A friend was just telling me she’s “bad with names” – can’t remember them, does a lot of “you know, that guy, who does that thing” – and I’m wondering why she’s that way. Is there something going on in her brain, akin to face blindness, that makes names not stick? Or is she just too self-absorbed to really care? I’m thinking there might be answers based in something other than neurology or scolding, so I turn to the Dope for enlightenment.
Thanks in advance,
E.
There is such a thing as prosopagnosia, but I think for the average “bad with names” person it’s mostly just a matter of not spending the mental attention up front to learn them (as, say, a salesman hoping to make a personal impression later might consciously do).
I’m not bad with names, but I am quite face blind. I’ve tried every concentration technique in the book and put a lot of effort in to it, but the reality is that I’m usually not going to recognize people until I know them fairly well.
I tend to say I’m bad with names, because from the outside it’s functionally the same, and people understand that a lot better.
I’m one of them. I meet someone and I say their name to myself several times, try to make some kind of connection like “Dave - the guy with the glasses and beard”, but the next day I’ll forget.
The only thing that really dependably works for me is to write people’s names down and then look at the list when I see them comming. Usually within a week I’ll remember but it takes time for me.
I don’t know why but I’m that way. I can remember anything but names. I assure you it’s not from lack of trying. I can watch a movie and remember half the lines but can’t tell you the name of the stars. When I meet someone I can tell you what they wore and what we talked about but not there name. I do try, it’s just not something that comes to me easily.
I’m bad with names. REAL bad. I try, I don’t succeed. If I make a dedicated mnemonic, I have half a chance. We got a new receptionist named Susan. I thought I’d try to recall her name, so I thought “Susan, what Susans can I remember?”. I finally settled on Susan in the Narnia books, so I visualized a bow beside her desk. So far it works great, as long as I don’t accidentally call her Katniss.
On the other hand, I’m amazing at ‘Name that Tune’, and can pick out the song on the muzak in the grocery store regardless of volume and distracting noises. Curiously, my son is the same way, so I suspect it is at least partially genetic.
Age is a factor. By the age of 50, almost all adults experience at least some difficulty remembering name and words. There’s a good reason why old people call everybody ‘sweetie’ or ‘buddy’—they literally can’t remember your name. Also, it’s easier to remember unusual names. If your name is Reginald or Winston, people are going to remember your name much more easily than they would if it were Dave or Steve.
This is what I have to do; it can take a lot of deliberate mental effort, especially when meeting several new people at once.
Of course, then Dave decides to be an asshole and switch to contacts and shave.
I’ve always sucked at remembering names and trying to memorize things (like bible verses as a kid, passages in a book, etc).
But I can remember events without issue.
I make sure to say the person’s name out loud as soon as possible. Seems to help. So when I meet Dave I’ll say ‘Hi Dave’ or if I ask a question preface it with his name “Dave, do you know where…”. There’s some theory about multiple senses being used to remember things. So if you say the name, write it down, and read the written name, then it’s supposed to be easier to remember.
My current problem is with guys named Bob. I know a lot of them. I seem to be most likely to forget that name now. I think it’s too generic now and I don’t form a strong connection with any new person I meet named Bob.
I’m one of those. I can remember phone numbers in a breeze. I don’t use mnemonics or anything. But names I’m lousy at. It’s so bad that colleagues’ names I’ve known for years I can just blank on. I know exactly who that guy is. But the name is simply gone. Then five minutes later when I’m not trying, I’ll remember.
There’s one in particular – the head of marketing – I fail on and I can’t recall it right now. It’s a rare non-American name, too.
DAMN. I’ll post again in five minutes I guess.
The way I’ve heard it is that in older times we could hang up a person’s name on his position in society, e.g. Tommy the cooper, John the blacksmith, Margaret the thatcher’s daughter etc, whereas nowadays names are totally arbitrary and therefore much more difficult to remember.
One other difference between people who are somewhat bad with names (such as me) and others might be the degree to which we feel the need to be sure. I met with a friend and his wife yesterday; I was pretty sure (p ≈ 0.99) her given name was Gertrud, but could not discount (p ≈ 0.01) it was Gerlinde, so I avoided greeting her or referring to her by name.
Yep. I was going to a meeting at a client’s offices recently and I always go over all the names of the people I’m likely to meet beforehand to help me not embarrass myself. I realised that I could not for the life of me remember the name of their CFO and she wasn’t in my contacts on my phone. Let’s say her name was Jane Doe.
So I gave up racking my brains and rang my PA and said “Hi, can you look something up for me: I can’t remember Jane Doe’s name. Oh. Dammit. Look, stop laughing at me! It isn’t funny. You’ll get old too, someday. OK, thanks, see you later…”
I’m not sure, but I think that subconsciously, I only make an effort to remember things I think are important, and in spite of my conscious mind saying I want and need to remember a particular name, the rest of my brain is too thoroughly conditioned to blowing it off as trivial.
But if it’s a new technical term or acronym or some obscure fact in an area of interest to me, that’s instantly locked away in carbonite.
Before I give the impression of being completely antisocial, my mind works the same way with regard to my own personal history. I won’t say that entire spans of years or decades are missing, but they have definitely faded to the point there’s very little I can remember at will - unless you want to know about something I learned in HS chemistry or Freshman sociology. I can have THAT for you in just a minute or two.
I have a couple theories*:
People who have trouble with names tend to be shy and less comfortable in social settings.
For them, meeting people and learning names is a challenge, sometimes even scary–not a pleasure.
I recently spent some time with a tour guide, and was blown away at her ability to learn 40 peoples’ names in 10 minutes, and remember each one as a new-found friend. She was the happiest, cheeeriest person I’ve ever met (and not in a fake, ditzy sort of way).She clearly enjoyed working with people. But when one of the group mentioned some engineering data to her,her eyes went blurry -(-gasp! skreech!–numbers! Oh no, not numbers…Numbers =bad!)-- and she just didn’t get it. But remembering faces and personal info was effortless for her.
*(based on personal anectdotes, with zero scientific evidence. Sorry 'bout that)
With me, it’s an age thing. I’m 67, and I never had a problem with names until maybe the last 5 years or so. Sometimes I even have problems with people I know fairly well. Eventually I come up with the name, but it may take a while. And if you look at the things I keep missing in online *Jeopardy! *tests, most of them are about names.
On the other hand . . . As an exercise, I decided to write down names of the kids I knew in grade school. These were people I hadn’t seen (or even thought of) in 55 years. To my surprise, I recalled quite a few of them.
I wouldn’t know the answer, but I’m definitely one of them. Occassionnally, I’ve even trouble remembering immediately the name of very familiar people (coworkers, relatives…). It’s not helping that I’m also not at all physionomist. If I meet someone I’m not well acquainted with “out of context”, I know that I know him, but can’t remember who he is exactly (the local baker? Someone working in my company? Someone I occassionally meet at the nearby cafe?). As someone mentioned too, I’m also often unable to remember the names of actors, singers, etc…
Remembering handles (who’s who on this board, in particular) is even worse.
I know there is a lot of anecdotes and little data in here, but I will give my theories a try.
But keep one thing in mind, I assme “I am bad with names” means that I am not bad with everything else. In other words, I can remember lots of other things with no problems, but for some reason I struggle with Names.
My first theory is related to this. I am not good socially, so when I first meet someone and am shaking their hand, I am thinking furiously about what to say and how to be sociable. Before I know it, they have blurted out their name and I was so concentrating on not screwing up that I’ve missed it.
My other (stronger) theory is that deep down, I don’t remember their name because I don’t find their name interesting. For example, the other day I met a man. Over the course of our discussion I learned:
-He grew up in Namibia.
-He works for the World Bank.
-Constantly travels to countries in central Asia.
-Lives about a mile from me.
These are interesting facts to me. I will remember all of these. His name…uh…John, Jim, Rich… I don’t remember, because, let’s be frank, names are boring. Despite my pleading not too, my Brain Manager took one look at that piece of information and threw it away while saying, “BOOOORRRINNNNNGGG.”
I repeated his name back to him at least three times. Two weeks later. It was gone.
I have no idea if this is related, but I also have the same problem. My wife has to help me with this. If a character changes hairstyle or anything, I suddenly get the storyline so confused.
Memory works far differently than you think it does. There’s (nearly always) nothing in your brain like a videotape system that records and stores your visual and auditory impressions of a scene you’ve experienced. There’s (nearly always) nothing in it like a file system where you put everything you just learned about a person in a single folder, so that the name, face, background, etc. of that person are all stored together. Your brain is nothing like a computer. All the sorts of things that you think of as getting stored by a unitary memory are in fact handled by different units in your brain which are of different strengths in different people. I added the words “nearly always” above because a few people can store memories that way, but it’s rare. You might like to read The Mind’s Eye by Oliver Sacks for some ideas about how much weirder the memory is than you probably think it is. The varied abilities to remember names is merely one of the many differences in people’s brains.