exist yet, but I believe it will. This involves having some method that allows a person to programme a virtual world in all aspects of form and behavior as quickly as talking about it. This would yield a situation that might be described as a shared, intentional waking dream in which everything is possible and everything is relatively easy and everything is shared.

This situation has simply never existed before. We have never had this interesting intersection of realities. This is a combination of the objectivity of the physical world with the unlimitedness and the uncensored content normally associated with dreams or imagination with the spontaneous composability of language.

One comment about the objectivity and sharedness of virtual reality. Virtual reality fits into exactly the same niche between people that is normally taken up by the physical world. No more, no less. So, the types of interactions that people have in the physical world are acceptable in virtual reality."

Another interesting example of the phenomenon of spirits not being able to remember names, not being able to speak, and in general being at least initially very unclear about their circumstances. Could this be mainly due to the absence of the brain structures that in physical life did the correlations between the sounds of words, their spelling and their meaning? This perhaps would partially clear up as the spirit learned new methods of correlation peculiar to his/her new "body".

Abridged from Chapter 8 of "Resurrecting Leonora Piper" by Michael Tymn (at http://whitecrowbooks.com/michaeltymn/en...conditions):

Augustus Martin, usually referred to as “General,” after Massachusetts Governor John Long commissioned him an honorary brigadier general because of his distinguished service during the Civil War, especially at the Battle of Gettysburg, died on March 13, 1902. On May 21, 1903, Hodgson, who had been studying the mediumship of Mrs. Piper for more 15 years at that point, was informed by Rector, Piper’s spirit control at the time, that a spirit there was constantly calling for a lady in the body. After some struggling to get the name, Rector (using Piper’s hand) wrote “Robbins.” The spirit was identified as having been Augustus Martin, but it was said that he was not yet ready to speak, though he would be soon. However, it wasn’t until December 23 that year, some 21 months after his passing that Martin actually began to communicate. Rector asked Hodgson to arrange for a sitting by Robbins.

During that sitting, Rector first addressed Robbins and brought her old friend Hiram Hart to communicate with her. Hart then said, “I am bringing another friend who seeks you, who knows you as you are. ” It was explained that Martin was not yet able to speak through Piper and that Hart would relay his words.
.....................................
Robbins asked Martin if he remembered any of the public officials who used to work with him. “I think I should,” he replied. “Many names have gone from me, naturally, and new ones have come up to me. Names of places, names of people whom I knew in the mortal world, have gone from me to a certain extent, and as I go on they go still farther from me, but I shall never forget you. I remember when I was suffering so, I remember the little councils we had together, and they have lasted in my memory and will to the end of all life.”

Hate to be a party pooper but y'know Occam's razor - maybe they have problems with names because they are just guessing and don't have any real abilities?