List of techniques to help you remember names
Name are very important. Everyone has one; everyone likes to know when you know their name. Everyone knows them to be a part of social interaction. You can't avoid names (well you can, but it gets tricky). In becoming more awesome at names, here is a bunch of suggestions that can help you.
The following is an incomplete list of some reasonably good techniques to help you remember names. Good luck and put them to good use.
0. Everyone can learn to remember names
in a growth mindset sense, stop thinking you can’t. Stop saying that, everyone is bad at it. Your 0’th task is to actually try harder than that, if you can’t do that - stop reading. Face blindness does exist but most of these will help with that.
1. Decide that names are important.
If you don't think they are important then change your mind. They are. Everyone says they are, everyone responds to their name. It’s a fact of life that being able to be communicated with directly by name will be useful.
2. Make sure you hear the name clearly the first time, and repeat it till you have it.
I tend to shake people's hands, then not let go until they tell me their name, and share them mine clearly (sometimes twice).
3. Repeat their name*
Part of 2, but also – if you repeat it (at least once) you have a higher chance of remembering it. Look them in the eye and say their name. "Nice to meet you Bob". Suddenly your brain got a good picture of their face as well as a good cue as to their name. If you want to supercharge this particular part; “Nice to meet you bob with the hat”, “susan with the glasses”, “john in the dress” works great!
*Repeating a name also has the effect of someone correcting you if you have it wrong. And if you are in a group - allowing other people to learn or remember a name more easily.
4. Associating that name.
Does that name have a meaning as another thing? Mark, Ivy, Jack.
Does that name rhyme with something? Or sound like something? Victoria, IsaBelle, Dusty, Bill, Norris, Jarrod (Jar + Rod), Leopold.
Does someone you already know have that name? Can you make a mental link between this person and the person who's name you already remember. Worst case about being able to remember their name, "oh I have a cousin also called Alexa"-type statements are harmless.
Is the name famous? Luke, Albert, Jesus, Bill, Simba, Bruce, Clark, Edward, Victoria. Any thing that you can connect to this person to hold their name.
5. Write it down
Do you have a spare piece of paper? Can you write it down? I literally carry a notebook and write names down as I hear them. Usually people compliment me on it if they ever find out.
6. Running a script about it
There are naturally lulls in your conversation. You don’t speak like a wall of text, or if you do you could probably learn to do this over the top. If you take a moment during one of those lulls, while someone else is talking - to look around and take note of if you have forgotten someone's name, do so at 1minute, 5minutes, 10minutes (or where necessary). Just recite each person’s name in your head.
7. The first letter.
There are 26 English letters. If you can't remember – try to remember the first letter. If you get it and it doesn't jog your memory, try use the statement, "your name started with J right?"
8. Facebook, LinkedIn, Anki
Use the resources available to you. Check Facebook if you forget! Similarly if people are wearing nametags; test yourself (think – her name is Mary – then check) if you don't remember at all then certainly check. Build an anki deck - I am yet to see a script to make an anki deck from a Facebook friends list but this would be an excellent feature.
9. put that name somewhere.
It seems to help some people to give the name a box to go in. “This name goes with the rest of the names of people I am related to”, “this name goes with the box of the rest of my tennis club”, By allocating boxes you can bring back names via the box of names. (works for some people)
10. Mnemonics
I never bothered because with the above list; I don’t need this yet. Apparently they work excellently. It’s about creating a sensory object in your head that reminds you of the thing you are after, i.e. a person named Rose – imagine a rose on top of her head, that was bright red, and smelt like a rose. Use all senses and make something vivid. You want to remember? Make it vivid and ridiculous. Yes this works; And yes it’s more effort. Names are really valuable and worth remembering.
Disclaimer: All of these things work for some of the people some of the time. You should try the ones you think will work; if they do - excellent, if they don’t - oh well. keep trying.
Also see: http://lesswrong.com/lw/gx5/boring_advice_repository/8ywe
and this video on name skill: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G1_o4oZCEmM
Note: This is also recommended from the book "how to win friends and influence people"
Meta: I wrote this post for a dojo in the Sydney Lesswrong group on the name remembering skills following a lightning talk that I gave in the Melbourne Lesswrong group on the same ideas.
time: 3hrs to write.
To see my other posts - check out my Table of contents
Any suggestions, recommendations or updates please advise below.
An accidental experiment in location memory
I bought a plastic mat to put underneath my desk chair, to protect the wooden floor from having bits of stone ground into it by the chair wheels. But it kept sliding when I stepped onto it, nearly sending me stumbling into my large, expensive, and fragile monitor. I decided to replace the mat as soon as I found a better one.
Before I found a better one, though, I realized I wasn't sliding on it anymore. My footsteps had adjusted themselves to it.
Parenting Technique: Increase Your Child’s Working Memory
I continually train my ten-year-old son’s working memory, and urge parents of other young children to do likewise. While I have succeeded in at least temporarily improving his working memory, I accept that this change might not be permanent and could end a few months after he stops training. But I also believe that while his working memory is boosted so too is his learning capacity.
I have a horrible working memory that greatly hindered my academic achievement. I was so bad at spelling that they stopped counting it against me in school. In technical classes I had trouble remembering what variables stood for. My son, in contrast, has a fantastic memory. He twice won his school’s spelling bee, and just recently I wrote twenty symbols (letters, numbers, and shapes) in rows of five. After a few minutes he memorized the symbols and then (without looking) repeated them forward, backwards, forwards, and then by columns.
My son and I have been learning different programming languages through Codecademy. While I struggle to remember the required syntax of different languages, he quickly gets this and can focus on higher level understanding. When we do math learning together his strong working memory also lets him concentrate on higher order issues then remembering the details of the problem and the relevant formulas.
You can easily train a child’s working memory. It requires just a few minutes of time a day, can be very low tech or done on a computer, can be optimized for your child to get him in flow, and easily lends itself to a reward system. Here is some of the training we have done:
- I write down a sequence and have him repeat it.
- I say a sequence and have him repeat it.
- He repeats the sequence backwards.
- He repeats the sequence with slight changes such as adding one to each number and “subtracting” one from each letter.
- He repeats while doing some task like touching his head every time he says an even number and touching his knee every time he says an odd one.
- Before repeating a memorized sequence he must play repeat after me where I say a random string.
- I draw a picture and have him redraw it.
- He plays N-back games.
- He does mental math requiring keeping track of numbers (i.e. 42 times 37).
- I assign numerical values to letters and ask him math operation questions (i.e. A*B+C).
The key is to keep changing how you train your kid so you have more hope of improving general working memory rather than the very specific task you are doing. So, for example, if you say a sequence and have your kid repeat it back to you, vary the speed at which you talk on different days and don’t just use one class of symbols in your exercises.
New Alzheimer’s treatment fully restores memory function in mice
The team reports fully restoring the memory function of 75 percent of the mice they tested it on, with zero damage to the surrounding brain tissue.
"We’re extremely excited by this innovation of treating Alzheimer’s without using drug therapeutics."
The team says they’re planning on starting trials with higher animal models, such as sheep, and hope to get their human trials underway in 2017.
http://www.sciencealert.com/new-alzheimer-s-treatment-fully-restores-memory-function
A vote against spaced repetition
LessWrong seems to be a big fan of spaced-repetition flashcard programs like Anki, Supermemo, or Mnemosyne. I used to be. After using them religiously for 3 years in medical school, I now categorically advise against using them for large volumes of memorization.
[A caveat before people get upset: I think they appropriate in certain situations, and I have not tried to use them to learn a language, which seems its most popular use. More at the bottom.]
A bit more history: I and 30 other students tried using Mnemosyne (and some used Anki) for multiple tests. At my school, we have a test approximately every 3 weeks, and each test covers about 75 pages of high-density outline-format notes. Many stopped after 5 or so such tests, citing that they simply did not get enough returns from their time. I stuck with it longer and used them more than anyone else, using them for 3 years.
Incidentally, I failed my first year and had to repeat.
By the end of that third year (and studying for my Step 1 boards, a several-month process), I lost faith in spaced-repetition cards as an effective tool for my memorization demands. I later met with a learning-skills specialist, who felt the same way, and had better reasons than my intuition/trial-and-error:
- Flashcards are less useful to learning the “big picture”
- Specifically, if you are memorizing a large amount of information, there is often a hierarchy, organization, etc that can make leaning the whole thing easier, and you loose the constant visual reminder of the larger context when using flashcards.
- Flashcards do not take advantage of spatial, mapping, or visual memory, all of which the human mind is much better optimized for. It is not so well built to memorize pairs between seemingly arbitrary concepts with few to no intuitive links. My preferred methods are, in essence, hacks that use your visual and spatial memory rather than rote.
Here are examples of the typical kind of things I memorize every day and have found flashcards to be surprisingly worthless for:
- The definition of Sjögren's syndrome
- The contraindications of Metronidazole
- The significance of a rise in serum αFP
Here is what I now use in place of flashcards:
- Ven diagrams/etc, to compare and contrast similar lists. (This is more specific to medical school, when you learn subtly different diseases.)
- Mnemonic pictures. I have used this myself for years to great effect, and later learned it was taught by my study-skills expert, though I'm surprised I haven't found them formally named and taught anywhere else. The basic concept is to make a large picture, where each detail on the picture corresponds to a detail you want to memorize.
- Memory palaces. I recently learned how to properly use these, and I'm a true believer. When I only had the general idea to “pair things you want to memorize with places in your room” I found it worthless, but after I was taught a lot of do's and don'ts, they're now my favorite way to memorize any list of 5+ items. If there's enough demand on LW I can write up a summary.
Spaced repetition is still good for knowledge you need to retrieve immediately, when a 2-second delay would make it useless. I would still consider spaced-repetition to memorize some of the more rarely-used notes on the treble and bass clef, if I ever decide to learn to sight-read music properly. I make no comment on it's usefulness to learn a foreign language, as I haven't tried it, but if I were to pick one up I personally would start with a rosetta-stone-esque program.
Your mileage may vary, but after seeing so many people try and reject them, I figured it was enough data to share. Mnemonic pictures and memory palaces are slightly time consuming when you're learning them. However, if someone has the motivation and discipline to make a stack of flashcards and study them every day indefinitely, then I believe learning and using those skills is a far better use of time.
Human Memory: Problem Set
I'm working on a post about how best to use human memory—when it's good to store things in your own brain and why, when it's best to outsource your memory, what memory upgrades are worthwhile in what contexts, and how to integrate and apply memory systems in real life. I'm hoping the following set of memory problems will draw out approaches that haven't occurred to me so I can compare a wider range of methods.
I'll post the first solutions I thought of myself later on, but for now I'd like to hear what you would do in each of these situations and what you believe to be the pros and cons of your answers. Can you think of ways to improve upon your first thoughts and the answers of others?
(You don't have to respond to all of the questions; feel free to post as little or as much as comes to mind.)
[Link] - No evidence of intelligence improvement after working memory training
This article critically examines previous studies that showed a link between working memory training (specifically via n-back training) and fluid intelligence, finding that the results may not have been as positive as reported owing to a number of factors including the use of a no-contact rather than active control group, and difficulty selecting tests that isolate the impact of working memory on fluid intelligence. The authors also present findings from a new study that show no improvement in fluid intelligence from dual n-back training, visual search training (active placebo) and no training (no contact placebo).
Minor, perspective changing facts
There's a lot of background mess in our mental pictures of the world. We try and be accurate on important issues, but a whole lot of the less important stuff we pick up from the media, the movies, and random impressions. And once these impressions are in our mental pictures, they just don't go away - until we find a fact that causes us to say "huh", and reassess.
Here are three facts that have caused that "huh" in me, recently, and completely rearranged minor parts of my mental map. I'm sharing them here, because that experience is a valuable one.
- Think terrorist attack on Israel - did the phrase "suicide bombing" spring to mind? If so, you're so out of fashion: the last suicide bombing in Israel was in 2008 - a year where dedicated suicide bombers managed the feat of killing a grand total of 1 victim. Suicide bombings haven't happened in Israel for over half a decade.
- Large scale plane crashes seem to happen all the time, all over the world. They must happen at least a few times a year, in every major country, right? Well, if I'm reading this page right, the last time there was an airline crash in the USA that killed more that 50 people was... in 2001 (2 months after 9/11). Nothing on that scale since then. And though there has been crashes on route to/from Spain and France since then, it seems that major air crashes in western countries is something that essentially never happens.
- The major cost of a rocket isn't the fuel, as I'd always thought. It seems that the Falcon 9 rocket costs $54 million per launch, of which fuel is only $0.2 million (or, as I prefer to think of it - I could sell my house to get enough fuel to fly to space). In the difference between those two prices, lies the potential for private spaceflight to low-Earth orbit.
Memory, nutrition, motivation, and genes
There are two confusing but potentially important papers in the Jan. 25 2013 Science on long-term memory (LTM) formation in fruit flies:
Pierre-Yves Placais & Thomas Preat. To favor survival under food shortage, the brain disables costly memory. 339:440-441.
Yukinori Hirano et al. Fasting launches CRTC to facilitate long-term memory formation in Drosophila. 339:443-446.
These papers categorize long-term memory formation along three axes.
- Aversive vs. appetitive: Actions that the brain interprets as helping it avoid something, vs. actions that help it attain something.
- Fasting-dependent (fLTM) vs. spaced training-dependent (spLTM): fLTM is formed in a single learning episode, but only at the time that an organism first obtains food after a long fast. spLTM does not require fasting but requires repeated training.
- LTM vs. ARM: Memories that require protein synthesis (LTM) vs. "anesthesia-resistent memory" (ARM), which does not. (The papers don't explain what ARM might correspond to in humans.)
The relationship between these is unclear, particularly as each of these three axes is claimed at various times to determine whether memory can be learned in a single training cycle (appetitive, fLTM, and/or ARM) or not (aversive, spLTM, and/or LTM). But these things appear to be likely, or at least to be reasonable hypotheses, if these pathways are conserved in humans:
- How quickly you learn something depends on how much you've eaten recently. You learn most quickly immediately after ending a long fast. Your brain thinks you just learned something that saved it from starvation. (But note that a 1-day fast for a fruit fly could be compared to a human fasting for months.)
- How quickly you learn something depends on whether your brain thinks that this knowledge is to avoid something bad (slow learning) or to attain something good (fast learning).
- Almost all of the mutations that extend lifespan in organisms from yeast to humans impact the FOXO3a vs. mTORc1 axis (to use the human analogs). Expressing FOXO3a inhibits mTORc1 and extends lifespan in various ways; producing and assembling more mTORc1 inhibits FOXO3a and promotes protein synthesis, growth, reproduction, tissue repair, and immune response. We already know that extending lifespan, in general, is antithetical to building muscle. It may also be antithetical to forming long-term memories. This makes sense.
- Learning rate can be increased by expressing or inhibiting proteins involved in these responses. Hirano et al. focus on activating a cAMP-regulated transcriptional coactivator (CRTC) by dephosphorylating it in order to invoke fLTM. They were able to do this and enable flies to learn quickly without fasting followed by feeding.
I'd really appreciate it if somebody would do a literature review and a comparison of the pathways involved to those in humans, and summarize their findings.
[Link] False memories of fabricated political events
Another one for the memory-is-really-unreliable file. Some researchers at UC Irvine (one of them is Elizabeth Loftus, whose name I've seen attached to other fake-memory studies) asked about 5000 subjects about their recollection of four political events. One of the political events never actually happened. About half the subjects said they remembered the fake event. Subjects were more likely to pseudo-remember events congruent with their political preferences (e.g., Bush or Obama doing something embarrassing).
Link to papers.ssrn.com (paper is freely downloadable).
The subjects were recruited from the readership of Slate, which unsurprisingly means they aren't a very representative sample of the US population (never mind the rest of the world). In particular, about 5% identified as conservative and about 60% as progressive.
Each real event was remembered by 90-98% of subjects. Self-identified conservatives remembered the real events a little less well. Self-identified progressives were much more likely to "remember" a fake event in which G W Bush took a vacation in Texas while Hurricane Katrina was devastating New Orleans. Self-identified conservatives were somewhat more likely to "remember" a fake event in which Barack Obama shook the hand of Mahmoud Ahmedinejad.
About half of the subjects who "remembered" fake events were unable to identify the fake event correctly when they were told that one of the events in the study was fake.
[LINK] How to develop a photographic memory
Article can be found here.
I am considering trying this, and I'm wondering if anyone on LW has tried this or something similar. This seems like it could work, but it also seems like it could be hokum. A simple search for "how to develop a photographic memory" returns any number of methods. If this works with the success rate that they imply, this seems like tremendously low hanging fruit.
Memory in the microtubules
A recent article in PloS Computational Biology suggests that memory is encoded in the microtubules. "Signaling and encoding in MTs and other cytoskeletal structures offer rapid, robust solid-state information processing which may reflect a general code for MT-based memory and information processing within neurons and other eukaryotic cells."
They argue that synaptic connections are transient compared with the lifetime of memories, and therefore memories cannot be stored in them, but in some more persistent structure. The structure they suggest is the phosphorylation state of sites on microtubule lattices within neurons. And that's about as much of the technical detail as I feel able to summarise. It's not all speculation, they report technical work on the structures of these cellular components. Total memory capacity would be somewhere upwards of 10^20 bits (or in more everyday units, 10 million terabytes), depending on the encoding, of which they suggest several schemes.
Journalistic writeup here.
Note that Stuart Hameroff, one of the authors, is known for his proposals for microtubules as the mechanism of consciousness through quantum effects (and with Penrose, quantum gravitational effects). The present paper, however, is solely about memory and does not touch on quantum coherence or consciousness.
Should You Make a Complete Map of Every Thought You Think?
Related to: Living Luminously
Linked is a treatise on exactly this concept. If the effects of recording and classifying every thought pan out like the author says they'll pan out... well, read a (limited) excerpt (from the Introduction), and I'll let you decide whether it's worth your time.
If you do the things described in this book, you will be IMMOBILIZED for the duration of your commitment.The immobilization will come on gradually, but steadily. In the end, you will be incapable of going somewhere without your cache of notes, and will always want a pen and paper w/ you. When you do not have pen and paper, you will rely on complex memory pegging devices, described in "The Memory Book''. You will NEVER BE WITHOUT RECORD, and you will ALWAYS RECORD.
YOU MAY ALSO ARTICULATE. Your thoughts will be clearer to you than they have ever been before. You will see things you have never seen before. When someone shows you one corner, you'll have the other 3 in mind. This is both good and bad. It means you will have the right information at the right time in the right place. It also means you may have trouble shutting up. Your mileage may vary.
You will not only be immobilized in the arena of action, but you will also be immobilized in the arena of thought. This appears to be contradictory, but it's not really. When you are writing down your thoughts, you are making them clear to yourself, but when you revise your thoughts, it requires a lot of work - you have to update old ideas to point to new ideas. This discourages a lot of new thinking. There is also a "structural integrity'' to your old thoughts that will resist change. You may actively not-think certain things, because it would demand a lot of note keeping work. (Thus the notion that notebooks are best applied to things that are not changing.)
The full text is written in a stream-of-consciousness style, which is why I hesitated to post this topic in the first place. But there are probably note-taking junkies, or luminosity junkies, or otherwise interested folk amongst LW. So why not?
(Incidentally I'm reminded of Buckminster Fuller's Dymaxion Chronofile. I wonder how he managed it, or what benefits/costs it wrought?)
[LINK] A proposed update model for working memory: multiple-component framework
I've seen some discussion on "working memory" and "spaced repetition"
I just read this pop-science article in which a new hypothesis is presented that seems to provide better predictions and test conditions for measuring working memory. Maybe this can also be used for the SRS contest.
A study in Science on memory conformity
I believe this may be a good addition to the cognitive bias literature:
Following the Crowd: Brain Substrates of Long-Term Memory Conformity
- Micah Edelson1,*,
- Tali Sharot2,
- Raymond J. Dolan2,
- Yadin Dudai1
1Department of Neurobiology, Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel.
- 2Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging, Institute of Neurology, University College London, London, UK.
ABSTRACT
Human memory is strikingly susceptible to social influences, yet we know little about the underlying mechanisms. We examined how socially induced memory errors are generated in the brain by studying the memory of individuals exposed to recollections of others. Participants exhibited a strong tendency to conform to erroneous recollections of the group, producing both long-lasting and temporary errors, even when their initial memory was strong and accurate. Functional brain imaging revealed that social influence modified the neuronal representation of memory. Specifically, a particular brain signature of enhanced amygdala activity and enhanced amygdala-hippocampus connectivity predicted long-lasting but not temporary memory alterations. Our findings reveal how social manipulation can alter memory and extend the known functions of the amygdala to encompass socially mediated memory distortions.
Two working memories, one on each side of the brain [link]
Not a working memory of four, it's really two plus two.
Tl, dr: It's easier to remember four things if you've got two on one side of your visual field and two on the other. Three or four on one side can cause overload errors.
Working memory for other senses hasn't been explored yet on this level.
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