At the end of his great address, King Benjamin gave his people a new name and one instruction for keeping it. They were to retain it, he said, written always in their hearts. The science of memory helps explain why a name held in mind can hold a whole identity in place.

Scholar of memory Charan Ranganath, in his 2024 book Why We Remember, shows that identity itself is built largely from memory. The sense of who you are rests on the experiences you carry and, crucially, on the ones you return to most. What you rehearse becomes the lens you see through and the self you act from. A person who keeps certain memories near, revisiting them until they are woven into daily thought, slowly becomes shaped by them. Memory is not a back room separate from the self. It is much of what the self is made of.

A name works as a powerful cue in this system. In the world of the Hebrew Bible, a shem (Hebrew, “name, and the identity and reputation it carries”) stood for the whole character of its bearer. To keep a name in mind is to keep present everything that name represents. Held in the heart and returned to often, a name becomes a constant retrieval cue, pulling an identity back into view again and again across a day.

We carry many names this way without thinking about it, the name of a family, a people, a calling, each one a small anchor of identity that shapes how we act when we remember to whom we belong. Let the name fade, and the identity it held drifts loose. Keep it near, and it steadies everything downstream of it.