- I'm sure you've met Bens before.
- Yeah. - What's your Ben trick?
- So I'd probably imagine someone named Ben having a bin
poured on top of their head.
- Ooh a New Zealander – Bin.
- Absolutely yeah. - Right.
I wanna set you a challenge.
See if you can remember the names and faces
of these eight people.
I'm really bad at remembering people's faces
what they look like and their names.
So Daniel, why am I so bad at this?
- We tend to think of memory as if it's one sort
of monolithic process,
but actually there's a whole of little individual things
that have to go right in order for us
to remember successfully.
One really, really important thing is just learning
to pay attention,
learning to be mindful, to be present.
Very often when we're introduced to people,
there's a lot of other things going on.
We might be a little bit maybe anxious
about meeting new people.
So it can really be helpful to just remind yourself
that you're in a situation
where you wanna remember this person's name.
But that alone is not enough.
As I said, there's a whole lot of little things
that have to go right to remember successfully.
Another one is that we need to be able to
create memories deliberately by creating associations
and little, sort of, stories
that help us remember people's names.
- So before Daniel shows us how,
how about we take a look at these faces again,
but this time without their names and in jumbled order.
See how you go at remembering them?
How did you go?
All right, Daniel, what are your tips?
- So there are two steps we wanna go through.
The first is mindfulness.
It's that being present, being aware.
Once we've done that,
what we wanna do is basically create a visual mental image,
and associate it with the person's face.
So for example, if I meet someone named James,
I might imagine wrapping chain around their head.
Chains sounds like James, and so this is my mnemonic.
But the key insight is that association
is the language of memory.
- So what's an example of this?
How would we start with one of these faces?
- OK, so the first thing we wanna do
is just pick out some feature that stands out to us.
Take Alice, for example.
The first thing that jumps out to me is her red hair.
It's very distinctive.
So that's gonna be the kind of anchor point for my mnemonic.
Then I have to think up some visual image based on her name,
that I'm gonna associate with her hair.
The 'lice' bit I'm gonna focus on here.
And I'm gonna imagine that her--
- Poor Alice.
- Yeah absolutely, I'm gonna imagine
that her lovely red hair is riddled with lice.
Maybe I imagine her sort of scratching furiously away
or something like that.
And that mnemonic is gonna hopefully trigger for me,
the association, remind me that her name is Alice.
- All right, I reckon I could on for Devin.
I could give it a go.
One thing I noticed about Devin
is he has very triangular ears.
And I'm gonna associate them literally with the word Devon.
So next time I see Devin,
I'm gonna try and remember two just triangles of Devon
coming out the side of his head and hopefully that'll work.
- Yeah, sounds great.
So one tip is that you can break names up.
So for example, for Clayton,
you might imagine a clay tonne.
- Yeah, I'd say like a tonne of clay.
- Yes. - But I'm trying to think
of something to associate with his face.
- This is one difficult thing about using faces
is that you're actually limited in a certain way.
So you could imagine for example,
that he has like a tonne of clay attached to his feet
or something like that, that makes it hard for him to walk.
It's harder to do that with the face,
but you often have more resources in the real world.
- OK, so remembering that tip that maybe I don't have
to associate the name with a particular facial feature,
I'm gonna work on remembering Jeanie here.
Jeanie, she's just wearing jeans. She just loves jeans.
And I'm just gonna focus on Jeanie all in double denim,
denim shoes, everything.
And whenever I see Jeanie,
I'm just gonna think of her wearing nothing but denim.
I'm sure you've met Bens before, what's your Ben trick?
- So I'd probably imagine someone named Ben
having a bin poured on top of the head.
- Ooh a New Zealander – Bin.
- Absolutely, yeah.
- Right, OK.
To be honest, I feel like she's got lice
and he's got a bin on his head.
Are all of your mnemonics this brutal?
- Yes, many of the mnemonic images are really gross or weird
because we have a memory bias towards remembering things
that are unusual, that are surprising, that are scary.
- OK, so how do you remember the name Daniel,
your own name?
- That's one I've never really had to remember.
Although I suppose Daniel is a fairly common name.
If I had to remember that name,
I'd imagine someone throwing me
or throwing the Daniel into a lion's den.
- OK. - Like the biblical story.
- Very biblical.
All right, well Daniel, thank you so much
for teaching us some tricks on how to memorise names,
and next time I see you,
I'll be imagining you in a lion's den
and I'll hopefully know exactly who you are.
- Fantastic, thank you so much.
- All right, so here's those faces one last time,
see if you remember their names
using some of Daniel's tricks.