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BONUS! Practical NLP, by Arman Darini,
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Enjoy reading this
sample online Tip:
Easy Memory Techniques for Remembering Names
by Arman Darini, Ph.D.
January 10, 2006
The world memory champion can memorize
170 names and faces in 15 minutes. Yet many people cannot
recall a single name thirty seconds after hearing it. If we
stay conservative for a moment and assume that remembering
170 names is the best people will ever be able to do, it
should still be a piece of cake to remember one name of a
person who just introduced herself to you three minutes ago.
Right?
Wrong. All too often the name slips out
of the mind, even after you ask for it the second time
around. Then a week later you see her walking down the
street and you want to call out and say hi. Except there is
no name in your mind. I used to devise clever strategies for
finding out the name second and third time around without
asking for it directly:
-
“Let me see the photo on your
driver’s license.”
-
“So, how do your close friends call
you?”
-
“You have an unusual name, how do you
pronounce it?” (and hope she doesn’t say “Kate”)
-
“What do they call you in this
country?” (works well with the foreigners)
-
Hang around and wait until someone
else pronounces her name. This strategy fails if the
name is foreign and complicated - you hear it but cannot
repeat it.
Wouldn’t it be nice if you could easily
and effortlessly memorize anyone’s name in just a few
seconds? Better yet capture the names of a whole group of
people as you are introduced to them and remember them once
and for all. If the world champion can do it with 170 names,
you can certainly do it with five or ten or even twenty.
Let us first examine what is involved in
storing and recalling information in your mind, and then I
will come back to the specific name remembering strategy.
There are three phases to storing information:
-
Attention. You have got
to pay attention to the information by listening,
watching, sensing. Have you ever had an experience of
reading a book while preoccupied with other thoughts,
like the parking ticket you got in the morning? How much
of what you have read did you remember afterwards?
Rampant self talk is the biggest obstacle to having a
great memory. You need anywhere from 3 to 15 seconds of
active (!) attention to form a strong memory in your
mind. (If you have an outstanding power of
concentration, you only need 2 seconds or 1 second or
even less. Monks practicing a certain kind of meditation
can do that or people in altered states of
consciousness, e.g. in trance (like our world memory
champion). The formula is memory_strength =
intensity_of_concentration x attention_time.)
-
Strategy. Use an
effective memory strategy. There are many great ones
that work really well, yet most people keep using truly
awful strategies they picked up accidentally along the
way when growing up. For example, if you want to
remember a telephone number, mental tape loops when you
keep saying the number to yourself over and over again
are a particularly poor memory strategy. (Especially so
if you remembered the number in one language, and
someone asks for it in another!) There is not a single
memory strategy appropriate for everything. You need to
learn a few to handle all sorts of situations. Some of
them have been invented many millennia ago. For example,
a very effective memory strategy for giving long
speeches without the help of written notes was created
by Greek orators. I will describe a great name
remembering strategy in a second.
-
Neurology.
Neurologically record the memory in your brain.
Occasionally, these neurological processes can be
affected by certain physiological conditions (powerful
drugs, physical brain damage, or some rare disorders),
but this is usually the rarest cause when people
complain of poor memory.
Recalling information has one phase:
-
See, hear or sense the trigger and
recall the information. It does you no good to remember
just the names - you have a name, but no face. You must
associate the two together, so that the face triggers
the recall of the name. We automatically take care of
this in the name remembering strategy below. But for
other times, make sure you create a recall trigger that
naturally occurs in your environment or that you have
easy access to (e.g. do not connect all of your math
learnings to the textbook or your notes - you will not
have access to them during the test).
Bulletproof Name Remembering Strategy
I used to think that remembering names
was hard. My strategy was to listen to the name and… that’s
it. Not much of a strategy, but I did have a handful of
how-to-get-the-name-a-second-time-around strategies. Then I
learned how to do it properly and easily.
First, pay attention to the person saying
their name. Do not look around, do not think about your
dinner plans. Do look at them directly for at least 3
seconds. I typically handshake for 3 seconds while making
eye contact. Listen to the name and imagine it written in
large bright letters around their head. Keep this image in
your mind for 3 to 15 seconds, depending on your power of
concentration. While seeing the image, say the name to
yourself in their voice three times. With your free hand
write the name on your hip or in the air (keep your hand
movements small and unobservable). That’s it.
How Does It Work?
Notice that the bulletproof name
remembering strategy uses all three of your sensory channels
- visual, auditory and kinesthetic. The result is a synergy.
If you were to use only one of the three channels, visual is
by far the most important one for most people. Here is a tip
- when I learned this strategy, initially it did not work
for me. I was told to write the names on the forehead. I did
and I did not remember them. Then I discovered through
experimentation that my letters were too small, I could not
make them out afterwards. The key is to make the imaginary
writing big and bright.
Remembering Many Names At a Time
We will use the chunk & review method.
Have you heard of psychologist George A. Miller’s 7+-2
memory chunks? He discovered in 1956 that people on average
can keep in their short-term memory seven plus or minus two
chunks of information. If more information is given to them,
something else must be forgotten before the new information
is recorded. So if you want to remember more then 7+-2
names, you need to transfer the first set from the
short-term to the long-term memory.
Suppose you are being introduced to a
group of twenty people. We are going to memorize their names
in chunks of five. Start by memorizing the first five names
using the bulletproof name remembering strategy. Then pause
and chunk this information by reviewing all five names in
quick succession (look at each one of the first five people
and mentally say their name). Then continue by memorizing
the next five names, pause, chunk & review. Simple.
