There is one reason you never remember people’s namesScience has found official confirmation of this problem that happens to all of us. When walking down the street and passing a person who greets us and calls us by our name, but we cannot return the favor because we do not remember theirs. This has happened to all of us and represents a problem and feelings of shame and confusion that are constant and that perhaps until now we had not suffered so intensely.
Science confirms that there is a main reason for a series of details that will mark this change or problem. It is not a problem that comes with age, although, obviously, the older we get, the more possibilities we have. People accumulate memories, but we also change over the years, so this can end up making an important difference. In every sense of the word, we are facing a memory problem that is also linked to the personal history of each one. Scientists wanted to find an answer that would help us understand why this happens to us.
You almost never remember people’s names.
Some names are harder to remember. than others, as well as others that we remember very easily. Human memory responds to a series of stimuli that we must take into account. Feelings and memories help us remember, to a greater or lesser extent, the names of people we know.
Imagine that you meet a person who has your father’s name and who has a certain resemblance. With these two details, we may be able to remember this person better. It will surely be difficult for us to forget him and if we pass him in the street, we will be able to greet him by his name, without problem.
Imagine instead that you meet another person whose name is unfamiliar to you or that you have hardly ever heard of. It will be much more difficult to remember, no matter how hard you try, you will not be able to remember this name that would surely be easier to remember in another context.
Over the years, perhaps you have been more or less successful in finding that person in front of you. It depends on many factors, not only your memory, which can be excellent, but deteriorate over time.
Science confirms it
Science has carried out a series of studies that help us to know at all times what happens when we remember or not the name of that person. There are some tricks that will help us remember it, if for example it is difficult or does not remind you of anything, just write it down several times by hand, it will be more difficult to forget it.
You can also associate this name with something, for example imagine that the neighbor who just appeared in your life is called Felipe. Think of the king and try to make it easier to remember with this detail or reminder, you can store it more directly.
THE Lancaster University has given us more information and claims that not only the name, but also the face of the more or less familiar person, can be relevant. So, ultimately, these details of familiarity or association with other names can be essential.
A familiar face can prevent us from remembering that person’s name correctly, so we will need extra help from these types of elements that are essential and that we may not have imagined until now.
According to this university in a recent study: “Twenty-two people kept records of the difficulties and errors they encountered in recognizing people, producing a main set of 922 records of difficulties and errors collected over a period of seven weeks, and a subsidiary set of 86 records of experiences in which a person encountered resembled in some way a known person. These records are classified into different types and are used to develop a model of person recognition in which representation systems create structural descriptions of the person encountered that are subject to similarity checks with known people (by recognition units); such similarity can be used to access the person’s identity information (stored in personal identity nodes), and then additional information (including the appropriate name) stored in separate stores. The outputs from the recognition units and person identity nodes go to the rest of the cognitive system, which can be important in making decisions about the “real” identity of a person encountered, and which also has various forms of obtaining more information that can help in such decisions.
