I've always been bad at names. But this semester, as part of my duties as a physics teacher, I tried to learn the names of 100 students. It went alright - two months later and there are still some I have trouble with. At the start, I was a bit worried. What if I've just read to many books and things, and used up most of my abnormally small allotment of memorized names? Then wasting names on students would be a really bad idea.
But things turned out not to work that way (as might be expected from how big the human brain is, viz people with eidetic memories). I've started remembering peoples' names after just one introduction, sometimes two. And the reasonable culprit just seems to be practice. You practice learning names, you get better at doing so. Before, I made occasional conversational detours if I couldn't remember someone's name. Now, I ask them again, because I'm confident that I'll remember it without tons of further awkwardness. If I'm really having trouble, sometimes I've written down a name with a short description, and that usually cements it. Remembering names isn't the most important social skill I've learned, but it's a surprisingly dramatic one - it makes me feel closer to people, and vice versa. And it only took having to learn the names of 100 people to get started.
The lesson from this is not necessarily just about learning names, though that might be useful to you. The lesson is about how ordinary people get a lot of practice at doing things like remembering names - if you can't do something that someone else can do, practice may be an effective place to start. What seems like a property of yourself ("bad at names") may turn out to be quite mutable with the kind of practice those other people are doing.
I haven't come up with one. I used to mix up my roommate with a coworker and have brief panicky feelings every now and then when I tried to figure out what I'd done that so pissed off my coworker that she was waiting in my living room. But I was pretty good at remembering that statistically it was my roommate.
Strategies I have used that helped:
* sending out emails at the beginning of the school year reminding people I'm pretty faceblind and I may not recognize them, esp if they changed their hair. So please introduce yourself when you see me, and, if I'm in a conversation with someone, greet my interlocutor by name
* teaching my then-bf fingerspelling and having him drift behind people I'm talking to and spell their names to me
These didn't make me better long term,but helped a lot to manage the problem.
16Randy_M
In college I occasionally mixed up a couple similar looking girls. I ended up marrying one of them. It worked out pretty well for me but I don't think it's a universally applicable heuristic.
I've always been bad at names. But this semester, as part of my duties as a physics teacher, I tried to learn the names of 100 students. It went alright - two months later and there are still some I have trouble with. At the start, I was a bit worried. What if I've just read to many books and things, and used up most of my abnormally small allotment of memorized names? Then wasting names on students would be a really bad idea.
But things turned out not to work that way (as might be expected from how big the human brain is, viz people with eidetic memories). I've started remembering peoples' names after just one introduction, sometimes two. And the reasonable culprit just seems to be practice. You practice learning names, you get better at doing so. Before, I made occasional conversational detours if I couldn't remember someone's name. Now, I ask them again, because I'm confident that I'll remember it without tons of further awkwardness. If I'm really having trouble, sometimes I've written down a name with a short description, and that usually cements it. Remembering names isn't the most important social skill I've learned, but it's a surprisingly dramatic one - it makes me feel closer to people, and vice versa. And it only took having to learn the names of 100 people to get started.
The lesson from this is not necessarily just about learning names, though that might be useful to you. The lesson is about how ordinary people get a lot of practice at doing things like remembering names - if you can't do something that someone else can do, practice may be an effective place to start. What seems like a property of yourself ("bad at names") may turn out to be quite mutable with the kind of practice those other people are doing.