記不住別人的名字 不是你的錯

Once, at a party, I was introduced to a friend of a friend. We shook hands, I told her my name, she told me hers. Then she did something that I was ever so grateful for.

“Hang on,” she said. “Can you say your name again? I wasn’t really listening.”

She saved me from having to later—possibly even at the same party—sheepishly admit that I, too, had already forgotten her name.

An informal poll of fellow Atlantic staffers confirmed my suspicion that this is something that happens to even the most kind and conscientious among us. No sooner does someone utter the most fundamental factoid about themselves than the information flees our brains forever.

There are a few reasons why this occurs:

The next-in-line effect: When you encounter a group of strangers with outstretched hands, your mind turns into a scared 9-year-old at the school talent show. You’re not watching the other contestants; you’re practicing your own routine. The process of both preparing to take in the others’ names and to say your own, as Esther Inglis-Arkell explained at i09, is so taxing that you don’t devote any brain power to actually learning the new names.

You’re not really that interested: Maybe you’re just making an appearance at this party and are planning to abscond shortly to a superior kick-back. Your level of interest can impact how well you remember something. “Some people, perhaps those who are more socially aware, are just more interested in people, more interested in relationships,” Richard Harris, professor of psychology at Kansas State University, told ScienceDaily. “They would be more motivated to remember somebody’s name.”

A failure of working memory: There are two types of storage in the brain: Long-term and short-term. The short-term variety is called “working memory,” and it functions like a very leaky thermos. It doesn’t hold much and it spills stuff out all the time. “You can hold just a little bit of information there and if you don’t concentrate on it, it fades away rapidly,” Paul Reber, a psychology professor at Northwestern University, told me in an email. “Information like a name needs to be transferred to a different brain system that creates long-term memories that persist over time.”

Names are kind of pointless: To answer the famous question, there’s not much in a name, frankly. It doesn’t actually tell you anything about the person you’re meeting, and thus it doesn’t give your brain anything to cling to. Steve may love parkour, but he’d love it just as much if he were Samuel or Sheldon. “Human memory is very good at things like faces and factual information that connects well to other information you already know,” Reber said. Wasn’t District 13, that French parkour movie, really awesome? And hey, remember that time you studied abroad in Paris? All those little connections help solidify the memory of who Steve is and what he does.

​The name, meanwhile, “is both completely arbitrary and somewhat familiar (for common names) and ends up neither connecting to what you already know nor standing out as unusual,” Reber said. “So you get this funny phenomenon where you can remember lots about a person you recently met—everything except their name (this happens to me all the time).”

So the next time you’d like to excuse yourself for forgetting someone’s name without offending the person, just say something like, “Oh sorry, I was just overly concerned with telling you my own name to remember yours. But to be fair, your name isn’t actually that interesting to me, and besides, it’s inconsequential in the grand scheme of things.”曾經在一次聚會上，我的朋友把我介紹給他的朋友。我們握手，互通姓名。然後她做了一件讓我很感激的事。

“等一下，”她說，“您能重複一下您的名字嗎？我剛纔沒注意聽。”

要不是她，我們下次再見時——甚至有可能就在這次聚會晚些時候，我會不好意思地承認，我像她一樣，也沒有記住她的名字。

是不是我們都會忘記別人的名字呢？最近的一項針對《大西洋月刊》職員的非正式調查證實了我的猜想，哪怕是我們當中待人最友善、最一絲不苟的人，也會忘記別人的名字。對方剛講完自我介紹，他的名字可能就已經從我們的腦海中永遠溜走了。

這種情況主要由以下幾種原因導致：

依次失真效應（The next-in-line effect）：

當一羣初次見面的人向你伸出雙手，你就會像一個在學校才藝展上受驚嚇的9歲孩子。你不是在看其他的選手，而是在練習自己的表演動作。你要準備好記住他人的名字，還要說出你自己的名字，正如艾斯特·英格里斯·阿科爾（Esther Inglis-Arkell ）所說，這太傷腦筋了，你的大腦又不是專門用來記新名字的。

你並非真的感興趣：

也許你想在聚會上露個臉，稍微待一會兒就走。對一件事感興趣的程度會影響你記憶水平。堪薩斯州立大學（Kansas State University）心理學教授理查德·哈里斯（Richard Harris）告訴《每日科學》（ScienceDaily）：“有些人可能更有社會意識，對人更感興趣，對人際關係更感興趣。他們更有動力去記住別人的名字。”

工作記憶失誤：

大腦有兩種記憶類型：長期記憶和短期記憶。短期記憶也叫“工作記憶”，工作原理就像一個漏水的熱水瓶，裝不了很多水，還在不斷地漏水。美國西北大學（Northwestern University）心理學教授保羅·雷柏（Paul Reber）在一封郵件中說：“你只能保留一點信息，如果你不集中注意力，這點兒記憶也很快會消失。像名字這樣的信息需要轉移到大腦的長期記憶系統，纔會變成長期記憶。”

名字意義不大：

說實話，一個人的名字並不包含什麼實質性內容，也不能告訴你任何有關這個人的信息。因此，你的大腦記憶也就沒有依附的載體。史蒂文（Steve）可能喜歡跑酷，但是薩姆爾（Samuel）和謝爾頓（Sheldon）也喜歡跑酷。雷柏說：“人類善於記住臉孔，還有一些與已知信息聯繫在一起的事實性信息。”法國的跑酷電影《13區》（District 13）不是令人讚歎麼？記得你留學巴黎的時光嗎？所有這些小小的聯繫，都能幫助你深化對於史蒂文的記憶。

同時，名字通常“也是完全隨意的，所以聽起來都有一點兒相似（尤其是常見的名字），和你已知的信息沒有聯繫，本身也沒有什麼特色，”雷柏說，“所以，你會發現你能記住有關你最近見到的人的很多信息，但唯獨記不住他的名字（這時常發生在我身上）。這很有意思。”

所以，下一次見面，當你想爲自己找個藉口，同時又不冒犯他人時，可以說，“對不起，我剛纔只顧着告訴您我的名字了，沒有聽清您的名字。但是說實話，您的名字我又不是那麼感興趣，何況名字也不是那麼重要，是吧。”