This doesn’t usually happen when you meet someone (thankfully), so if you wish to learn someone’s name, the only guaranteed way to remember it is to rehearse it while it’s still in your short-term memory. The trouble is, this approach takes time and uses mental resources. And as we saw from the “Why did I just come in here?” example, something you’re thinking about can be easily overwritten or replaced by the next thing you encounter and have to process. When you first meet someone, it’s extremely rare for them to tell you their name and nothing else. You’re invariably going to be involved in a conversation about where you’re from, what you do for work, hobbies, what they arrested you for, that sort of thing. Social etiquette insists we exchange pleasantries on first meeting (even if we’re not really interested), but every pleasantry we engage in with a person increases the odds of the person’s name being pushed out of short-term memory before we can encode it.
Most people know dozens of names and don’t find it takes considerable effort each time you need to learn a new one. This is because your memory associates the name you hear with the person you’re interacting with, so a connection is formed in your brain between person and name. As you extend your interaction, more and more connections with the person and their name are formed, so conscious rehearsing isn’t needed; it happens at a more subconscious level due to your prolonged experience of engaging with the person.
The brain has many strategies for making the most of short-term memory, and one of these is that if you are provided with a lot of details in one go, the brain’s memory systems tend to emphasize the first thing you hear and the last thing you hear (known as the “primacy effect” and “recency effect,” respectively),8 so a person’s name will probably get more weight in general introductions if it’s the first thing you hear (and it usually is).
There’s more. One difference between short-and long-term memory not discussed so far is that they both have different overall preferences for the type of information they process. Short-term memory is largely aural, focusing on processing information in the form of words and specific sounds. This is why you have an internal monologue, and think using sentences and language, rather than a series of images like a film. Someone’s name is an example of aural information; you hear the words, and think of it in terms of the sounds that form them.
In contrast to this, the long-term memory also relies heavily on vision and semantic qualities (the meaning of words, rather than the sounds that form them).9 So a rich visual stimulus, like, say, someone’s face, is more likely to be remembered long term than some random aural stimulus, like an unfamiliar name.
In a purely objective sense, a person’s face and name are, by and large, unrelated. You might hear people say, “You look like a Martin” (on learning someone’s name is Martin), but in truth it’s borderline impossible to predict accurately a name just by looking at a face—unless that name is tattooed on his or her forehead (a striking visual feature that is very hard to forget).
Let’s say that both someone’s name and face have been successfully stored in the long-term memory. Great, well done. But that’s only half the battle; now you need to access this information when needed. And that, unfortunately, can prove difficult.
The brain is a terrifyingly complex tangle of connections and links, like a ball of Christmas-tree lights the size of the known universe. Long-term memories are made up of these connections, these synapses. A single neuron can have tens of thousands of synapses with other neurons, and the brain has many billions of neurons, but these synapses mean there is a link between a specific memory and the more “executive” areas (the bits that do all the rationalization and decision-making) such as the frontal cortex that requires the information in the memory. These links are what allows the thinking parts of your brain to “get at” memories, so to speak.
The more connections a specific memory has, and the “stronger” (more active) the synapse is, the easier it is to access, in the same way that it’s easier to travel to somewhere with multiple roads and transport links than to an abandoned barn in the middle of a wilderness. The name and face of your long-term partner, for example, is going to occur in a great deal of memories, so it will always be at the forefront of your mind. Other people aren’t going to get this treatment (unless your relationships are rather more atypical), so remembering their names is going to be harder.
But if the brain has already stored someone’s face and name, why do we still end up remembering one and not the other? This is because the brain has something of a two-tier memory system at work when it comes to retrieving memories, and this gives rise to a common yet infuriating sensation: recognizing someone, but not being able to remember how or why, or what their name is. This happens because the brain differentiates between familiarity and recall.10 To clarify, familiarity (or recognition) is when you encounter someone or something and you know you’ve done so before. But beyond that, you’ve got nothing; all you can say is this person/thing is already in your memories. Recall is when you can access the original memory of how and why you know this person; recognition is just flagging up the fact that the memory exists.
The brain has several ways and means to trigger a memory, but you don’t need to “activate” a memory to know it’s there. You know when you try to save a file onto your computer and it says, “This file already exists”? It’s a bit like that. All you know is that the information is there; you can’t get at it yet.
You can see how such a system would be advantageous; it means you don’t have to dedicate too much precious brain power to figuring out if you’ve encountered something before. And, in the harsh reality of the natural world, anything that’s familiar is something that didn’t kill you, so you can concentrate on newer things that might. It makes evolutionary sense for the brain to work this way. Given that a face provides more information than a name, faces are more likely to be “familiar.”
But this doesn’t mean it’s not intensely annoying for us modern humans, who regularly have to make small talk with people we’re certain we know but can’t actually recall right now. That’s the part most people can relate to, the point where recognition turns to full-on recall. Some scientists describe it as a “recall threshold,”11 where something becomes increasingly familiar, until it reaches a crucial point and the original memory is activated. The desired memory has several other memories linked to it, and these are being triggered and cause a sort of peripheral or low-level stimulation of the target memory, like a darkened house being lit by a neighbor’s fireworks display. But the target memory won’t actually activate until it is stimulated above a specific level, or threshold.