What’s Your Name Again?

I was on the academic team at my high school, and my teammates were often surprised by my ability to recall names and dates. Our joke was that I had a secretary in my head named Josephine who drank too much coffee and ran around the filing cabinets to retrieve information. Oddly enough, in time I realized that thinking of my memory as a series of organized filing cabinets actually helped; the assumption that the information was there, organized, and easily accessible made it easier for me to remember other details, like the location of the Mexican restaurant that had deep-fried ice cream. Of course, it could also simply be that having to continually remember things that are easy to forget (names and dates) conditioned my brain to remember them more easily over time.

Learning is the acquisition of facts/content or procedures. A wide range of individual differences exist with regard to how they learn. For learning names, particularly in social situations, it's best to combine visual with auditory-- take a mental photo of the face and repeat the name back to the person ("NIce to meet you, Tom."). It may also help to note an article of clothing as you "take the photo" to assist with encoding and recall. For learning at the college level, research shows that the most high-achieving students organize their material into charts, graphs, or content outlines and memorize it in ways meaningful to them. Susan Hardwicke, Ph.D.