How many people do you really know

2024 Author: Malcolm Clapton | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 03:44

How many people fit your social media friends lists? How many of them do you recognize when you meet on the street? Can you call your name? The human brain is able to remember a lot of faces and surnames … Scientists have figured out the exact number.

It is believed that people remember faces faster than names, because visual information is perceived better than any other.

How many times have you looked at a person and frantically tried to remember his name?

But it is not yet possible to give a numerical interpretation of this "better": the researchers failed to find out how many faces a person can remember. Let's be fair: It's very difficult to create a test that produces reliable results.

Nice to meet you

But there are works that have determined which faces we remember faster than others. A 1999 study in the Psychonomic Bulletin & Review suggests that faces people have come across before are better remembered. Not a very surprising result, is it?

On the other hand, if you look at the pictures (image above) that were shown to the subjects, it seems strange that some could not remember a single face at all.

In 2003, researchers at the University of Colorado discovered that there are some physical elements that aid memorization.

It turned out that we more easily remember those who have closed eyes, have bangs or facial hair, and also the elderly.

Male faces are remembered better than female ones (for some reason, the participants easily erased their girlish appearance from memory).

What's in a name?

When it comes to names, things get even more complicated. Try to imagine yourself as an explorer for a second. How to check how many names a person remembers? What test would be suitable for such a task? It is possible to ask to list all the names that will appear in memory, but then the experiment participant is unlikely to remember all Mas and Sing, whom he accidentally met on the street or at a party.

Therefore, most scientists try to focus on how many people (their appearance, names and surnames) you can remember at all. Some studies have shown some pretty interesting results.

For example, in 1950 sociologists Ithiel de Sola Pool and Manfred Kochen conducted the first study measuring dating. They tried to estimate how many people are on an individual's social network. To do this, Poole carried a notebook with him for 100 days. Every time he spoke (by phone, in person or by mail) with someone whose name he knew, he noted it in his notebook. Due to the fact that he wrote down the names and surnames only once, without duplicating, after some time the list in his notebook began to grow more slowly.

The findings were used by sociologists to predict how many acquaintances Poole will have in the future. In their opinion, a sociologist would recognize 3,500 people in 20 years.

It seems that this is too much. But in 1960, a MIT student looked at Franklin Delano Roosevelt's diary and calculated that the president had about 22,500 acquaintances.

In 1961, Poole's experiment was repeated by Michael Gurevich. This researcher alone asked a group of 27 subjects to follow up on dating.

As it turned out, over 20 years we have made an average of 2,130 acquaintances.

Of course, writing down acquaintances is not at all the same as remembering every person. Poole thought about that too and wanted to check how many people he could remember. He did this by using phone books as clues. The researcher took 60 random pages and looked at the names collected on them, trying to remember people with similar or the same last names. In the end, he managed to remember over 7,000 people.

On the one hand, it's cool. On the other hand, you hardly ever need to memorize all the people you meet on your way. What you need to do is memorize the names of those with whom you communicate, with whom you cooperate and are in constant contact.

To do this, you should use the recommendations of Professor Richard Harris of the University of Kansas (Richard Harris). To better remember the name of a person, you need:

1. Repeat his name several times during the first conversation.
2. Be genuinely interested in a new acquaintance.

But there may be people you would like to forget about simply because you don't need this information. For example, I perfectly remember the face of Benedict Cumberbatch whether I want to or not. Is it worth worrying about this?

How many necessary and important people we can remember

Robin Dunbar, professor of evolutionary psychology, studied primates and the size of their social groups. He wanted to know how many connections the monkeys could maintain. It turned out that the Ceylon macaque is friends with 17 relatives, and cocoa only with four. After examining the relationship between the findings and the brain size of primates, Dunbar suggested that humans are able to maintain about 150 connections.

To test his conclusion, Robin Dunbar researched modern hunter-gatherers who live in clans. It turned out that the most productive clans consist of 100-200 people (which is pretty damn close to the result obtained by the professor himself). It is in such groups that people interact on a regular basis, build strong social ties based on direct knowledge of each other.

Dunbar confirmed his conclusion with another simple fact: on Christmas, US residents send an average of 153 postcards.

There seems to be some cognitive limitation on the number of individuals with whom we can maintain a stable relationship.

In general, without prompting, you can remember the appearance and names of about 150 people. The rest of the acquaintances will have to be remembered with difficulty and with the correct stimulation of memory.