What’s in a name?

Does your name carry your destiny? The theory of “nominative determinism” suggests that names have power to shape life outcomes. To give but one anecdotal example, this writer certainly has experienced that using one form of name has led to greater success than another. As men and women of science though, you are no doubt looking for hard facts in your relentless quest for truth in all matters. So you will be glad to know that researchers have decided to investigate the issue of the power of names in a more empirical way.

Nominative determinism suggests that your name might influence thing s like your choice of profession but that is perhaps a function of your mind, even if subconsciously, choosing a path to align with your name. These researchers wanted to see if a name might influence health.

To investigate this they looked at people with the surname “Brady”. The choice of Brady was much more than a hunch because “bradycardia” is a slow heart rate and the researchers wanted to see if people called Brady were more likely to have bradycardia.

Pacemakers are often given to patients with bradycardia, so the researchers examined hospital records in Dublin to establish who had been given a pacemaker. This was then matched against the total number of number of people with those surnames in the phone listings. The results showed that the proportion of pacemaker recipients among Bradys was 1.38 per cent compared to only 0.61 per cent among non-Bradys. That means people with the surname Brady are more than twice as likely to develop bradycardia as people without the surname Brady. This does not prove that all names influence health outcomes, and it does not speak to mechanism; maybe Bradys have a genetic mechanism at play or possibly some greater collective unconscious knowledge is at play. It all becomes incredibly speculative but it opens a Pandora’s Box of possibilities.

It might seem improbable but your name may carry your health destiny. This is might give pause to new age parents about to name their child “Ink-spot” or “Soil” but it is incredibly good news for people named Joy or Hope or with the surname Sunshine. It is not such glad tidings however, for Robert or Richard or Mrs Down or Mr Droop.