I can’t remember the names of the people who live across the street from me. They were here when my wife and I moved in 37 years. And their names are on our refrigerator in case of emergency.
Co-workers? Pffft.
I’ll go on record as saying “below average” though that’s not what I said in my first post. In my case, there are a helluva lot of people to remember, given that I moved constantly during both my childhood and working adulthood. I just did a rough count of places I have lived for at least 3 months from age 5 onward, usually more like 2-4 years at a time, and came up with 28. I’m almost certainly leaving out a few.
In some cases, I can remember if I’m given a prompt. (Kinda like some dementia patients, I think.) For example, a childhood friend by the name of Lynn wrote to me decades later. I had ZERO recollection of who she was when I got the note. But my mother reminded me of an activity we had done together, and then the memories clicked and I remembered what she looked like, where she lived, and what shared interests/activities made us friends. We knew each other for about 2 years total.
My guess is that most people would do better than I did at recalling a friend like Lynn without needing a prompt to get them started.
Stranger
My hero, and the son I never had.
Maybe I should have watched the show.
I’ve got mild prosogagnosia as well while my wife has a fantastic memory for faces. I’m worse with names and constantly have to ask my family about the names of people we know.
I also have aphantasia, the inability to make mental pictures. I’m between a 4 and 5 on the scale below.
I can sometimes do a little better on some things, and I seem to remember photos of people or things better than the actual object.
I mix up people in real life from recent events. I met the mother of one of my 6th grade students, and a week later I don’t remember which student she said was her child or her face, so the next time I see some parents, I won’t quite be sure. It’s always awkward.
However, I do remember people I worked with and such. I remember many of my teachers, all the way back to elementary school, although I don’t remember their faces or many of their names.
One of my first part time jobs was delivering newspapers when I was 12 and I remember one of the other boys and the couple that ran the group.
Once you get past the sitcom trappings it is actually a pretty deep introspection on the challenges and failures of American democratic governance. And Pawnee is America in a nutshell, from its barely concealed history of Native massacres, casual bigotry, failing infrastructure, and recreational obesity to obsession with absurd fads, being co-opted by corporations and special interests, being constitutionally incapable of effectively dealing with natural disasters and pandemics, and how the people who do the hard work of actual governance are actually ridiculed and punished for their devotion. Also, Ron Swanson is a never-ceasing fount of sage wisdom and advice:
Stranger
For what it’s worth, most people do drive better than average, if you define average as the mean, which is what, for instance, insurance fees are based on. 20% of drivers cause 80% of insurance losses. The other 80% are all “better than average”.
Whereas I’ve always had a terrible memory for both names and faces, and I’m frequently embarrassed by running into someone who instantly recognizes me as I’m struggling to place who they are, let alone their name.
I remember a handful of names from elementary school, a few students and a few teachers. I doubt I’d recognize any of them if i ran into them, except for one woman i remained friends with off and on for years after. (And I’m not certain i would recognize her face.) I remember a handful of people from my first real job, but again, the only one i would actually recognize is the one I’m still friendly with. There are tons of people i worked with or went to school with that i don’t remember, though.
I was massively relieved to find out there’s a word for face blindness (actually at least two, that and prosogagnosia) – in part because now I can warn people, when introduced, that I won’t recognize them; and/or explain myself to people I “should” recognize and don’t; and do it in a relatively coherent form using a term they can look up and find out that it’s real.
That does seem to cut down on the awkwardness, though it doesn’t remove it entirely.
I’m not sure where to put myself on the aphantasia scale. I have a sense of what an apple looks like – but it’s not a visual picture at all. It’s maybe more a sense of what an apple feels like, combined with knowing the words to describe what it looks like? So I’m not sure if that’s a 4 or a 5 or even a 3; it seems more like “other, question not really applicable”.
I can’t remember faces at all, but, say, if I can’t remember an actor’s name, I’ll call up a mental image of a movie poster he or she was in and read the name off it.
I’m horrible at faces and names. I remember the important people though. And some odd ones from decades and decades ago. Short term memory sucks though.
Some people amaze me. My Wife (I remember her name) my FIL and I where have a conversation in the basement of the In-Laws house.MIL upstairs and could hear us talking about some past event.
The MIL yelled down the stairs, “It was 1954, and we had Liver and Onions” Um, OK, I can’t remember what I ate yesterday.
I can remember all my elementary school teacher’s names. But it’s only six of them, one for each grade, and at a time when I didn’t know the names of that many adults. Because it was a small number of names, and in conjunction with my young uncluttered memory those names were embedded deeper for me. Starting in Jr. High there were a ton of teachers in each grade and I only remember a few of them.
An interesting question though: how accurate are those memories?
Have you ever gone back and checked them against objectively available sources?
My wife tends to suffer from a kind of deja vue, and sometime ‘remembers’ things that never happened and people who she never met. Fortunately not to a pathological level, but sometimes I have to try to find physical evidence to convince her that such-and-such an event never happened, or not in the way she ‘remembers’ it.
I don’t think I have the same syndrome: I may forget things, but I don’t think I have any false memories?
That’s what I was thinking. I’ve occasionally had the experience of thinking that I distinctly remembered someone from my past–old schoolmates, teachers, that kind of thing. I could picture them vividly in my mind.
And then I’ve come across an old picture of them, and been shocked to realize that they actually looked VERY different than the face that I was “remembering.”
Memory is a tricky thing. I never contributed to the original “Did Kamala really work at McDonald’s” thread, but it did get me thinking about my own high school job. I shelved books at the public library. I know that there were several other kids who did the same job, that I worked with throughout my time there. I can only remember two of them. One was a guy who I was friends with already, the other is a girl that I had a huge crush on. That’s it. The others are a blank to me.
I can remember exactly one, because she was the daughter of a family friend, lived at the same place as I did, we hung out outside of kindergarten and I met up with her again once in my teens.
I can remember three from 1rst and 2nd grade combined, first names only. My best friend, the kid I admired the most and my first crush. Both teachers because of word association, Monk (" miss chipmunk") and Berger (“miss hamburger”).
Four names of kids from 3rd and 4th grade combined. No teachers.
It slowly climbs from there, but I know it still continues to fade bit by bit each year. There are for example a number of last names I knew in High School that I’m now blanking on, though I do remember a good number. I can remember one of my teacher’s names from 5th and 6th grade. A few from 7th and 8th. A number from high school. Many college professors, but probably not the majority.
Could be I’m in the low-end of the memory spectrum when it comes to names, which would not at all surprise me. But it might be worth noting I moved cities and states between kindergarten and first grade. Between second grade and third. Between 4th grade and 5th. Between 7th grade and 8th. Quite possibly my family’s peripatetic lifestyle when I was young contributes a lot to my old memory issues.
I haven’t bothered to check myself, but it’s not the first time I’ve recalled those names in the past 60 years so I’m pretty sure I have those right. I wouldn’t rely on my memory of much else going back that far though.
My daughter’s first grade teacher was Ms Hagofsky. After the first day of class, she told me her teacher drew a picture of a witch on a broomstick, with the moon in the background. “See, I’m Ms Hag Of Sky”, she told the class.
We ran into her at the grocery store. My daughter pointed her out and told me that was her teacher. I approached her and said, “Hi, I’m daughter’s dad, you must be The Hag Of Sky”.
We adults laughed, but my daughter was embarrassed.
I wouldn’t say I remember the name of every person at every job I worked with. But I can remember most of the people, what I thought about them, and their name and face a good percentage of the time. Even almost forty years out.
I think a good percentage of people could do so. To me, outlier is maybe 20% and extreme under 5%. Possibly women and more social people remember more?
That’s what surprises me about most people who say they remember every kid in their elementary school classmate or everyone at their first job - how do you know if you are wrong? Maybe you forgot the kid who wasn’t there on picture day or the one who transferred out after a year or the coworker who only lasted two months. You probably aren’t 100% wrong about someone you remember - but there are lots of memories that you can’t objectively check to see if you don’t remember someone.
Something similar happened to me not that long ago - there was a person I knew in high school (1979 ish) who I ran across on Facebook. At some point , he died and I saw his funeral arrangements on Facebook - in my memory he was overweight but his tribute video had photographs of him from that time and he wasn’t overweight. I must have conflated my memory with more recent photos where he was overweight.
After he passed away, I asked one of my grade school classmates if she had known him in high school - they went to the same school and would have graduated the same year. She said she didn’t remember him from school but she had met him through me. Which surprised me as we weren’t close and don’t have any memory of hanging out with her in high school - if she had met him, it would have been in passing but she said she didn’t like him, which sounds like it wasn’t a single meeting on the street. She doesn’t remember how it came about that she met him. No idea which of us is remembering things correctly. I suppose it’s possible she met him once, decided she didn’t like him and recognized his full name over 40 years later.
I vaguely remember attending grade school.
One day my husband and I were talking about how there are certain instances you remember in your life. I’m talking about instances that weren’t attached to big events, just ordinary days. I said - just think of all of the things you’ve done, encounters you’ve had, etc. in your life that you have no memory of.
A few days later, I was going through some old photographs. I came across a picture of my husband driving a blue 4-wheeler down a dirt road and he had our kids with him. They were around 4 & 10. My mom and I were walking along the side of the road. I assume my dad was taking the picture, but if he was, I don’t know why I have the picture. Neither of us have one single memory of that day, we don’t even know where the picture was taken! The area doesn’t look familiar at all. AND if my dad was involved, he never owned a 4-wheeler! So where did that come from?