A simple trick to memorize names just requires a little imagination.
The longer you live, the more people you meet and the more names you have to learn and try to remember. It's an ironic truth, considering how our capacity to memorize seems to dwindle the older we get, so it's handy to have some tips and tricks for remembering people's names, especially when you're meeting a bunch of new people at once.
Derren Brown is one of the most famous mentalists in the world, so he knows a thing or two about people. Mentalists are a special breed of magician who focus on tricks and illusions of the mind. They do things like hypnosis, mind-reading, and impossible predictions. There's trickery involved, of course, but mentalists are also masters at reading people and have to employ advanced memory techniques to keep track of information they learn during their shows.
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In an interview with Big Think, Brown revealed some of his favorite memory hacks, including his 'party trick' to never forget a person's name.
The secret is to create a link between the part of your brain that stores information, like names, and the visual part of your brain that is more easily accessed. Visual memory has also been found to be substantially stronger and more detailed than auditory and other kinds of memories, so what you want to do is get the visual part of your brain involved in remembering!
"You find a link between the person's name and something about their appearance, what they're wearing, their face, their hair, something," Brown says. "You find a link with something that they're wearing, so if they're called Mike and they've got big black hair, you think, 'Oh that's like a microphone,' so I can imagine like a big microphone walking around, or if they've got a stripy T-shirt on, you imagine a microphone with those stripes going around it.
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"And it's the same process later on in the evening, you see them, you look at the stripes, and you go, 'Oh, that's Mike. Oh yeah, that's Mike. The hair, why am I thinking the hair is like a big microphone? Oh yes, of course, they're called Mike.'"
Microphone Mike! Any sort of alliteration based on a physical characteristic will work. Stripey Steve, Tall Tim, Green Gene. The more interesting and unique, the better you'll remember.
If this sounds a little bit like Michael Scott's mnemonic devices from The Office, well, they're not far off. He applies in a pretty strange and convoluted way: "Baldy. Your head is bald. It is hairless. It is shiny. It is reflective, like a mirror. M. Your name is Mark." But ultimately, he was on to something. If you watched the show, you know that Michael Scott never forgot a name!
Season 5 Nbc GIF by The Office Giphy
There is one catch with the technique: You have to actually listen and pay attention when someone tells you their name!
"So, you do have to listen, that's the first thing when they say the name," Brown says. "Normally, the very moment where someone is giving you their name, you're just caught up in a whole lot of social anxiety anyway, you don't even hear it, so you have to listen."
Using someone's name when you talk to them has tons of benefits. It conveys respect, friendliness, and intimacy. When you're on the receiving end, and someone you've just met uses your name, it just feels good! It feels like it matters to them that they met you. Just don't overdo it. Repeating someone's name every other sentence comes across as disingenuous and salesy. A good rule of thumb is to repeat their name immediately after learning it ("Nice to meet you, Jim") and upon saying goodbye. The rest of the memory work should happen in your head to avoid creeping them out!
"And then at the end [of the party] you get to go around and say goodbye to everybody by name, and everyone thinks you're very charming and clever," Brown quips.
It's definitely worth a try.