Memorizing the name of the people who you come in contact with can dramatically increase your social net worth. Consider the social event where a potential new client or contact introduces themselves, and you forget their name by the end of the evening. The evening comes to a close, and you’re left clueless about the individual’s name.
Imagine the difference it could make if you thanked them personally by learning how to remember names? You’ve suddenly made an impact because you have shown you value the person enough to remember their name. Learning how to remember recognize names can bolster your career.
"If you want to win friends, make it a point to remember them. If you remember my name, you pay me a subtle compliment; you indicate that I have made an impression on you. Remember my name and you add to my feeling of importance."
When I was younger, I enlisted in the military and came across a doctor early on who had an incredible knack for instantly memorizing a soldier’s name. When one brave recruit asked how to remember names, he replied, “It’s a matter of effort and concentration.”
Fast forward 10 years later, and I found myself teaching in a middle school where I had 300 students. The good doctor’s advice came flooding back to me, and I remembered his comment about how to remember names.
I put in the effort, paid attention, used repetition and created memory links to ensure that I could also learn to memorize student names. I learned very quickly that if you don’t know a middle school student’s name, classroom control and management becomes impossible.
Learning names became essential to surviving and thriving as a teacher.
Cynthia R, Green, Ph.D. is the founding director of the Memory Enhancement Program at Mount Sinai School of Medicine. She offers eight basic memory techniques that can bolster your memory. Of these techniques, paying attention, using internal repetition, external repetition and creating links are the most useful for learning how to remember names.
According to a video from AsapScience, it’s harder to remember a name because names are relatively unattached and meaningless in the grand scheme of things. In our society, we tend to place an emphasis on our current relationships and de-emphasize new relationships.
It’s important to discover a way to gain enjoyment from meeting a new person, and more importantly, learning their name. Remembering a person’s job tends to stick in the brain because their job may directly affect you. We are also wired to remember faces, but names remain elusive.
When the brain comes across four people named Ryan, it tends to have trouble differentiating. The brain looks for patterns and differences, and a name isn’t as unique as the person’s face, job or personality. When names are unisex, such as Sam, Alex, Ryan, or Angel, it becomes clear why it is so hard to learn how to remember names.
The result is that you remember all kinds of details about a person who you just met, but remembering a name is extremely difficult. It’s not your fault; your brain seeks out the novel and noteworthy. As insulting as it may sound, a name is not typically memorable in itself.
1. Focus
2. Internal and External Repetition
3. Create Links
We live in a world where there are constant distractions. When you meet someone, make it a point to give them your undivided attention for the duration of the conversation. Adam Gazzaley, Ph. D. notes that college students were tested and found to be able to focus for only three to five minutes before getting distracted.
Get involved in activities that force you to concentrate and focus. Meditation and focusing on your breath will teach you to focus on one thing at a time. Yoga will guide you to ignore outside stimuli and focus on your breathing as well. Exercise, in general, is great for the mind, but all of this implies that poor memory is somehow your fault.
The truth is, our brains constantly seek new information.
This brings us to the question of how to remember names when your biology is working against you? It seems that our brains reward us for discovering new information, and a name may not trigger the most exciting reward-inducing responses.
One way to increase your focus and wrangle your mind into compliance is to stop multitasking and focus on the person in front of you. Take control of the situation, put your phone away and look directly at the person. Making eye contact can create a more reliable connection that will heighten your senses and make you more likely to remember.
When it comes to devising methods to memorize a person’s name, you probably already have plenty of practice. When you must learn something new, you can use repetition to reinforce that information.
Internal repetition requires you to simply take an idea and repeat it several times to yourself. It seems too simple to work, but it’s one of the best ways to learn a person’s name. Get used to repeating a person’s name several times in a short period to enhance your skill and get better at memorization.
External repetition is a bit more complicated in a social situation. However, the first thing you should do is repeat the person’s name back to them. Make it casual and fluid by saying something as simple as, “It’s good to meet you, Sam.” Attempt to work their name into the conversation at least three more times before moving on to the next person.
Practice applying internal and external memory techniques. The simple act of practicing these techniques will force you to pay attention to your contact. By being forced to concentrate, it makes it far less likely that you will forget a name.
By giving each person you meet a minimum of 30 seconds for an introduction, you can make a lasting impression and be more likely to remember their name. Often, we remember things that engage us, so engage with your new contact and make the meeting memorable.
Once you have repeated a person’s name, it’s time to get to work linking their name to something novel. Let’s say that Sam has blue eyes and likes sailing. You can remember the name by imagining Sam sailing on a blue ocean.
Links are one of the best and simplest ways to link information. If you don’t see anything immediately that would allow you to link Sam’s name with something memorable, it’s time to start asking questions.
I’m currently a professor at a university, and I have to memorize my student’s names to make it easier to conduct lectures and ask questions. One of the first things I do every semester involves asking students to stand up and tell the class three interesting things about themselves.
I won’t remember all three things about the students, and I can’t very well sit there and write while they are talking. I attempt to find one statement that I can then connect to their name. It takes effort, but the result is that I am more likely to learn their names.
Once the student is finished, I typically ask a follow-up question and try to link the student to something I already know. I may find that a student named Alex likes to spend the weekend listening to music. I picture Alex playing the accordion, and the student suddenly becomes Accordion Alex.
Not all links will be as easy to find, but the mere act of putting in the effort to link will improve your ability to memorize names. Practice linking with your grocery list, to-do list or any other list to gain proficiency in linking names together and gain a better understanding of how to remember names.
Practice makes perfect, and if you practice linking techniques as a way to improve your memory, you will get better at learning how to remember names. It’s critical to put in the effort, pay attention and develop the techniques that will make others take note of you as well.
One way you can practice is by going through an old yearbook and attempting to memorize all of the names on each page. Cover up the names, and create stories to help you build links for each person.
It’s also important to be upfront and honest about your difficulties in remembering names. Most people tend to project their strengths and hide their weaknesses. We all have trouble with memory at some point in our lives, and there is no shame in asking a person to repeat a name.
Focus on the person you are talking with, take the time to get to know them, and make them the center of your world for three to five minutes. Do you remember the study of the college students who could only focus for three to five minutes? Make each encounter engaging and keep your first encounters short to make your meetings more exciting and memorable.
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