You've probably heard it before: I am bad at names.
I don't remember names so well. But are you truly bad at names? Or is it something that we all say?
In this article you can test yourself and figure out how impressive your memory really happens to be. Best of all, you will never say that you're bad at names – or even have a bad memory. Your perception of memory will change quite substantially. Let's go, shall we?
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Note: (This is an unedited transcript)
I'm just about to impress you with my memory.
About a month ago, we were in a hotel called Torel Palace in Lisbon. Our flight arrived at 10:30 p.m. When we got to the hotel, it was closing in at midnight. But there was Philip to meet us at the door, and he took us to our room. Unfortunately, they had left the air conditioning on at 16 degrees centigrade.
That's pretty cold.
And from the looks of it, the cold blast had been on since the afternoon. We were uncomfortable, so at about 1 a.m., I went downstairs, and there was somebody new, somebody called Fabian. Fabian said he could take us to the villa, and we could spend the night there.
The following day, we were upgraded. Bertrand took us to our room. He was sitting right next to Melissa. That's the way she said her name. At breakfast, we were served by Pritika from India, Pinky from Nepal, and Sonia from Cape Verde. The name of the restaurant manager? Andre. The bellboy at the gate? That's Dellington.
And I'll stop now.
You can't tell if I am reading from a sheet. You can't even ratify if these names are correct. They are, but that's not the point. Well, what is the point of this article? It's just that most of us have an exceptional memory.
We might say things like, “We're not good with names. ” But if you stay with me for a few minutes, I'll prove that you're exceptional with names. Your memory is better than you think it is. In fact, you've been putting yourself down.
So let's go, shall we?
I will read a few people's names and see if you recognise them. If not, your memory might not be so good. You might be terrible with names.
Albert Einstein, Madame Curie, William Shakespeare, Leonardo da Vinci, Nelson Mandela, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Winston Churchill, Oprah Winfrey, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Michael Jackson, The Beatles, Pablo Picasso, Vincent Van Gogh, Jane Austen, Mark Twain, Serena Williams.
Oops, those are 20 names that you remember.
Let's take some more names. New Zealand, Canada, Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Russia, China, Japan, India, Australia, South Africa, Egypt, Nigeria, Saudi Arabia, South Korea, North Korea. Are you having any problems yet?
You even remember people that don't exist.
Sherlock Holmes, Harry Potter, Frodo Baggins, Luke Skywalker, Wonder Woman, Tony Stark, and Bond, James Bond. You're likely to remember the names of all your family members, friends, and teachers from high school. You also know the names of thousands of objects.
Let's take some names: book, booklet, notepad, computer, headphones, chair. You know those objects in four, five or six different languages if you speak several languages.
A chair would be a chaise in French. In Spanish, it would be silla. In Hindi, it would be kursi or kurchi in Marathi, and then sedia. And you know which language that is if you speak the language. It's a myth that you are hopeless at remembering names. So why don't we remember names? We don't pay attention. It's that simple.
We remember all the names that are important to us in some way, relevant, and engaging. We then forget all the rest. But why is this information so important to you? It is essential because it's a factor of confidence.
Some people are supremely confident as they go through life for many reasons. However, one thing that brings us down consistently is when we say things that aren't true.
We don't have a terrible memory.
If you were to get on ChatGPT today and ask it to generate a thousand names of important places, people, and objects, you'd probably get a perfect score. If we were terrible at remembering names, we should get a big fat zero.
But we don't. We get a perfect score. And when we realise we've been fooling ourselves for so long, we should logically question what other things we have in our heads are holding us back.
Because these myths are plainly silly. The more you hear others saying the same thing, the more the myth is reinforced. In reality, your memory is excellent. In most cases, you and I just seem to pay less attention.
Even when you're thinking about things that happened in the last year, five or ten years, maybe even the last 30 years, you can remember everything in great detail. What your brain is doing is acting as a volume regulator. If the information is essential but not valid or crucial, it just reduces the volume.
If it's important to you right now, it turns it up. For instance, when we go on holiday, we must write lists of what to do when we return. Why? Because we forget pretty much everything.
When we return from our holiday, our brains are focused on having breakfast, waking up, and doing nothing. The volume related to work and activity has been turned down to nothing.
We don't remember what we're supposed to do and how we're supposed to do it. That's not because our memory is terrible. That's just because of a volume control.
You know this to be true because you can listen to a song you heard 20 or 30 years ago. The first time you listen to the song after a long time, some of those lyrics seem to slip your mind.
But once you hear the same song a second or third time, they're all back. The same thing happens with any kind of memory you hold of the past. Somebody can fill in all the little details, and then it's back like it never went away.
If you sit down to write a memoir right away, you would run into a blank wall. It's like most of the memories of your past have faded away.
But as you start chipping away at the memories, more and more come to mind. As you begin reading memoirs of other people, like I was reading about Stanley Tucci and Trevor Noah, whose stories reminded me of my past, those memories haven't gone. They're just buried at low volume, and now they're back.
It isn't to say that all memories are precisely correct. The moment you bring up a memory and add some other information to it, you can corrupt that memory.
When you're telling a story, someone says, “No, that's not the way it happened,” it is because something corrupted that memory. As you repeat a story, it takes on a life of its own. The details get embellished, things get left out, and other bits are added.
But it's OK that we have these partially dodgy memories. Once the details have been rearranged, we will find that our memories are excellent.
Well, it's time to summarise this article.
The first point is that almost everyone is very good with names. Not just hundreds but probably tens of thousands of names. And if you speak multiple languages, probably 50,000 names, 100,000 names, who knows?
When we think of the past, it's not like our memory has been erased somehow. It's just a volume control. If your brain had every memory at full volume, that would be messy and frustrating.
Finally, memory is corruptible. Whenever you bring up a memory and add some other information, that memory could be warped. But that doesn't always have to happen.
If you write things down, well, you'll remember it as it happened, or at least as you perceived it at that point in time. And why is all of this important? It's important because it gives you confidence.
When you walk around saying, I remember names, I remember things, you build an excellent little database in your head. People like you because you remember their names and what they said. It makes a difference in your life.
Confidence is the most abstract and yet one of the most crucial elements of your life. Stop putting yourself down. You're better than what you think you are. You most certainly have a good memory.
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