When our comversation touched on the common experience of failing to retrieve somebody's name my friend exclaimed, "What is it with names?" Why do we all have this ineptitude for a task we feel is so important?
I opined that the typical failure to recall names is a structural attribute of the human mind. A "feature" as the current idiom has it rather than a "flaw". I have no objective data to support that position but it is consistent with the ubiquity of the problem.
For me the more interesting side of the question is why we are so upset with this failure when we have so many others of arguably greater significance. (Which is more important? That your banker call you by your name or that your bank credit card charge you a non-usurious rate? Apparently most people are more concerned with the name than the rate.)
Alek Dog, who wa also present for this conversation, never calls anyone by their proper name or any other name. He doesn't seem to be as upset by this as a human might be. Alek does recognize his own name although I suspect he understands it as a command or "wake word" to pay attention to a proximate word or phrase: "Hey Google" or "Alek" serving analogous functionality.
In the broad sense names are a key to how we function as humans. Adam was presented with all the created beings and asked to name them because that is fundamental to what Adamites do in the world. We can name species and individuals, localities and groups, and by doing so we are able to talk about them and to think about them. Naming is the tool which allows humans to have dominion over the birds of the air and the fish of the sea.
We even name words and subsets of words in order to have dominion over our language. There is a set of words we call "names". This allows us to ask questions like, "What is it with names?"