How to Remember People’s Names Wie man sich die Namen von Menschen merken kann Comment se souvenir du nom des gens Como lembrar o nome das pessoas Как запомнить имена людей 如何记住人的名字

- Oh hi, um sorry I forgot your name.

I'm actually, I'm really bad at names but as it turns out

everyone is bad with names.

Names are a uniquely hard type of information to remember.

They're arbitrary and they seem to slip from our minds

even when we're trying to remember them,

sometimes seconds after we've met somebody

which can lead to embarrassment.

So if you find yourself forgetting names on a regular basis

you can take comfort in the fact that well most people do

but some people put effort into remembering names

and I think you should become one of those people as well

because even though names are hard to remember,

even though they're arbitrary strings of characters

and syllables that don't really mean a whole lot,

names mean a lot to us.

Your name is the centerpiece of your identity

and your ears perk up when you hear it, Derek.

So, if you could learn the skill

of remembering people's names successfully

you're gonna make better impressions when you meet them

and you're gonna build stronger relationships

and in this video

we're gonna show you exactly how

you can start to remember names more effectively.

But first let's dig in a little bit deeper

into the reason why names are so hard to remember.

So when somebody forgets your name it can be tempting

to think that they don't care about you in particular

but the problem lies more

in the type of information we're dealing with

rather than their lack of caring about you.

As it turns out,

names are a hard type of information to care about

because they're entirely arbitrary information.

There's not a whole lot to connect a name to in your brain.

By contrast, a word like controller

brings up a lot of other images that are associate to it,

a TV, a game console, maybe your favorite games.

There's all sorts of different associated mental imagery

and thinking of any one piece

could easily lead you back to the word controller

and all the information imbued in it.

Similarly, a guitar is something

that can very easily connect to concerts,

your favorite artists, other instruments,

maybe the guitar pedals if you're a nerd like me.

But again, a name like John or Sarah,

there's not a whole lot to connect that to,

it's totally arbitrary information.

Maybe you know somebody who is named John or Sarah

but if you meet a new person

and you're trying to encode that person's face in your head

along with that arbitrary string of characters and syllables

it's pretty difficult to do

and this isn't just mere conjecture either.

A lot of actual scientific research

has gone into why names are so difficult to remember,

why they are uniquely hard to encode in our memory.

In research that's been done

on people who have suffered brain injuries has found

that the recall of proper names is particularly impacted

by those injuries, even more than the proper names

of famous monuments for example

and the thinking about this difference

is that while famous monuments and famous works of art

also have proper names,

those names often include descriptive words

such as the Statue of Liberty or the Eiffel Tower.

Because there are descriptive words in the name

it's much easier to remember

as opposed to something like John or Sarah.

Again, these terms are completely arbitrary.

There's not a lot you can connect them to in your mind

without a lot of up front work

and what's also quite arbitrary

are telephone numbers and addresses.

And more research that's gone into people

who suffer from brain injuries has found

that these types of information are similarly impacted

and people have trouble recalling them as well

and it's not just people with brain injuries.

Another study that was done in 1990 showed people

pictures of faces and tied them to occupations,

proper names, and possessions.

For example this is Mr. Potter.

He is a pilot and he has a dog.

People who are quizzed on seeing this later on

were much more easily able to remember the occupation

and the possessions but not the name.

So it seems that names are just arbitrary

and because there's not something

we can immediately connect them to in our mind

they take a lot of work to remember

but not as much work as you might think.

So now that you know why names are so difficult to remember

I wanna give you my number one tip

for remembering them more easily

which is to realize that they are difficult to remember.

This is the pitfall that many people fall into.

They assume that information they are dealing with

in the moment is going to stick around

and names aren't the only example.

I remember being in math class

and seeing the professor work an example out on the board

and thinking that makes perfect sense.

I don't need to write it down

because it's so logically easy to follow

I'm gonna be able to use it later on in my homework

only to be humbled later on when I did the homework

and realized I could not recall how to work the problems.

And when we meet people and hear their names

it's the same exact situation.

In the moment we feel like it's gonna be easy to remember it

but then seconds later something else comes to our attention

and the name is lost.

So take this seriously.

Realize that names are difficult to remember

and you're going to put

a little bit more effort into it naturally.

That being said,

there are also some techniques that you can use

to remember them a little bit more easily

and the first one is really easy actually.

When you meet somebody and they tell you their name

instead of saying nice to meet you say nice to meet you

and then their name.

So, nice to meet you Thanos, for example

and in the rare case that you actually are talking to Thanos

this does have the secondary benefit

of slightly reducing the likelihood

that he'll destroy your spaceship

and leave you floating in the infinite cosmos forever,

only slightly though.

But more importantly

when you say a person's name back to them

you're forcing your brain to interact with that information

in a new way.

As the cognitive psychologist Brian H. Ross notes,

"Speaking involves conceptualizing

"the content of an utterance, selecting a term to use,

"retrieving the sounds of the selected word,

"and planning and executing the motor movements

"to articulate it."

So a lot more is going on there

than when you just merely hear the name.

And again, when your brain is forced to interact

with information in multiple different ways

you build new neural pathways to it

and you're more easily able to remember it.

And you can even do this more than once

during the course of a conversation.

I've met a handful of people during my life

that are really good at working my name

into different points during our conversation.

So Thomas, what have you been working on lately?

Oh just this.

(piano music)

(snaps) Ye.

Now it should be noted that this is a skill

and it takes a little bit of finesse to do correctly

because you can easily say the person's name too often

and come off as creepy but if you can use it sparingly,

again you're gonna make a better impression

and you're getting more practice

retrieving the person's name and saying it more often

and that's actually the second point I wanna make.

Retrieval practice is really, really useful

for remember names.

So when you meet somebody,

make it a point to quiz yourself every so often

about what their name is.

You should do this at different intervals.

Do it maybe a few seconds after you've met them

and after they've told you their name

just so you remember it

during the course of the conversation

then quiz yourself once the conversation is over

and then at the end of the day

maybe consider keeping a journal

and writing down the names of anybody you met.

And this is actually a great argument

for why keeping a journal could be really, really useful

because again you're interacting with the information

in a different way, you're writing it down

instead of saying it or listening to it,

and you're also doing a little bit more retrieval practice.

Finally, you can more easily remember somebody's name

if you use a mnemonic device and if you need a primer here,

mnemonics are essentially mental constructs and devices

that we can use to bind hard-to-remember information

like names and telephone numbers and addresses,

things that are arbitrary,

to concepts that are much more easily remembered

like rhymes or acronyms such as again on a guitar

the order of the strings are E, A, D, G, B, E.

So Ernie ate dynamite goodbye Ernie.

That's a really good mnemonic

for remembering this order of strings.

And you can do the exact same thing with names as well,

you just need to find a mnemonic

that helps you to bind the person's face

or some attribute about the person

that is easily remember-able to their name.

So for example the other night I met somebody named Stephen

who looked a little bit like Benedict Cumberbatch.

So in my mind I thought of Benedict Cumberbatch,

then I thought of Dr. Strange,

and I remember Dr. Strange is Stephen Strange

so I bound the image of Benedict Cumberbatch

being Dr. Strange to this person's face

and now I'm easily able to remember

that his name is Stephen.

Now, no matter how hard you work,

now matter how well intentioned you are

there's gonna come a time

when you still forget somebody's name.

So what do you do when that happens?

Well, the first thing I wanna say here is that with the fact

that everyone tends to say they're bad with names

you shouldn't really feel bad

when you forget somebody's name

and on the flip side if somebody forgets your name

I think it's a good idea to be gracious about it.

Don't give them too much of a hard time about it

because again, forgetting somebody's name

does not indicate that they don't care about you

it's just that names are inherently difficult to remember.

That being said, here are a few tips

for getting yourself out of this type of situation.

First, you could just wait

and hope that their name comes up in conversation later on.

Maybe somebody else walks in the room and says it

and you just get lucky but don't wait for so long

that you end up having to introduce this person

to somebody else that you know

because that could be a potentially embarrassing situation.

Secondly, there are some somewhat sneaky tricks

that you can use and that can work

if the opportunity arises organically.

For example, if you're exchanging phone numbers

you could just casually ask hey,

how do you spell your name and then you have their name.

Or if you're exchanging social media handles

you could ask what's your Twitter handle,

what's your Instagram handle

and then you're probably gonna see their name

right on your phone and everything is cool.

But in all seriousness, the best thing to do I

is just to swallow your pride and ask them their name again

because most people are going to understand.

Now putting in the work to remember people's names

can help you make a fantastic first impression

to each new person that you meet

but what about making a great first impression

on groups of people?

At some point in your career,

especially if you're putting in the work

to build strong relationships,

you're probably gonna have the opportunity

to give a presentation to a group of people

and if you wanna learn how to craft those presentations

so that people pay attention and remember what you say,

I highly recommend the presentation essentials class

by Simon Sinek who is one of my favorite speakers.

You'll find his class on Skillshare

which is also home to thousands of others

covering career skills, graphic design, animation,

music production, and lots more.

And one other course that I wanna shout out this month

is a new Final Cut Pro editing course

that my friend Ali Abdaal just released.

And if you've seen his channel at all

you know that his editing is absolutely fantastic.

So if you wanna start a YouTube channel yourself

or you wanna learn how to edit video

you should definitely check out his class as well.

And while you're at it,

you're also gonna find a class from me

that's all about building a productivity system

and the best part is that you can get access

to all these classes and Skillshare's entire library

with thousands of other completely free

for two months by using the link below to sign up.

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use that link and sign up for that two-month free trial

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