Why is a person’s face not remembered? Which people are the hardest to remember by sight?

When networking with industry peers at a conference, you don't want to rely on the standard "Hello, my name is..." or a name tag. You want to do something original to make an unforgettable impression on people. In fact, it is not as difficult as it might seem at first glance.

What is the connection between memory and appearance?

Scientific studies that have highlighted the differences between memory and appearance tell us that it's custom details that have the greatest chance of standing out. You can meet a person in a public place, look at him for a few seconds and remember this meeting for a long time. An older lady could amaze you with a luxurious red dress, a stranger sitting opposite you in the waiting room with a pocket watch or a pleasant compliment.

Psychologists say that the most beautiful person in the room cannot automatically be classified as the most memorable person. Appearance types are divided by skin, eye and hair color, and the rarest ones are the most memorable. It is unlikely that you will remember another long-haired brunette from several dozen girls of the same type, but you will remember the red-haired lady with freckles for a long time.

Some of the most memorable people don't have the beauty of top models or the stature of duchesses. But their unique characteristics (protruding ears, interesting eye shape or hooked nose), coupled with unusual behavior, force others to pay attention to them.

Less attractive faces are more memorable

It is believed that ideal facial features and external attractiveness attract attention. However, experts are quick to debunk this myth, arguing that we are more likely to remember less attractive faces. This became clear based on data from a scientific study conducted in 2014. Distinctive features or blemishes (such as scars or birthmarks) are more likely to be etched into your memory. These findings may explain why people remember completely ordinary strangers, while forgetting faces with ideal features that most would consider beautiful.

Understanding Beauty

Other studies show that beautiful people may be better understood because they command more attention when communicating. One study found that we tend to pay more attention to attractive fellow humans on a subconscious level, resulting in a deeper understanding of personality. The experiment involved strangers spending three minutes with each other in a confined space. The results supported the assumption that physically more attractive individuals are more desirable to interact with.

About eye magnetism

Further analysis of the research results revealed the phenomenon of beauty in the eyes of the interlocutor. The author of the experiment, Dr. Lorenzo, and his team found that positive impressions are directly related to the nature of communication. Agree that not all people are lucky enough to be born dazzlingly beautiful, but they have a good chance of being liked with the help of their inner charm and charm. These findings have important implications for all people with low self-esteem. Fortunately, interpersonal attraction is made up of a number of factors, including personality traits and personal taste preferences.

"Two of a Kind"

The researchers also found that the most appropriate impressions of each other were made by individuals with a typical, average appearance. This can be explained by the fact that people of average attractiveness are not used to judging someone “by their cover.” It is customary to treat a beautiful book more politely and read it more carefully, but an edition in a regular binding can be read to the core. Thus, people with attractive facial features can expect increased attention, while people with average appearance are perceived in a more positive way.

Conclusion

No matter what you look like, people form an intuitive impression of you. They will remember not your beautiful eyes, but the pleasant feelings that communication with you left. The first impression turns out to be a more important aspect in assessing your overall personality. Give a stranger a compliment and he will definitely remember you.

As statistics show, there are very few people in the world who have a photographic memory that allows them to remember every person by sight. Moreover, this skill can be extremely useful in moving up the career ladder or establishing important business contacts.

All Courses Com decided to take a closer look at the problem and help its readers learn to better remember people's faces.

Before treating any problem, you need to understand its causes. Why do many people complain of poor memory for faces? The reason may be undeveloped visual memory, inability to recognize facial features, inattention to the person himself, poor eyesight, as well as deep self-absorption (this usually affects people in creative professions), and others. Here are some techniques you can use to to solve this problem.

We observe intelligently

When trying to remember a person's face, use the concept of intelligent observation. How does the method differ from a simple “See and remember” method? Usually, a person who remembers looks at the face of a new acquaintance as a whole and therefore, as a rule, does not remember anything. It is wise to focus your attention on distinctive details: features of the shape of the nose, the shape of the eyes, complexion and its shape, features of the hairstyle.

Division into parts

You should describe your new acquaintance from top to bottom, that is, from head to toe. Having stopped at the face, you should describe in turn: hairstyle, forehead, eyebrows, ears, eyes, nose, lips, wrinkles (if any) and the feature of the chin.

All details must be described on a three-level scale: narrow, normal and wide. On some elements you can make several characteristics, for example, the nose can be described as humpbacked, linear, the size of the wings, and so on.

Tony Buzan Method

Which in certain circles is called the method of social etiquette, instructs people who want to learn to remember faces to be polite and show genuine interest in the new interlocutor.

It will help to highlight a new acquaintance if the person remembering him respects him as a person and imagines that in each of him there is a universe of new qualities and colors. You should pay more attention to the person, keeping him in sight and observing his habits. A new acquaintance about whom more information is known remains in memory for a longer period.

Self-discipline and self-hypnosis

A person may have an excellent memory, but if he is not confident in himself and constantly pushes himself, he will get confused and will not remember the simplest things. This is also the reason why a new face may simply not be imprinted in memory. The consciousness of almost every person is capable of assimilation, processing and remembering a huge amount of information. It is important to believe and convince yourself that the new face will definitely be remembered.

Open your eyes

Everyone who is poorly sighted knows why such a person does not greet first. He just sees very poorly. Therefore, if your vision requires it, wear glasses or contact lenses.

It has been revealed that in most cases, when a person complains of poor memory for faces and has poor vision, the problem is almost certainly that he does not wear or rarely uses glasses/lenses. A person with good eyesight focuses on details that will prevent him from confusing similar people. This is an important point and this may also be the problem.

Associate faces with character or appearance

How to remember a face forever

To remember for a long time the people you met during the day, remember them after 20-25 minutes, then after an hour, and for more lasting memory, in the evening before bed. Remember faces in detail, information about people that you learned additionally. Look through the accounts of new acquaintances on social networks, especially sections with photos. If you are meeting a group of people, it is convenient to ask for business cards. All that remains is to reliably associate the owner of the business card with herself - and the person will remain firmly in memory. It is important not to confuse where whose business card is - when getting acquainted, you should pay attention in conversation with each person in turn and thereby gain time for memorization. Take short breaks, looking at business cards and their owners, associating the design of the cards with new acquaintances.

Separate long-term and short-term memory. Short-term memory is also called working memory, and with its help sensory images are remembered for several hours or days. Long-term memory remembers for an indefinitely long time. Long-term memory is further divided into episodic and semantic. Developments and any personal experience are classified as episodic memory. Vocabulary, various phenomena, recognition of faces and objects, events are classified as the semantic part of memory.

If the memory of people, animals and things by their appearance, sound and smell is impaired, this phenomenon is called agnosia. There are auditory and visual agnosia, tactile and gustatory. Visual agnosia is also called mental blindness, and this concept includes prosopagnosia, object and, presumably, misrecognition of words and letters, called alexia. This also includes metamorphopsia, or distortion of the perception of objects, micro- and macropsia, namely a decrease or increase in the real volume of an object.

Prosopagnosia

If there are disturbances in the temporal parts of the brain, which is important - on both sides, then distorted recognition of faces and objects occurs, their misrecognition. If a person is unable to recognize faces, this is called prosopagnosia, and if he is confused in recognizing familiar things, this is object agnosia.

Some patients do not even recognize their own face in the mirror, but at the same time they retain the memory of all other signs, and as soon as something reminds him of the person standing opposite him, he remembers everything he knows about this person. Previously, it was believed that this disorder was very rare, and was most often caused by traumatic brain injuries of various types. But in recent years, it has become clear that at least 1 in 50 people have such an illness of varying degrees of severity, although they do not have any history of injury or deviations from developmental standards, and their vision is also fine. It is now believed that difficulties with recognizing faces begin in early childhood, and heredity may be involved.

Some people may admit to having the condition, but in general prosopagnosia remains a very little-studied disorder, because most healthy people cannot even imagine how it is possible not to recognize faces. Many of the patients have learned to live with this illness, but most feel guilt and anxiety when they cannot recognize familiar faces. Some people do not know that they suffer from this disease, but even those who know prefer not to talk about it either at work or among friends. This disease is poorly studied, and therefore patients are rightly afraid of getting fired instead of words of support.

Treatment

Any cognitive disorder is difficult to correct, and the search for drugs that could make life easier for patients is still ongoing. Most often, a variety of nootropic drugs are prescribed, but the list of conditions that can be alleviated in this way is very small. Improvements occur with cerebrovascular insufficiency, with the consequences of stroke and cerebral infarction, with depressive states, with asthenia and traumatic brain injuries.

With this disease, much greater importance should be attached to various memory training exercises. There are quite a few special exercises for this, most of them can be performed in. Memorization of poems, texts and melodies is used, and drawing helps a lot. It is often easier for those suffering from this disease to assimilate information that is emotionally colored, has associations from tactile sensations or situational associations.

Memory training
> How to remember faces and names
Remembering faces

As a rule, we have to remember faces together with the names of their owners or some minimal information about them. The need to remember individual faces appears quite rarely, most often it is remembering people in a queue when you need to leave it; all other situations of the need to remember the faces of people without information about them can rather be attributed to the specifics of some professions (duty officer, security guard and so on.).

However, the ability to remember faces without any information about them can be useful to everyone. For example, if you become an unwitting witness to a crime or accident (although this can already be called information). In any case, before moving on to examples of remembering faces (both with and without names), get acquainted with some characteristics of persons, which you can (should) pay attention to when meeting every new person.

Naturally, the list of these characteristics is very large, and in a real situation, depending on the amount of time, you will be able to pay attention to only part of the characteristics, to those that are most striking, that is, to the distinctive features of the face. However, to more successfully remember these features, you need to know the parameters by which this or that part of the face is described, as well as the variations of individual features.

Of course, the list (or description diagram) below does not contain all the characteristics of facial features, so you can add others to them. Even if you are not going to be closely involved in the development of memory for faces, a detailed study of this list will help you become more attentive to the features of human faces, which in itself will lead to more successful memorization of them.

So here's the list:

Head

Before moving on to the characteristics of individual facial features, look at what the human head is like as a whole.

To size:

By form:

And also in general, by general impression the head can be:

Hair

Hair is not the best reference point for remembering a person, because this is exactly what is easiest to change in your appearance - dye it, cut it, make a ponytail, put on a wig in the end. And a person can make changes of this kind at any time.

Often, changing a hairstyle changes a person beyond recognition, which once again confirms the need for a more attentive attitude to other characteristics of a person’s appearance. However, the ability to characterize a person’s hair will, of course, also be useful to you. But you probably shouldn’t give a primary role to remembering hair (as is often done), especially if you’re memorizing a woman’s appearance.

General impression:

By lenght:

By thickness:

Other characteristics:

Color:

Forehead

Brows

Eyelashes

Eyes

Eyes are a very important characteristic of a person’s appearance. If you learn to differentiate and remember the eyes well, then this may be (almost) enough to recognize a person. It’s not for nothing that the first thing that criminals and all sorts of secret agents try to hide is their eyes.

In each eye, or rather, in the gaze, there is something completely unique and elusive, depending, probably, more on the personality of the person. Therefore, despite a fairly large list of possible parameters for describing the eyes, it may turn out to be absolutely not enough. Often, for accurate characterization and/or memorization, it is more important to capture something special and unique in the eyes and gaze.

Still, the eyes may have the following characteristics:

After describing the parameters of eye analysis, a list of looks is tempting (kind, soft, hard, eagle, evil, cunning... etc.), but I am afraid that it may take more than a dozen pages and actually turn into on the list of personality traits, so I leave this fascinating and useful activity up to your discretion.

Nose

The nostrils of the nose can be:

Cheekbones

Ears

As a rule, people do not often pay attention to the structure of the ears, and they, by the way, can become a very, very characteristic feature, since they can be very, very different. Of course, some people have them covered with hair, but such people are still a minority. So, there are ears:

Mouth and lips

Chin

Cheeks

Skin on the face

A) perfectly smooth, slightly wrinkled or wrinkled,
b) with large or invisible pores,
c) excessively dry (flaky), normal or oily (shine),
d) light or dark, reddish, pale, blush,
d) with pockmarks, scars, pimples.

additional characteristics

A person can wear GLASSES, and they can be of various shapes: round, square, rectangular, trapezoidal, of unusual shape. The frame can be plastic or metal (white or yellow metal). Glasses may have tinted lenses. Frames can be of different colors.

In addition, women (and sometimes men) can wear in their ears (and not only in their ears) earrings. Earrings can be large, medium, small, with or without stones, made of white or yellow metal, plastic, wood, exotic. There can be one in each ear or several, an earring can only be in one ear.

Men can wear mustache, sideburns, beard of various shapes. You can successfully use them when remembering faces, but do not forget that a person can change all these additional characteristics at any time.

*** Exercise 43.

Here are several photographs of people. Try to describe each person according to the list of characteristics above. It is better to perform the exercise in writing, using the same wording as in the list. This exercise is not aimed at developing memory itself, but at developing the ability to more clearly notice facial features and pronounce them, which naturally entails better memorization of them in combination with other methods.

You can record the characteristics of the person’s face shown in the first photo by looking directly at the plan (list of characteristics). When describing the second person, try to remember the parameters for analyzing facial features on your own, only occasionally looking at the plan (you can change the sequence of the description, but the main thing is to indicate all the parameters in each paragraph) and checking it.

Try to characterize the third person in as much detail as possible, without looking into the plan. Then look at what characteristics of the face you forgot to describe (for example, you described the thickness of the eyebrows, but forgot to indicate the shape, etc.) Practice some more using photographs of your friends.

*** Exercise 44.

In this exercise, you should try not only to describe faces while looking at a photograph, but also try to repeat the noted characteristics of faces after some time. Here are two photographs. Describe orally or write down the characteristics of the faces of the people depicted. Then get distracted, take a short break and, without returning to the photographs or your notes, write down everything you remember about the faces of these people.

Could you name the most distinctive features of these individuals? Would the characteristics you remember help you recognize these people in the future? Would someone else be able to recognize these people (individually) from others if they used your last description?

*** Exercise 45.

Here is a photograph of a man. Look at her for 2-3 minutes, trying to analyze his face according to the diagram during this time. Then cover the photo with a sheet of paper and try to answer the following questions (read the questions after the photo is covered): Tick the correct statements. The man had

Open the photo and check the correctness of your answers.

You can perform the last three exercises as many times as you like, using photographs of friends and relatives you have, as well as photographs cut out from magazines and newspapers.

To previous |

There is a common theory that a beautiful face is hard to forget. But recently, researchers from the University of Jena (Germany) refuted it. Or rather, they managed to prove that it is not entirely true.

During the study, the results of which were published in the scientific journal Neuropsychologia, scientists showed a group of volunteers pictures of different people. At the same time, half of the faces could be considered beautiful, and the second - not so much, but the number of features of appearance for all was approximately equal.

During the demonstration, the electrical activity of the subjects' brains was recorded. After some time, they were shown the photographs again and asked if they had seen certain people before.

As it turned out, volunteers remembered ugly faces more often. They were more likely to recognize beautiful faces only in cases where the “handsome people” had unusual facial features, like Angelina Jolie. If they were shown the faces of beautiful people whose photographs they had never seen before, the subjects often said that they were familiar with them.

Experts believe that when we see a beautiful face with regular features, it already seems familiar to us. Therefore, we often make mistakes in recognition. If the face is ugly, then it is easier to remember it, since usually some noticeable features such as a long nose or a large mouth make the appearance ugly.

“The test showed that subjects tend to remember unattractive faces when beautiful ones have no remarkable features,” said study authors Holger Wiese, Caroline Altmann and Stefan Schweinberger.