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Nice to meet you! ... What's your name again?

Tired of finding yourself in that awkward situation where you recognize someone's face, yet you can't recall their name? New research in Psychological Science sheds some light on the phenomenon.

Scientists recently discovered that a face's features, more than the entire face per se, are the key to recognizing a person.

"In the past, it was believed that we look at faces holistically in order to recognize the face," says Jason M. Gold, coauthor of the study and associate professor of psychology at Indiana University. "But surprisingly, we found that the whole was not greater than the sum of its parts."

Avoid a Memory Meltdown

But how can you put this ability to hone in on features to good use? We reached out to Scott Hagwood, author of Memory Power and four-time National Memory Champion, to teach you how to utilize that memory of yours and never forget a name again.

Wordplay
The key to remembering someone's name is making a connection between their name and something that you can easily remember, says Hagwood. So right off the bat, see if the name itself does the work for you. Alliteration and rhyming can be very helpful, says Hagwood. For example, you remember Lucy due to her luscious lips (alliteration), or you were introduced to Cole, who has a large facial mole (rhyming).

Form a trigger
Let's say you meet "Henry," yet this isn't the first "Henry" you know. Since you have an old Henry in mind, try to form a connection between the new Henry's features and the original Henry, says Hagwood. By drawing this parallel, this conditions the brain to use that feature as a memory trigger. A weak example: Both men have short hair. "Since hair styles can frequently change, it's not the wisest choice to make connections to," says Hagwood. A better method: Pick something you despise about old Henry and compare it to the new. Maybe Old Henry has absolutely horrible skin, yet the new once looks like he just stepped out of a Clinique ad.

A simple way to get an individual's name to go hand in hand with their face is to say their name aloud in conversation. This technique practices mindfulness and can condition your brain to associate the sound of their name to their face, says Hagwood. Just don't overdo the repetition, otherwise the interaction feels forced.

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By Natalie Wolchover
Life's Little Mysteries

Our brains balk at the thought of four-dimensional hypercubes, quantum mechanics or an infinite universe, and understandably so. But our gray matter is generally adept at processing sensory data from the mundane objects and experiences of daily life. However, there are a few glaring exceptions.

Here are five common things that unexpectedly throw our brains for a loop, revealing some of the bizarre quirks in their structure and function that usually manage to slip under the radar.

Doors
Do you ever walk into a room with some purpose in mind — to get something, perhaps? — only to completely forget what that purpose was?  Turns out, doors themselves are to blame for these strange memory lapses.

Why you forgot what you were just doing

Psychologists at the University of Notre Dame have discovered that passing through a doorway triggers what's known as an "event boundary" in the mind, separating one set of thoughts and memories from the next, just as exiting through a doorway signals the end of a scene in a movie. Your brain files away the thoughts you had in the previous room, and prepares a blank slate for the new locale. Mental event boundaries usually help us organize our thoughts and memories as we move through the continuous and dynamic world, but when we're trying to remember that thing we came in here to do… or get… or maybe find… they can be frustrating indeed.

Beeps
Which bugs you more: the whine of a digital alarm clock, the sound of a truck backing up, or the shrill reminders that your smoke detector is running out of batteries? Fine, they're all terrible. Beeps are practically the soundtrack of the modern world, but they're extremely irritating because each one induces a tiny brain fart.

We didn't evolve hearing beeps, so we struggle to grasp them. Natural sounds are created from a transfer of energy, often from one object striking another, such as a stick hitting a drum. In that case, energy is transferred into the drum and then gradually dissipates, causing the sound to decay over time. Our perceptual system has evolved to use that decay to understand the event — to figure out what made the sound, and where it came from. Beep sounds, on the other hand, are like cars driving at 60 mph then suddenly hitting a wall, as opposed to gradually slowing to a stop. The sound doesn't change over time, and it doesn't fade away, so our brains are baffled about what they are and where they're coming from. 

Photos
Just as we didn't evolve hearing beeps, we also didn't evolve seeing photographs. Like your grandmother learning to use the Internet but never developing an intuitive feel for it, we consciously "get" photographs, but our subconscious brains can't quite separate them from the objects or people pictured.

Case in point: Studies show that people are much less accurate when throwing darts at pictures of JFK, babies, or people they like than when throwing darts at Hitler or their worst enemy. Another study found that people start to sweat profusely when asked to cut up photographs of their cherished childhood possessions. Lacking millions of years of practice, our brains fail when it comes to separating appearance from reality.

Phones
Do you ever feel your phone vibrating in your pocket or purse, only to retrieve it and be met by eerie, black-screened lifelessness? If, like most people, you occasionally experience these "phantom vibrations," it turns out it's because your brain is jumping to wrong conclusions in an attempt to make sense of the chaos that is your life.

Brains are bombarded with sensory data; they must filter out the useless noise, and pick up on the important signals. In prehistoric times we would have constantly misinterpreted curvy sticks in the corny of our vision for snakes. Today, most of us are techno-centric, and so our brains misinterpret everything from the rustle of clothing to the growling of a stomach, jumping to the conclusion that we're getting a call or text, and actually causing us to hallucinate a full-on phone vibration.

Wheels

Ever noticed how car wheels can look like they're spinning backwards in the movies? This is because movie cameras capture still images of a scene at a finite rate, and the brain fills in the gaps between these images by creating the illusion of continuous motion between the similar frames. If the wheel rotates most of the way around between one frame and the next, the most obvious direction of motion for the brain to pick up on is backwards, since this direction suggests the minimal difference between the two frames. [Why It Took so Long to Invent the Wheel]

However, wheels can also appear to spin backwards in real life, too, which is weirder. The leading theory to explain the "continuous wagon wheel illusion," as it is known, holds that the brain's motion perception system samples its input as a series of discrete snapshots, much like a movie camera. So our brains are effectively filming their own movies of the external world, but not always at a fast enough frame rate to perceive the wheels in the scene spinning the right way. 

For scientific explanations of five more brain farts, click here .

More from Life's Little Mysteries:

• 15 Weird Things Humans Do Every Day, and Why
• Top 10 Inventions that Changed the World
• Why Aren't We Smarter?

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By Maren Kasselik
Men's Health

Have you ever walked into a room and realized you don’t remember what you’re doing there? Yeah, us too. Well thankfully science finally explains why: It’s the doorway’s fault, a new study finds.

“When you go from room to room, your brain identifies each room as a new event and sets a new memory trace to capture the new event,” says study author Gabriel Radvansky, Ph.D., a psychology professor at the University of Notre Dame.

Like a chapter marker, doorways end old episodes and begin new ones, as far as your brain is concerned. This makes it difficult to retrieve older memories because they’ve already been filed away, Radvansky says.

Radvansky suggests physically carrying a reminder of what your intent is: “For example, if you want to go from the living room to the kitchen to get a snack, you may forget why you went to the kitchen when you get there because this is a new event, and you may have been distracted. But, it would be easier to remember if you walked into the kitchen with something to remind yourself of what you wanted, such as a bowl.”

Don’t keep bowls in the living room? That’s OK. Form your hand into a bowl shape when you walk to the kitchen. If you’re going from room to room to fetch a pair of scissors, hold your index and middle fingers in a scissor shape to help the memory stay intact.

More from Men's Health:

• Stimulate the brain for better recall through yoga
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No matter your political views, you probably couldn’t help but feel a little sorry for Gov. Rick Perry’s memory hiccup during Wednesday night’s CNBC Republican presidential debate. Sorry and perhaps a little empathetic.

For the life of him, Perry couldn’t remember the name of the third federal agency he’d abolish as president. Commerce, Education, and, and, and. Nothing. Someone suggested “EPA,” and Perry briefly appeared to consider that possibility. By the time reporter John Hardwood asked him what that third agency was, Perry seemed to have forgotten even Commerce.

We might call such incidents “senior moments,” but they happen to people of all ages, says Gayatri Devi, director of the New York Memory and Healthy Aging Services. It’s just that few people experience them on live TV.

“I don’t think we can make too much of it,” says Devi, a board-certified neurologist and psychiatrist. “This is a very human error. I don’t think it’s portentous of any memory problems.”

Perry, who’s 61, probably had several factors working against him, Devi speculates.

Story: Perry's debate brain freeze looms large

For one, she says, the guy is running for president and has tons of stuff to remember. Just because he blanked on the name of that third agency (Department of Energy, by the way) doesn’t mean he’s unfamiliar with the details of his own platform, Devi says. “Haven’t you ever forgotten your home telephone number?” (My hand is up.)

Plus, the stress of everything going on in his life right now probably doesn’t help. While a little stress can keep you on your game, Devi says, too much can hinder your performance.

Perry’s lapse does probably mean that he didn’t rehearse enough, she says. As anyone who’s ever given a talk knows, practice, practice, practice helps get you closer to perfect.

On top of that, you have to figure that Perry, a governor running for the presidential nomination, probably isn’t getting enough zzz’s. As Devi says, “the most important thing for remembering is a good night’s sleep.”

 Catnaps probably aren’t enough, she says, because it’s “slow-wave”-- or deep sleep—that’s needed to help make memories stick. “What your grandmother said is true: Get a good night’s sleep. Especially before a presidential debate.”

Readers, let's sympathize with the guy for a second. When's the last time you had a brain freeze? Leave a comment telling us about it -- if we like your story, we may use it in an upcoming Body Odd post!

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The better you can forget, the better you’ll be able to remember, scientists now say.

To remember facts that are important in your life today, you have to be able to let go of information that you no longer need, says Benjamin Storm, an assistant professor at the University of Illinois in Chicago.

“For example, if someone asks you who is the current Speaker of the House, you might remember Newt Gingrich or Nancy Pelosi,” explains Storm, co-author of a study on the subject published in Current Directions in Psychological Science. “That, of course, is incorrect. So you have to have a way of not thinking about Gingrich and Pelosi, so you can remember that the current Speaker is John Boehner.”

Your brain is stuffed full of information and for you to have important information at your fingertips -- or the tip of your tongue -- it has to forget facts that aren’t currently needed. It’s like your belongings: Important stuff you might store on your desk. Less important stuff you’ll toss up in the attic. You can get the stuff out of the attic if you really need it, but it’s harder to access.

To get a sense of how the brain forgets in order to remember, Storm set up some experiments. In one, volunteers were given a list of six words that were all related: a list of six fruits, for example. Then the volunteers were given a simple test in which the category was listed along with the first letter of three items followed by a blank to be filled in -- so you might see “fruits,” followed by an “o” for orange or an “a” for apple. Next the volunteers were given the same test, but this time with cuing letters for all six items.

The volunteers easily remembered the three items they’d originally been tested on. The other three were very hard to recall. Their memories of these items had been lost.

The experiment explains what happens when we get a new phone number, Storm says. Once you’ve learned the new number, it’s almost impossible to recall the old one. And that makes sense. Imagine how hard it would be if you remembered every single phone number you’d ever had.

As it turns out, some people are better forgetters than others, says Storm. And these people tend to be better at problem solving. Something about the way their brains organize information helps them to think, he explains. 

Are you better at remembering -- or forgetting? 

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Pssst! Guys, if you want that hottie sitting beside you to remember your stunning good looks long after you’ve left, lower the pitch of your voice when you turn on the charm.

Lower voices seem to stick better in women’s memories, scientists now say. In a study published in this month’s Memory & Cognition, British researchers reported that women were more likely to remember something if they heard it from a man with a low voice than one with a higher pitch.

The theory is that women are hard-wired to pay better attention to a potentially superior mate.

“The reason that male voice pitch should be important is that the pitch of the voice gives an indication of how much testosterone the man has,” said the study’s lead author, Kevin Allan, a lecturer in psychology at the University of Aberdeen in the United Kingdom. “Lots of testosterone produces pronounced masculine features, in the voice and face most notably.”

Studies have shown that testosterone impacts the immune system, Allan said. “So, if a man has a rugged masculine face and voice then it implies that he has a good immune system and therefore good health,” he explained.

And that’s the payoff, in evolutionary terms: healthy daddies are more likely to make healthy babies.

To look at the impact of male voice pitch on women’s memories, Allan and his colleagues rounded up 45 young women whose average age was 21.

The women were shown an image of an object while listening to a voice read the name of the object. The male voices were manipulated to sound either high or low pitched.

Later on, the women were shown a picture of the object they’d looked at earlier, along with a picture that was similar, but slightly different -- a plain blue fish versus the same blue fish with a yellow blotch.

When the researchers tallied up the number of times each woman picked the right picture, they discovered that the women were more likely to remember if they’d initially seen the object while a low pitched male voice was naming it.

So, does it work the other way round?

Allan says not. “We did collect data from men who were listening to women’s voices that were high and low in pitch,” he explained. “We found no effect on the men’s memory at all. Our conclusion about the absence of the effect in men’s memory is that men are picking partners based purely on physical characteristics.” 

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Studying for multiple final exams was always rough. Just when you felt you’d mastered Spanish, say, and moved on to American history, every bit of grammar you’d slaved to store away would just stream out of your head. It seemed like your brain wasn’t big enough to keep both subjects going at the same time.

As it turns out, you were right -- sort of. Scientists have now discovered why it’s really hard to learn two subjects, one right after the other. A new study published in Nature Neuroscience shows that when you try to learn or to memorize two different types of information in rapid succession, the second interferes with the brain’s ability to permanently store the first.

To prove this was happening, Dr. Edwin Robertson and his colleagues at Harvard rounded up 120 college-age students for an experiment in which study volunteers were given two memory tasks back to back.

First the volunteers were given a list of words to memorize. Then they were given a finger-tapping task -- unbeknownst to the volunteers, there was a pattern to the finger tapping that they could unconsciously learn through repetition.

Right after the word test, volunteers remembered the list quite well. But after they did the finger tapping routine, they’d forgotten many of the words. 

Then, in the second part of the experiment, the tasks were reversed so finger tapping came first, followed by the word list. Once again, the volunteers did well in testing after the first task, but after performing the second, they’d lost much of what they learned in the first.

That could just mean that the brain couldn’t hold all that information, says Robertson, an associate professor of neurology at Harvard Medical School and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center.

So Robertson and his colleagues re-ran the experiment, only this time they used a magnetic device that pumps up the electricity in the brain when the device is placed against the head.

Sure enough, with the stimulation people remembered both tasks as well as if they’d done each one alone. What’s interesting is that the stimulation didn’t improve memories when only one task was done at a time. So it was just removing interference, says Robertson.  

Practically speaking, what the study is telling us is that when you’re trying to learn two different things, you need to take a break in between. Other research shows that two hours might be enough, Robertson says. 

There might be other ways to trick the brain into giving up interference, but that might not be a good strategy.

It’s not clear why the brain is wired the way it is, says Robertson. “An important aspect of the study is that it demonstrates that the brain actively conspires to produce memory interference and so impair recall,” he adds. “Admittedly this may seem somewhat paradoxical, and one way to resolve that paradox is to imagine that memory interference serves some important function. As yet, we don't know that that function may be.”

And that’s why we probably shouldn’t be trying to fool Mother Nature by getting around the interference issue, Robertson says.

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Paul Burns / Getty Images stock

Look at the scary dentist image! Now you'll remember everything in this post.

If you want to remember new information, looking at photographs that stir up negative emotions may do the trick, suggests new research from Psychological Science.

Yeah, we know that sounds counterintuitive -- but it appears to work.

When study participants viewed color images of a dead cat, a pointed gun, or a person getting a dental exam -- pictures that evoke negative feelings -- it actually improved their recall of recently learned information.

In this case, 40 college students were asked to bone up on 100 vocabulary words in Swahili along with their English translations. (Example: "Mashua" means "boat" in Swahili, if you're going to east Africa.)

Volunteers were then tested on the vocabulary pairs, 10 words at a time. After they gave a correct answer, participants were shown a negatively arousing photo, a neutral image, such as a fork or shoelaces, or a blank screen. If they gave the wrong response, they saw a blank screen or neutral image.

Later they had a final exam on all 100 words.

Recall was much better for words after viewing the emotional image than it was following the neutral ones or a blank screen.

"The negative picture might have enhanced later recall because emotion, in particular negative emotion, can enhance memory," says Bridgid Finn, PhD, a postdoctoral research associate in psychology at Washington University in St. Louis. Researchers suspect this occurs because the emotional centers of the brain are closely linked to the ones involved in memory.

What about positively arousing images -- wouldn't they put you in a better frame of mind to learn Swahili? Finn says they tried using photos that were exciting, such as a ski jumper or sky diver, or even some that were sexually arousing in follow-up studies.

"We haven't found that retention is better using the positive pictures compared to the neutral pictures," explains Finn, the study's lead author.

But she is quick to admit that showing a classroom of students a picture of an awful dental exam or a cat that has been run over, as they did to study participants, probably isn't the best way for kids to learn.

And that wasn't the point of this research, either. The scientists had wanted to find out if after you retrieve something from memory, you continue to process the information. And they discovered that the time period right after you retrieve new information from your memory is key for strengthening its retention.

Instead of looking at dead cat photos, Finn offers this advice, "If you want to maximize retention, test yourself. Restudying is not going to get you as far."

She says taking practice tests is a great way to prepare. And if you get the wrong answer, finding out the correct response will benefit your learning.

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Scientists have discovered why it becomes harder and harder to multitask as we age. Just as our bodies become stiffer, our brains become less maneuverable as we get older, a new study shows. 

Older brains, researchers found, have trouble refocusing after they’re interrupted or distracted.

While nobody’s particularly good at multitasking, we do get worse as we age,  says Dr. Adam Gazzaley, study co-author, associate professor of neurology, physiology and psychiatry and director of the neuroscience imaging center at the University of California, San Francisco.

Gazzaley looked at the impact of interruptions and distractions on “working” memory. This type of memory is like the screen on a computer. Just as we can edit and manipulate words on the screen before we save them to the hard drive, with working memory we can take in information and mull it over in our brains without committing it to permanent memory. That's why we can do simple calculations and compose short works in our heads.

Gazzaley and his team suspected that interruptions and distractions might interfere more with the working memories of older people and explain the occurrence of “senior moments,” like forgetting what you wanted from the fridge after you’re interrupted by a phone call. 

To test this, the researchers ran a simple experiment with the help of 22 young people (average age 25) and 20 seniors (average age 69). While in a functional MRI machine, each study volunteer was shown a nature scene and asked to remember it for about 15 seconds. While they were thinking about the scene, the volunteers were briefly shown a picture of a face and then asked to determine its age and gender.

When the 15 seconds were up, they were shown another nature scene and asked whether it was the scene they’d been asked to remember or a new one.

As the researchers expected, the older people had more trouble than their younger counterparts remembering whether the second picture was the same as the original one. When the researchers looked at the fMRI scans, they could see what was happening during the experiment as some parts of the brain lit up while others dimmed.

When people were interrupted from thinking about the scene, the part of the brain responsible for memory maintenance went offline, while the parts of the brain needed to make a decision about age and gender fired up. After the decision was made, the memory maintenance network came back online, while the decision-making regions turned off. 

The switching process went smoothly for the younger people. But the brains of the older people had trouble turning off the decision-making regions and firing the memory maintenance network back up.

What this means, Gazzaley says, is that the older you get, the more trouble you’ll have switching back and forth between tasks. So, if you have an important deadline to meet, you might want to silence your cell phone ringer and mute your computer so you don’t know when new emails come shooting through. 

What are some tricks you've developed to keep yourself focused?

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Ever wonder why the bad times seem so much easier to remember than the good ones? Scientists may have found the explanation: A new study shows that your memory doesn’t work as well when you’re in a good mood.

“Other studies have found that you have more creativity when you’re in a good mood,” says the study’s lead author, Elizabeth A. Martin, a doctoral candidate at the University of Missouri. “We may have found something that a good mood is bad for.”

At the beginning of the study, Martin and her co-author assessed the moods of 180 college students. Then half the study volunteers were shown a video designed to make them feel good -- 15 minutes from Jerry Seinfeld’s stand up comedy video, “I’m Telling You for the Last Time.” The other half were shown a home improvement video called “How Do I: Flooring,” which explained how to install different types of floor coverings.

After the videos, the volunteers’ moods were assessed once again -- sure enough, the Seinfeld viewers were happier, while the moods of the other volunteers were unchanged.

Next Martin sat her volunteers down and gave them a memory test. They were told they would hear a list of single digit numbers and would then be asked to recall the last six without being told in advance how many numbers would be in the list. Then Martin listed 12 to 20 numbers for the volunteers, with just four seconds between each item.

Martin repeated the test 18 times with each person. And as it turns out, there was a clear difference in the volunteers’ ability to parrot back the numbers: Those who saw the Seinfeld video had a harder time remembering all six.

What is it about a good mood that makes memory bad? Martin isn’t sure, but she’s willing to guess.

The same thing that makes us more creative at these times -- our tendency to focus on many things rather than just one -- may be what makes it hard to remember, she says. Put simply, we’re just a bit more scattered when we’re in a good mood.

The solution is simple. If you know that your memory isn’t going to be as reliable when you’re in a good mood, you can take steps to counter that effect, like writing down people’s phone numbers or consciously associating something important with a new acquaintance’s name.

Do you think you get a little spacier when you're happy?

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