Names!

People who need people
Are the luckiest people in the world.
- Barbra Streisand song

One of the hardest things to remember is a person’s name. My wife and I once sent a Christmas card to an old friend and used the wrong first name for her new husband. Research shows that even after 50 years you can remember many of the faces from your High School Year book but the names are a distant memory. The reason is that names have no meaning. You may recall relevant personal facts like a friend’s hometown or job because these are talking points and something you can relate to. But there is rarely any cosmic meaning to whether a person is named Joe or John.

So in order to remember a name you must assign it some meaning. I once knew a fellow train commuter named George. To remember the name I linked it to the cartoon and song “George of the Jungle”. When I saw the person I’d think of the song and the name. Another example. For some reason I kept forgetting the name of musician Jethro Tull whose music I like. So I linked the name to the phrase, “For whom the bell tolls” and that reminds me of Tull and then I can remember Jethro.

Many websites teach that the way to remember names is repetition:

When you are first introduced to someone, use their names several times when you talk to them. “Hi, Jim, nice to meet you. So, what do you do for a living Jim? Do you have any kids, Jim? Jim, it was great to meet you!” If you don’t catch their name when it was originally told to you, ask for it again and then use it.

I’m skeptical. There are many things in school I learned via repetition that are now gone. On the other hand, I do remember things that used memory aids like HOMES for the names of the Great Lakes. Or “A rat in Tom’s house might eat Tom’s ice cream” to spell arithmetic. If Jim mentioned above were slender I might link him to “Slim Jim”. But be careful never to let it slip out and say it aloud!

I have an uncommon last name so when I introduce myself to people I often say, “Kibble, as in Kibbles and Bits”. I hope this helps them to remember me.

Bottom Line

Each of us has different responses to stimuli. I tend to forget what I hear and remember what I see. At meetings I take notes so that I can see the words that must be recalled for later. Likewise names are more meaningful to me when they are written down and spelled. Perhaps I should imagine people wearing their name as a nametag or written on their forehead?

See http://www.43folders.com/2006/07/10/remember-names for more ideas.

How to Remember

cam•bist (kam'bist)
—n.
1. a dealer in bills of exchange.
2. an expert in foreign exchange.

As a follow-up to yesterday’s post on why we forget, today I’d like to examine ways to remember. Way back in college, a dorm mate asked fellow residents to take a series of memory tests for his class project. The goal was to remember a list of 10 items with three different methods. I did very well since I had read a book on memory tricks and used them. Another friend of mine, Joe, got 10/10 on the first pass with no “tricks” and did worse on attempts 2 and 3 when asked to use specific memory methods. So while these methods do work, they also require some practice.

The human brain remembers facts poorly but stories and songs quite well. I’m amazed that anyone can remember the entire Iliad or Odyssey but it was passed down orally for generations before being written down. So memory trick #1 is to create a story that unites your list.

When driving in to work today I experienced a flood of ideas for blogs posts and did not want to forget them before reaching my desk to write them down. So I made up this simple story:

“I lost the KEYS to the SCHOOL. It was over a YEAR AGO. So long in fact that I’ve forgotten the NAMES of the people involved. So much THYME gone by.”

This translates as:

• Lost Keys and why we forget (yesterday’s post)
• First Day of School advice
• Retrospective of my first blog topic (Rule of 3’s) from a year ago
• How to remember Names (which became this post)
• Substituting dried herbs for fresh

Sometimes a visual story can help to liven up boring items like a shopping list:

The CABBAGE rolled off the table and was impaled upon a CARROT. It LEEKED a red fluid like BEET juice or perhaps blood from a STEAK. I mopped it up with some BREAD.

Who knew a grocery list could be so violent?

Bottom Line

The story method is easy to use (if you’re creative and like making up stories). The drawback is forgetting the start of the story or missing a link somewhere in the middle and losing your train of thought and half the story.

Tomorrow I’ll discuss a different technique that handles items independently and not as one long chain.

Aside

The dorm I referenced above was the Honors College floor at Bryan Hall of Michigan State and many of the residents had excellent memory skills. For example, John Paola was the National Spelling Bee Winner of 1977. One day as we passed in the hall I asked, “John, can you spell ‘cambist’?" He immediately stopped and shouted, “How do you know that?” I explained that his name was in “The Book of Lists” along with his winning word. Today Spelling Bee winners can be found on the Internet.