A short guide

How to remember names

Most people who say they are bad with names are about average. Names are the hardest thing to remember about a person, for a reason, and a few habits make a real difference.

Why names slip away

A name tells you nothing about its owner. Psychologists call this the Baker–baker effect: people shown a face and told the man is a baker remember it far better than people shown the same face and told his name is Baker (McWeeny and colleagues, 1987). “A baker” comes with flour, an apron and early mornings. “Mr. Baker” comes with nothing. Your memory is working properly. It has been handed a word with nothing to hold on to.

It gets harder with age, and harder again in a room where you are meeting ten people in ten minutes.

Four things that help

1. Say it back, at once

“Good to meet you, Lydia.” A forgotten name was often never heard properly in the first place. Saying the name makes you listen to it, and it is your first go at pulling it out of memory.

2. Attach one thing

Give the name something to hold on to: what they do, where they are from, who brought them. “Walt, the retired fire chief.” In experiments, people who tied a name to a meaning recalled far more names than people who only repeated them (Morris and colleagues, 2005).

3. Test yourself instead of rereading

Looking at a list of names and faces feels like studying, and it does very little. Covering the name and trying to produce it does a great deal. The same experiments found that being asked for a name beat seeing it again, and that the two habits together, a meaning and a test, beat either alone. This is why leafing through a photo directory never seems to work.

4. Space it out

Ask yourself again a few minutes later, then that evening, then in a few days. Each time you get it right, the gap can grow. Spacing and testing have both been shown to help with names in particular (Carpenter and DeLosh, 2005).

At your next meeting

• Pick three people to learn, not thirty.
• Say each name back when you hear it, and once more when you part.
• Find the one thing: the job, the hometown, the grandchild.
• In the car, see whether you can still name all three.
• Before the next meeting, try again.

And when a name is gone, ask. “Tell me your name again” is kinder than a year of avoiding someone.

Where Omnoti comes in

Omnoti does the last two steps for a whole group. It is a photo directory of your club, church or team, with a two-minute round: it shows a face and asks who it is. Each person adds one line about themself, so every name has something to hold on to. A missed face comes back soon and a known one later, and on the morning of a meeting you get a round of the people you are about to see.

What you miss is private, and nothing is ever computed from a face.