Who Are You?
Holidays and parties and so many names! No need for name-tags —
there are way to remember!

By Fran Molloy

What do you do when an acquaintance comes up and launches into a conversation with you – and you can’t remember where on earth you know them from – and have no clue about their name?

It’s even more embarrassing when you have someone with you and both people are waiting for you to introduce them.

Do you carry on, pretend to be oblivious; use complicated subterfuge to try to get them to introduce each other – or confess to forgetting the person’s name?

This is a scenario that’s all too common for many of us. If you’re always forgetting names, though, you risk being thought arrogant, rude – or perhaps flaky. It’s certainly not good for your career; and those on the receiving end of ‘name forgetting’ will often be quite offended that you think their name so inconsequential.

But the good news is, remembering names is a skill that you can develop quite easily.

Businessman Chris Lyons has refined his memory-enhancing techniques to such an extent that he’s running workshops and selling tuition packages to help others learn simple memory techniques. He’s won various memory competitions over the years, breaking the national Australian memory record in 2006 by correctly recalling 118 names and faces in 15 minutes and reciting the mathematical figure Pi to 4400 decimal places.

He says that, in the absence of any neurological condition, having a good memory is a skill that you can learn – and has generously shared some of his tips with this absent-minded author. Most people don’t usually forget faces, he says; it’s more that they forget the context in which they met someone.

Lyons says that a recently-identified neurological condition called face-blindness, related to the way that certain people ‘code’ the faces of people they meet, won’t respond to simple memory techniques – but adds that severe face-blindness is very rare.

But if you struggle to recall faces, one basic memory technique that may help is focusing carefully on the face of a person when you first meet them. In particular, focus on the zone between the eyes and the nose and try to observe details like the shape of the eyes or the width of nostrils and so on. “If you spend a little bit of time observing people and noticing the details, it trains you in ‘active observation,’ so you are paying more attention and hopefully storing more information away,” he explains.

Far more common is the problem of forgetting the name of someone you have met before, he says. That’s a really common problem of mine, I admit.

So I had to ask the strategic question: what’s the best approach when you have forgotten someone’s name and they have remembered yours? Should you admit it straight away - or hold off and wait for their name to come to you?

“In that situation, where you have a clear memory of the person’s face but not their name, – the chances that you’re going to come up with the person’s name during the next couple of sentences are actually pretty slim,” says Lyons.

He says that our brains are usually very good at storing images of faces. “When you see somebody, your brain quickly compares that face with its big databank of all the faces you’ve ever seen before and says – yes, I know this face.”

But if you don’t store a memory of a person’s name and face together when you first meet them, you aren’t going to come up with it when you meet again, he says.

He explains that there are two parts to remembering someone’s name. “The first part is a processing thing - when we meet someone and we hear their name, it’s what goes on, the context at the time. And the other part involves what you do to make a memorable connection with the sound of their name; there are two different processes there.”

Unfortunately, in many social situations, we meet new people in a way that makes it very difficult to recall their name. We are often introduced to six or eight people, very quickly; and most of us are not able to process this much information quickly.

“Once most people get six to eight pieces of information in their short-term memory, it tends to go blank,” Lyons says. So the problem is that we are overloading our short term memory. It’s much better to meet two or three people at a time then have the opportunity to talk to them for a few minutes, he adds.

And for most people, once you have met a new person – even if you recall their name straight after you have been introduced – that’s it, until the next time you see that person. But people tend to forget about 80 percent of new information within 24 hours, he says – our brains are very good at filtering out what we don’t need.

“If we don’t review or elaborate this information, if it isn’t emphasized, we will forget it.”

If you don’t think back and review that new information fairly soon afterwards, the chances of it decaying are much greater, he says.

So a simple strategy is to later mentally put yourself back there, and review the new names. Writing it down later might help some people, but for others, this encourages forgetfulness because they know that it is written somewhere.

More useful in business situations is remembering which person gave you which business card, he suggests. Visual memory tends to be the strongest in most people, Lyons says; we’re good at remembering places we have been, you can picture your home, picture every room; you can picture your journey to the shops.

So the most common and effective memory technique for names, is to come up with a visual association to match that name, he explains.

For example – his own visual association for the name “Michael” or “Mick” is to imagine that person walking down the steps of a private plane, because he has a memory of seeing a film clip of Mick Jagger disembarking from a private jet.

“It’s quite convoluted – and they often are – but the thing is, that’s my association with that name,” Lyons explains. “Then when I meet someone with that name, I picture them at that location.” People with good memories for names have usually built for themselves a visual vocabulary, he says. Most names don’t have an associated image; but if you create this vocabulary for yourself, you can use your images again and again.

Not remembering people’s names is a widespread problem, and most people suffer from it, Lyons says; but very few people actually do anything about it.

“These techniques do work and they work really well; you have to put a little bit of effort up front. Memory is a skill, it’s something that you need to learn and to work on,” he says.

“Your brain is all about making associations and connections – one thing makes you think of something else, all the time; what these techniques do, is actually train your brain to get much, much quicker at looking at situations and finding similarities and connections. It’s very good from a problem solving point of view.”

“Learn the basic rules and do a little bit of practice and you’ll get so much from it,” he says. “You should then be able to remember the names of most of the people you meet.”