This is inspired by a totally unrelated thread from the BBQ Pit: Its title got truncated to “[thread=505635]God, I F***ing Hate Carrie…[/thread]” in the forum overview.
I thought: Carrie… who? Carrie Fisher? Carrie Stevens? That other Carrie-Anne-something…Moss? Carrie Underwood?
Turns out it was Carrie Underwood. Funny thing is, I don’t even know this woman. Had to look her up on Wikipedia. Yikes. I wouldn’t touch American Idol with a ten-foot pole. Why do I even remember her name? Probably picked it up somewhere in the media. But where, when, why? Beats me.
Egads. Just how much of my precious brain capacity must be dedicated to remembering all these people’s names!
I bet that everybody of us is able to recognise thousands of actors alone. All those singers, stars, and pseudo-celebrities. You all remember the names of historical people, famous scientists, artists from many centuries. Inventors, business people, public figures, dead and living. The names of politicians, delegates, and other famous criminals. You instantly recognise them in the news. For most of those, you’re able to expand them to their full name even when you only read a shortened version.
Do you know those lists where they rank the “brand awareness” for something? Like 99.99999 percent of all people have heard of Mickey Mouse or Ronald McDonald. The borders between “knowing”, “recognising”, and “vaguely remembering” are blurred, of course. But I think it’s safe to assume that similar lists got compiled by market researchers about the “publicity value” of famous names. Would a statistician be able to take these rankings and deduce the average sample size needed to achieve a given threshold of popularity? Has anybody done this? Can we estimate it?
It’s funny, I was just reading in How to Win Friends and Influence People that Whoever Giant Something Baron claimed to know fifty thousand names, and I was wondering, is it possible for somebody who isn’t autistic or something?
Most people have a vocabulary of 10,000 to 30,000 words. I’d imagine that remembering a word and remembering a name is virtually the same process. Thus, it seems reasonable to expect that thousands of names could be remembered by even an average person.
Heck, I have a terrible memory for names and yet I could still list 100 or so of my classmates who I haven’t seen in almost 15 years.
And would you count the names of places, companies and fictional characters? Nicknames and name variations? It might be that the average person knows more names than they do words.
I was walking with my 4 kids once and this guy came up to me all incredulous and said “Are they ALL yours!?! How on earth do you remember all their names!?!”
I can’t imagine what world he lives in that he find it difficult to remember 4 people’s names
Mh, good question. Let’s leave out places and brand names. Since most members should be able to recognise their messageboard community just by the mix of screen names here, I guess someone’s nicknames and pseudonyms qualify as names in their own right. Wow, think about it. Simply by frequenting this board, you must be subconsciously learning to recognise at least a few dozens of names.
Fictional characters? If there’s a name-like association with a single entity that you could interact with, for real or in your imagination, same difference. Bilbo?→Baggins! Certainly counts for me as another “name slot” to remember.
A good politician can identify thousands, some even tens of thousands of people. I don’t know know if they train themselves, or if people with this talent naturally go into politics. Chances are, though, if you have ever been introduced to your congressman or M.P., he’ll be able to identify you on sight.