By Dean Burnett
Photo: Vintage Images
“You know that girl you went to schoolwith?”
“Can you narrow itdown?”
“You know, the tall girl. Dark blond hair but I think she wasdyeing it, between you and me. She used to live in the streetnext to us before her parents divorced and her mother movedinto the apartment that the Jones family lived in before theymoved to Australia. Her sister was friends with your cousinbefore she got pregnant with that boy from town — that was abit of a scandal. Always wore a red coat but it didn’t really suither. You know who I mean?”
“What’s her name?”
“No idea.”
I’ve had countless conversations like this, with my mother,gran, or other family members. Clearly, there’s nothing wrongwith their memory or grasp of detail; they can provide personaldata about someone that would put a Wikipedia pageto shame. But so many people say they struggle with names,even when they’re looking directly at the person whose namethey’re trying to recall. I’ve done this myself. It makes for avery awkward wedding ceremony.
Why does this happen? Why can we recognize someone’sface but not their name? Surely both are equally valid ways ofidentifying someone? We need to delve a bit deeper into howhuman memory works to grasp what’s really goingon.
Firstly, faces are very informative. Expressions, eye contact,mouth movements, these are all fundamental ways humanscommunicate. Facial features also reveal a lot about a person:eye color, hair color, bone structure, teeth arrangement;all things that can be used to recognize a person. So much sothat the human brain has seemingly evolved several featuresto aid and enhance facial recognition and processing, such aspattern recognition and a general predisposition to pick outfaces in random images.
Compared to all this, what does someone’s name haveto offer? Potentially some clues as to their background or cultural origin, but in general it’s just a couple of words, asequence of arbitrary syllables, a brief series of noises thatyou’re informed belong to a specific face. But sowhat?
As it turns out, for a random piece of conscious informationto go from short-term memory to long-term memory,it usually has to be repeated and rehearsed. However, youcan sometimes skip this step, particularly if the informationis attached to something deeply important or stimulating,meaning an episodic memory is formed. If you meet someoneand they’re the most beautiful person you’ve ever seenand you fall instantly in love, you’d be whispering the objectof your affection’s name to yourself forweeks.
This doesn’t usually happen when you meet someone(thankfully), so if you wish to learn someone’s name, the onlyguaranteed way to remember it is to rehearse it while it’s stillin your short-term memory. The trouble is, this approachtakes time and uses mental resources. This means that somethingyou’re thinking about can be easily overwritten or replacedby the next thing you encounter and have to process. Whenyou first meet someone, it’s extremely rare for them to tellyou their name and nothing else. You’re invariably going tobe involved in a conversation about where you’re from, whatyou do for work, hobbies, what they arrested you for, that sortof thing. Social etiquette insists we exchange pleasantries onfirst meeting (even if we’re not really interested), but everypleasantry we engage in with a person increases the odds ofthe person’s name being pushed out of short-term memorybefore we can encodeit.
Most people know dozens of names and don’t find it takesconsiderable effort each time you need to learn a new one.This is because your memory associates the name you hearwith the person you’re interacting with, so a connection isformed in your brain between person and name. As youextend your interaction, more and more connections with theperson and their name are formed, so conscious rehearsingisn’t needed; it happens at a more subconscious level due toyour prolonged experience of engaging with theperson.
The brain has many strategies for making the most of short-termmemory, and one of these is that if you are providedwith a lot of details in one go, the brain’s memory systemstend to emphasize the first thing you hear and the last thingyou hear (known as the “primacy effect” and “recency effect,”respectively), so a person’s name will probably get moreweight in general introductions if it’s the first thing you hear(and it usuallyis).
There’s more. One difference between short- and long-termmemory not discussed so far is that they both havedifferent overall preferences for the type of information theyprocess. Short-term memory is largely aural, focusing on processinginformation in the form of words and specific sounds.This is why you have an internal monologue, and think usingsentences and language, rather than a series of images like afilm. Someone’s name is an example of aural information; youhear the words, and think of it in terms of the sounds thatformthem.
In contrast to this, the long-term memory also relies heavilyon vision and semantic qualities (the meaning of words, ratherthan the sounds that form them). So a rich visual stimulus, like,say, someone’s face, is more likely to be remembered long termthan some random aural stimulus, like an unfamiliarname.
In a purely objective sense, a person’s face and name are,by and large, unrelated. You might hear people say, “You looklike a Martin” (on learning someone’s name is Martin), but intruth it’s borderline impossible to predict accurately a namejust by looking at a face — unless that name is tattooed on hisor her forehead (a striking visual feature that is very hard to forget).
Let’s say that both someone’s name and face have beensuccessfully stored in the long-term memory. Great, welldone. But that’s only half the battle; now you need to accessthis information when needed. And that, unfortunately, canprovedifficult.
The brain is a terrifyingly complex tangle of connectionsand links, like a ball of Christmas-tree lights the sizeof the known universe. Long-term memories are made upof these connections, these synapses. A single neuron canhave tens of thousands of synapses with other neurons, andthe brain has many billions of neurons, but these synapsesmean there is a link between a specific memory and the more“executive” areas (the bits that do all the rationalization anddecision-making) such as the frontal cortex that requires theinformation in the memory. These links are what allows thethinking parts of your brain to “get at” memories, so tospeak.
The more connections a specific memory has, and the“stronger” (more active) the synapse is, the easier it is toaccess, in the same way that it’s easier to travel to somewherewith multiple roads and transport links than to anabandoned barn in the middle of a wilderness. The nameand face of your long-term partner, for example, is goingto occur in a great deal of memories, so it will always beat the forefront of your mind. Other people aren’t going toget 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 andname, why do we still end up remembering one and not theother? This is because the brain has something of a two-tiermemory 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 howor why, or what their name is. This happens because the braindifferentiates between familiarity and recall. To clarify,familiarity (or recognition) is when you encounter someone orsomething and you know you’ve done so before. But beyondthat, you’ve got nothing; all you can say is this person/thingis already in your memories. Recall is when you can accessthe 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 andit says, “This file already exists”? It’s a bit like that. All youknow is that the information is there; you can’t get at ityet.
You can see how such a system would be advantageous; itmeans you don’t have to dedicate too much precious brainpower to figuring out if you’ve encountered something before.And, in the harsh reality of the natural world, anything that’sfamiliar is something that didn’t kill you, so you can concentrateon newer things that might. It makes evolutionary sensefor the brain to work this way. Given that a face provides moreinformation than a name, faces are more likely to be“familiar.”
But this doesn’t mean it’s not intensely annoying for usmodern humans, who regularly have to make small talkwith people we’re certain we know but can’t actually recall right now. That’s the part most people can relate to, thepoint where recognition turns to full-on recall. Some scientistsdescribe it as a “recall threshold,” where somethingbecomes increasingly familiar, until it reaches a crucial pointand the original memory is activated. The desired memoryhas several other memories linked to it, and these are beingtriggered and cause a sort of peripheral or low-level stimulationof the target memory, like a darkened house beinglit by a neighbor’s fireworks display. But the target memorywon’t actually activate until it is stimulated above a specificlevel, orthreshold.
You’ve heard the phrase “it all came flooding back,” oryou recognize the sensation of a quiz answer being “on thetip of your tongue” before it suddenly occurs to you? That’swhat’s happening here. The memory that caused all this recognitionhas now received enough stimulation and is finallyactivated, the neighbor’s fireworks have woken those living inthe house and they’ve turned all the lights on, so all the associatedinformation is now available. Your memory is officiallyjogged, the tip of your tongue can resume its normal duties oftasting things rather than providing an unlikely storage spacefortrivia.
Overall, faces are more memorable than names becausethey’re more “tangible,” whereas remembering someone’sname is more likely to require full recall than simple recognition.I hope this information means that you’ll understandthat if we ever meet for a second time and I don’t rememberyour name, I’m not beingrude.
Actually, in terms of social etiquette, I probably am beingrude. But now at least you know why.
Excerpted from Idiot Brain: What Your Head Is Really Up To by Dean Burnett. Copyright © 2016 by Dean Burnett. With permission of the publisher, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved.
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