Most of us have experienced being introduced to someone new only to forget his name within seconds. But why is it often easy to remember a person's face but so difficult to remember what he's called?
A new video explains that is due to the way our brains process random data. The video, called "why do you forget their name?" was produced by Mitchell Moffit and Greg Brown from YouTube channel AsapSCIENCE. The pair explained our brains are born to recognize facial details and that specific brain cells fire in response to seeing a face.
The University of Toronto, for example, found when looking for faces in a crowd the frontal cortex（额叶皮层）sends signals to the posterior visual cortex（后视觉皮层）to enhance what the person was looking at. But because names are random and hold no specific information in them, the brain struggles to remember them.
The video continued to show when meeting people for the first time, many of us focus on introducing ourselves and this is known as the "next-in-line effect". Instead of watching and listening to the other person, the brain starts focusing on its own routine — what I'll say and how I'll say it. As a result, we're not able to take in new information.
In an experiment by Texas Christian University, researchers asked people in a group to take turns introducing themselves. They then tested them to see which information they remembered. A participant's memory was accurate for each fellow group member except for the person who spoke before them. For these people, the participants failed to recall any or little information.
Also, brains have both short and long-term memory and the short-term memory is often called "working memory". This can only hold so much information and if the brain doesn't focus, or repeat it, the information fades.
