We were talking, a few of us, at a recent photo gallery reception when my wife walked over and joined the conversation. I would, of course, have introduced her to the woman I was speaking with except that, of course, I had no idea of the name of the woman I was speaking with.

I couldn’t think of her name despite the fact that I knew I used to work with her. I had no idea of her name although apparently she knew my name quite well, knew me quite well, easily recalling details of our long relationship.

So, naturally, I spent the next ten minutes or so finding ways to avoid introducing my wife to … whatever her name was. And this was not the first time something like this had happened.

I’ve forgotten names of people I’ve worked with and names of neighbors living down the block. I’ve forgotten the names of people I haven’t seen in some time and people I see regularly. I’ve forgotten the names of people I know well and people I barely knew but that knew me. I’ve changed aisles in the supermarket when I’ve seen someone I know and know I know coming toward me and have realized I have no idea of their name.

It’s not that my memory in general is completely shot. Sure, sometimes, like all of us, I have difficulty recalling who was Hillary Clinton’s running mate in the 2016 election (Tim Kaine!) and sometimes I can’t remember where I left my glasses or if I closed the garage door before pulling away. But I’m also able to recall, usually fairly easily, bizarre pieces of obscure information, both recent and distant, like the lead actress in the 1950s TV series “I Remember Mama” (in case you’re having difficulty, it was Peggy Wood) or the results of a recent New England Journal of Medicine story on the effectiveness of beta-blockers.

But names have proven particularly elusive. Recent research has found that memories are stored in several different parts of the brain—the hippocampus, perirhinal cortex and medial prefrontal cortex—rather than just one place. It’s been likened to an internal library system; the memory for a face will be stored in one particular brain region, whereas a name is stored in a completely different one. And that means that different parts of the brain, the name and the face part, for instance, need to efficiently talk to each other.

Which is harder as we age. When you get older, neural pathways get eroded, making what had been a free-flowing interstate into a bumpy dirt road. And of course, any name has to fight for space in your already crowded brain that’s overflowing with last night’s baseball scores and this morning’s Trump trial news and an assortment of digital ephemera.

So sometimes, names are just on the tip of your tongue but can’t quite jump off (I love that there’s even a word for that: lethologica, a word that I have just learned and is taking up valuable space in my brain that could be better used for actually remembering someone’s name).

But much of the time, the name simply isn’t there at all. No matter how hard we try, we can’t come up with the name even though we know we know it. Or think we know we know it.

There must be ways around this. Maybe we should ask the person for contact info, a sly way of finding out their name. Or perhaps we should have the person introduce herself to the newcomer to the conversation.

Or, more likely, we should just acknowledge our inability to remember a name. Would that be so embarrassing? Would it make us look old and doddering, or more old and doddering than we actually are? Would it be interpreted as a social faux pas, a slight?

Maybe. But most people, I’m guessing, would be understanding if you just said, “I’m so sorry, I’m blanking here, but I can’t recall your name.” Because it’s pretty certain it’s happened to them, too.