On the principle that it takes a village to raise a child, I would like to pursue the thought that it takes as much as 156 milligrams of hippocampus to remember who directed a film that is nearly everyone’s favorite.

Now for those of you who are conversant with adjusted average hippocampal weights, you are prepared already to turn the page, metaphorically speaking, because you know there has never been a hippocampus that weighs anywhere near that much.

And you are right.

But here’s what I am thinking. Bette and I live in a senior center where a good deal of the social activity goes on in the dining room. As is true in many other settings, “meeting for dinner” is a common way to keep up with events in the lives of friends. It is true here as well.

And one of the common features—no pun intended—of our dining room is that is has tables large enough to seat six people. “Six top” tables, they are called, for reasons I have never understood [1]. They are tables intended to serve six people. And very often at dinner at such a table, a question will come up about a movie everyone has seen and liked. We remember the actor who played the lead, but not the name of the character she played. We remember the name of the producer, but not the director. We remember the name of the town where the events are supposed to have taken place, but not the name of the county. That last one is especially prominent for movies set in Ireland.

What to do?

Well, remembering that the hippocampus is the seat of explicit memory, we could look there for help. The hippocampus mediates our recall of specific events—names, dates, places. It is therefore the part of the brain that is being called on at our table when we all remember something—some the character, some the place of filming, some the date of issue—but no one remembers what we are trying to remember.

You could, of course, say that this is the kind of problem that bedevils old people, but what is the value of a description like that? I say let’s regard it as a problem caused by an inadequate hippocampus. The standard 26 milligram hippocampus is just not up to addressing this problem. Fortunately at our table, a six top, there is roughly 156 milligrams (26 X 6) of hippocampal weight to be directed toward the problem. That ought to be enough, don’t you think?

And eventually it is. Someone remembers that this actor has a brother who starred in a different Irish film. Someone else remembers that the film the brother starred in was released only five years after the film we are trying to remember. Someone else remarks that it was one of the highest grossing films of the summer in the year it was released. That has nothing at all to do with our common problem, but it gets said anyway. We’re a bunch of old people.

Eventually, bringing to bear 6X the power of one normal hippocampus, someone remembers the right name and everyone else says they were just right at the edge of remembering it themselves and that they know it is correct.

This illustrates the same principle embodied in “it takes a village to raise a child” as applied, in this case to remembering who played the lead in a film everyone at the table had seen and liked.

[1] “Restaurant slang” was the speculation of the only source I found that was willing even to speculate.