Master of Memory: Accelerated learning, education, memorization - MMem 0289: Reprise: How do you remember people’s names?

Episode Date: April 16, 2015

Today Timothy revisits the question on how to remember peoples names, with some extra comments on how he would change his answer today. What do you want to learn? Leave your question at http://MasterOfMemory.com/. Music credit: Maurice Ravel’s String Quartet, 2nd movement, performed by the US Army Band.

Today, we're representing episode 2, which is about remembering names. And this is still a really good introduction to my method for memorizing names, specifically using the stressed syllable of people's names as your mnemonic. The only thing that I would add to this episode is that while the mnemonic tactic of doing that is good, I would also add the exclusivity tactic of looking up the most common names and actually creating stock mnemonics for those names that are at the top of the list. So it's easy to go back and look at, for example, baby names from the whatever year you think is most relevant. If it's 20 year olds, obviously

from 20 years ago. So I would be looking up baby names from the 80s and 90s. Then take those top 100 baby names, find the stress syllable, create a stock image for yourself, and then you don't have to think about it too much when you meet most people. You can just attach your stock image for their name to their face. Other than that, I hope you enjoy this refresher on how to remember people's names. Welcome to Master of Memory. I'm Timothy, and I'm here to answer your accelerated learning questions every day and to inspire and empower you to learn anything you want to learn faster than ever. Now, I got a question from Emily on the Facebook page about remembering people's names with their faces.

Now, there are quite a few resources out there on the Internet already for remembering people's names, and a lot of that information is pretty good, but I'm recording this episode to cover a couple of gaps and to give you a method that works more quickly and effectively than any other that I know. So the model that most people use is to take a feature of someone's face and then think of that person's name and somehow connect them with some sort of mnemonic. And that's simple enough, right? But the two main problems with this are first, how do you make sure that you come up with and somehow connect them with some sort of mnemonic. And that's simple enough, right? But the two main problems with this are first,

how do you make sure that you come up with a mnemonic connection really quickly? And then second, how do you make sure that even if you are able to create a connection between the face and the name, you're actually able to remember the name from looking at the face later instead of just remembering the face when you think of the name. So remember that the model for remembering anything is that the trigger will point to the mnemonic which points to the intended result. So to get the results we want, we want the face to trigger our thought of the person's name. So looking at the face triggers the mnemonic, which then triggers us to think of the name.

Now I'm going to show you how to come up with your mnemonic quickly and how to make sure that the mnemonic you choose actually strongly connects with the person's name. So obviously, like I said, the trigger has to be the person's face. Now how do you make their face a trigger? That's actually kind of easy. The moment you see that person's face, which facial feature sticks out at you the most? Is it the wrinkles on the forehead? Is it the thick glasses or the goatee? And this is really important, but it also makes it really easy because as long as you choose something that's really, you know, that really sticks out at

you, you'll notice that the second time you see them and you'll remember the same thing. So now to move on to the mnemonic, the best way to remember a name or any word is to focus on the stressed syllable. Every name and every word has one primary stressed syllable. If you focus on that, not only will you be able to come up with a mnemonic more quickly because your choices are narrowed, but also because of the magic of stressed syllables, your mind is going to fill in the rest of the name for you if you just give it that one small part of the word. So if I gave you, you know, if you had to remember the name Tyler, then the stressed syllable is Ty. The stressed syllable in Nicole is Cole. The stressed syllable in Brandon is brand, or you could use just part of the stressed syllable like ran. And then if you connect that to part of their face and, you know,

looking at their face makes you think of the word ran, then you'll remember Brandon because ran is a trigger for the name Brandon. So let's say that you had to remember that somebody's name is Christopher. And the thing that sticks out at you the most is his eyebrows. Maybe he has really thick eyebrows. Well, what you can do is connect the eyebrows on his face somehow mentally with the word wrist. Because Christopher has the word wrist in the stressed syllable. And if you think wrist, you'll think of what comes around it. And that would be, oh yeah, wrist, Chris, Christopher. So the way you can connect those two is maybe imagine that he rubs his wrist on his eyebrows.

And maybe you could imagine that he's wearing a watch and it's scratching his eyebrows or whatever. You know, make it as memorable as possible. But essentially, all you have to do is, you know, think of that facial feature that sticks out at you, the eyebrows, and make it so that when you look at those eyebrows, you think of the mnemonic, which would be him rubbing his wrist on them, which causes you to think of the stressed syllable of his name, which would be wrist and trigger Christopher.

Now, admittedly, some names are easier to remember this way than others. For example, the name Sarah doesn't really, you know, the stressed syllable is Sarah. And I guess you could use air or something like that, or you could slightly modify it to be stare. So maybe what you like is her wavy hair, and you could imagine that, you know, there's something staring out of the wavy hair. But again, some names are harder than others, but, you know, just use your imagination and practice. That's really what it takes is practicing, going out there, meeting some people and trying to remember their names from their faces. All right. I hope you've enjoyed this reprise episode. For anyone who has any

questions about learning or memorizing anything faster than ever, feel free still to leave a message at masterofmemory.com slash question, and I'll be able to respond quickly to your message from wherever I am. I just won't be able to record an episode on that topic until I'm back in the States in May. Meanwhile, if you want to support the show, please check out our Spanish course at masterofmemory.com slash Spanish. Or if you want to follow my adventures in Argentina, or wherever else I might happen to be, you can do that at timothymoser.com.