- 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.
And after that Skillshare is still really affordable
starting at just 10 bucks a month.
So, if you wanna start boosting your skills
and you wanna help to support my channel,
use that link and sign up for that two-month free trial
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Big thanks as always to Skillshare for sponsoring this video
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