from Business Insider . . .
Narrator, Jessica Orwig, starts by pointing out that
90% of the information we receive is visual, so we store more images in our memory than sounds. The first thing you have to do is concentrate and make a point of hearing the name.
In other words, spend a few seconds on the name, even at the risk of looking forgetful. First, repeat their name. People love hearing their name anyway. Hearing other people pronounce your name correctly is an affirmation that you're speaking and working with a talented and articulate, hopefully, intelligent person. When we hear our name pronounced the right way by someone taking the trouble to work through all the different auditory permutations, it almost feels like they know something about our heritage or our family history that we've someone overlooked. Too funny. If someone butcher's your name, however, it means either, one, they don't care too much, at least right now, or two, that they've got other, bigger fish on their mind. The narrator says to give meaning to someone's name. They recommend transforming it into a silly picture. Really? I like mnemonics, where you create associations with someone's name. The narrator says to take 20 seconds to transform it into an image. That's too long. You can say hello, shake hands, have a brief conversation, and say goodbye in less than 20 seconds. Makes no sense to spend 20 seconds configuring a picture and attach it to someone's name. Plus, people will give you that in a kind of branding. Tamara from BlackJack Pizza. You'll never forget that one. Further, a ridiculous image won't stick so well in the mind of a very logical person; in fact, ludicrous and absurd ideas are often and immediately scoffed at and dismissed. So here Business Insider telling people what memory tricks to use, but their tricks are not so useful. Follow what has worked. Noam Chomsky made his bones as a linguistic with his "language is generative" theory. Go with that. Use that. Do word association games with words or names, and then write them down later or as you're getting in the car to leave. Create a database if you must. Write a follow-up note, telling them how glad you are that you met. That'll make you more memorable in their minds. You might come across as a crazy too, but it might be worth the risk.
Horsley has 3 methods for remembering: the body method, the car method, and the journey. Okay, the best picture "body method" was interesting; again, it takes a lot of effort, but I guess for some information you'll have to put in the effort. I remember I used 3 x 5 cards in college to remember the names of 95 poets, titles of their poems, first lines, what the entire poem was about, its date, and that was about it. But 95 is nothing to snuff or sniff at.
Like anything in life, improving your memory takes practice, but the more you learn the more connections you can build making it even easier to learn even more, so the possibilities are endless.
Why does she use the word "receive"? Why wouldn't she use the word process or "take in" or compute? Receive just sounds too passive of description. Anyway, the narrator explains that what we do when we meet someone for the first time and we hear their name is that we don't quite hear it because we're paying attention to other things about them--height, weight, sex, age, we're paying attention to how they rank whether it he family or work. We are taking in a lot of other information that take precedents to the spelling of their name or the sound of their name or their name's heritage. So we don't hear the name and we just move on. Not good. Treat people like they are a celebrity, whether they want to be on their talk show or not.
