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:
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.”
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).”
