Your Career’s Best Friend: Other People’s Memories

Robby

I’m writing this post on a break at a local event here in Indianapolis. This is a quarterly event I attend when I can with a membership organization. I don’t go too often because of schedule conflicts. I haven’t been in at least a year, maybe two, and a funny thing happened when I walked in today:

People recognized me.

© Flickr User icannphotos

If you’ve ever said “I remember faces, but I tend to forget names” you’re not alone. The BBC helped explain why this is:

It is true that humans are experts at recognising faces. Most of us could name thousands of them, and it is something we tend to do easily and automatically. To a neuroscientist, this is a clue that this is a difficult problem made to seem easy because there is a lot of machinery in the brain dedicated to the task.

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It is tempting to conclude that when people say they are good with faces but not with names, it somehow means that their ‘face area’ is bigger or better connected than the ‘name area’. But, in fact, something more interesting than a simple imbalance is going on. There is a crucial difference between the kinds of memory task we are usually asked to do with faces, compared to the task we have to do with names. Or to put it another way, we might use the same word – ‘remember’ – to describe our ability to place faces and names, but in fact we are describing two different psychological processes: recognition and recall.

The article goes on to explain that recognition is much more straightforward because we are only confirming if something is familiar. That’s why it’s so important to network through the course of your career.

When people recognize you, they are more comfortable with you. And when they are comfortable with you, they want to help. That could be a connection for a job, advice, or a resource.

Get out there and get recognized.