How good are you at remembering names?
I’m not. And I continue to wonder why. Am I not paying attention? Am I too focused on making a good impression that I simply don’t register their name? Is my brain on the fritz?
Perhaps. But the research yields a bit of relief, presenting this poignant reminder: remembering names is difficult because names, in and of themselves, are entirely arbitrary. “Names are meaningless labels,” explain the authors at psychologicalscience.com, and at times their “unique sound components make them harder to remember.”
Offers Chris MacLeod at succeedsocially.com: “In my experience, having some trouble remembering names is the rule, not the exception. And the people who are good with names work at it. It's not something they were born with.”
Forgetting is natural, adds Carmine Gallo of inc.com, who shares these mind-numbing stats from neuroscience professor Charan Rangathan: “The average American is exposed to 34 gigabytes of information a day – the equivalent of 11.8 hours of images, words, sounds, etc. And that’s why the human brain is designed to forget most of what it comes across.”
I feel better already.
But don’t forget my name!
Most people I know feel bad when they can’t recall a person’s name. Many more, I suspect, feel worse when someone can’t remember theirs. I get that. But it may be time to challenge those thoughts.
Says theswaddle.com's Rajvi Desai: “A person who can’t remember your name is not necessarily slighting you or disrespecting you; it’s possible their forgetfulness has more to do with the way their brain works than it has anything to do with how they see you.” Adds Desai: “They could even have a mild type of aphasia – which prevents them from retrieving nouns and verbs from their memory.”
'I know that face'
Faces offer endless cues – the eyes, the ears, the nose, not to mention hair, teeth, skin color, clothing, posture, and facial expressions. But names? It’s a hollow label. We need more information! Where do you live or work? What are your favorite hobbies?
The battle pits recognition (I know that face) against recall (I remember that name). Notes Anne Eddy at colby.edu: “Recall has fewer cues than recognition, making it a more challenging process.”
How can we improve?
In recent years, one of the standards – to repeat a person’s name – has been challenged. “It turns out,” says Nick Morgan of psychologytoday.com, citing a recent study, “that repeating a name immediately actually interferes with the brain’s work of encoding it into memory. Instead, the effort goes into, well, saying the name out loud. The brain can do one or the other but not both. It’s either busy talking or remembering, but apparently, remembering-while-talking is not one of our brain skills.”
So what works? Links, associations, and creating unique mental images that match the person to their name.
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Gallo: “If you want to become a memory machine, you must make an active effort to link the two. Simply repeating a person’s name isn’t enough – the link between the name and face is what matters.”
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Eddy: “All faces have basic features, and finding distinct features is hard at first, but this skill can be developed with practice.”
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MacLeod: Create a mental image, or an internal rhyme, and soon after meeting, write down their name.
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Beth Ann Mayer in parade.com: Encourage yourself! Quoting Dr. Erisa Preston: “The power of positive thinking and believing in yourself cannot be underestimated.” Mayer shares two of Dr. Preston’s affirmations: “I am good at remembering names” and “I value remembering names and making connections.”
And when you forget? Dr. Preston again: “Be kind to yourself. It happens to everyone. Berating yourself is not likely to make you remember any better.”