Do you struggle to remember people’s names after you meet them? Do you have a penchant for weird tricks? If you answered “yes” to those questions, you’re a great candidate to use my three-part weird trick to remember people’s names. I call it the “Tocayo Technique.”

I find it very effective, though unfortunately, I still don’t have a habit of using it as often as I should.

Step 1: Intention – before the person tells you their name, set an intention of actually remembering it. It’s too easy to not really be listening when a person says their name or to not even TRY to remember it.

Step 2: Repetition – say the person’s name back immediately when you learn it (e.g., “Nice to meet you, Isadore”). This is, of course, useful for memory, but it can also help you figure out if you misheard their name. You can also repeat their name in your head if there is no opportunity to say it aloud.

Step 3: Visualize

Branch 1: If you are aware of any other person with that same name (e.g., a friend or acquaintance, or celebrity), then:

Commonality: take a few seconds to notice anything this person has in common with the person you think of who has the same name (e.g., maybe they share the same haircut, or both are very tall, or both work in software), and then…

Confrontation: imagine that same-name person (i.e., the person’s Tocayo) interacting with or confronting the person you just met.

(If you are one of the people who has no mental imagery, then, unfortunately, this last part may not work for you.)

Ideally, this imagined interaction should involve something specific or relevant to the person who shares this new acquaintance’s name, and it should be as freaky and weird as possible. Weirdness makes the visualization more memorable.

Branch 2: If you can’t think of anyone who shares that person’s name:

Association: Think of the words that first come to mind that sound the most like the component sounds in the person’s name, and visualize (for a few seconds) some kind of narrative involving both this person and all those words.

Just be careful if the sounds aren’t exact fits, in which case you should try to remember what those sound differences are. Also, be aware that words can switch in your memory for their close synonyms. I once referred to someone named Sofas as “couch-us”! Fortunately, it wasn’t to their face.

So to summarize the Tocayo technique:

(1) Set an INTENTION to remember the person’s name.

(2) REPEAT the person’s name.

(3) If you can think of anyone with that name, notice any COMMONALITY between the two of them, then imagine them having a weird CONFRONTATION. Otherwise, ASSOCIATE each sound in the name with a word that sounds almost identical, and craft a narrative out of these words that involve the person.

Example 1: You are about to meet someone. You (1) set the intention of remembering their name. It turns out it is Tom. You (2) repeat the name by saying, “nice to meet you, Tom.” You think of Tom Cruise (since he is the first person who comes to mind that shares that name). You look for any similarities and notice that this Tom and Tom Cruise have similar hair.

Next, you imagine a confrontation between them and try to make it weird. In this case, you imagine Tom Cruise dropping down from the ceiling on a cable (Mission Impossible-style) and then mean-spiritedly licking his finger and sticking it into the ear of the Tom you just met. What is Tom Cruise’s problem? Hard to say. But the fact that he descended from the ceiling Mission Impossible-style will make it easy to remember it was Tom Cruise, and therefore, that this person is Tom.

Example 2: You meet someone named Natalie, setting the intention to remember her name and repeating it quickly in your head. You think of your friend Natalie (who’s a gymnast) and notice that they both have thinner than average lips. Then you imagine these two Natalie’s competing for who can do more double backflips in a row without making a mistake. It turns out this new Natalie can’t do any.

Example 3: You meet a new person, and when they tell you their name, it sounds like “su-kee.” You intend to remember their name, and say, “Nice to meet you, su-kee…did I say your name right?” When they confirm the pronunciation, you momentarily visualize that person picking up a magic key that they can point at any person to instantly initiate a lawsuit—a sue key.

Example 4: You are being introduced, and you decide you want to remember the person’s name, which sounds just like “ra-meer.” You repeat it quickly in your head, then you visualize Ra, the ancient Egyptian sun god, and watch in your mind’s eye as Ra morphs into a meerkat. A Ra-meer(kat).

I’m certainly not going to say this technique is EASY to do, but I think that after a little practice, you can likely learn to do it pretty reliably in 5-15 seconds or so. It also fails pretty gracefully. Even if you only achieve some of the steps, that’s still an improvement memory-wise over doing none of them. Just don’t try to do it right while someone is asking you a question!

I suspect that this technique works well for quite a few reasons, all of which relate to how (I think) memory works:

(1) Our visual memories are usually stronger than our auditory memories, so we want to get our visual system involved in the memorizing process. This is why the technique involves visualizations.

(2) Repetition helps memory, and carrying out the technique forces you to repeat the person’s name in multiple ways.

(3) Strangeness enhances memory, so by doing a strange visualization, you increase the chance that you remember it.

(4) Active generation of content tends to improve memory compared to passive processing, and the technique gets you to generate content rather than just listening to the person’s name.

(5) Paying attention increases memory, and when we are doing the technique, we’re forced to have focused attention at the moment when we hear a name.

After a little reflection, it is clear that the morality of a person who carries out an action doesn’t just depend on the action itself but rather depends on the state of mind of the person who performs it. This holds for pretty much every commonly used definition of morality. Suppose, for example, that I was tricked into believing that giving money to a certain charity would help the poor when, in fact, the donation was being funneled to gangsters. Generally, Christians, Buddhists, Utilitarians, Kantians, and almost everyone else are in agreement that, although the consequences of my action were bad, I am not bad for carrying out the action because I misunderstood the action’s nature. On the other hand, if I willingly chose to fund gangsters, almost everyone would be in agreement that the action would reflect poorly on my character, even if the net result of such funding was essentially the same as in the case where I thought I was donating to charity. To give another example, there are very few who would say that a person is good for giving money to the poor merely to impress a good-looking date, whereas many would call the person good if they donated out of genuine concern for the welfare of others. Hence, pretty much however one defines ethics, there is widespread agreement that it is not our actions themselves that define how good we are, but rather the intentions underlying our actions. An action (e.g., giving money to charity) is compatible with us being a good person if the thoughts that motivate us to carry it out are considered good (e.g., a desire to help others) but may have no effect on our goodness or even make us a worse person if the motivating thoughts are considered bad (e.g., a desire to help only me at great expense to others).

What is curious is that while there is little dispute that it is legitimate to evaluate the goodness of people based on the goodness of their intentions rather than on the goodness of the consequences of their actions, many people are not willing to carry this logic out to its ultimate, somewhat startling conclusion, namely that a number of people that are generally thought of as “evil” may not really be, and in some cases, may even be “good.”

To illustrate this point, consider the hypothetical case of a person who is schizophrenic and whose delusional thinking has led him to believe that the only way to save the world from unprecedented disaster is to blow up a certain office building while it’s full of workers. If this man were to carry out this terrible act, our instincts would inevitably be to label him as evil, whereas his intentions could demonstrate that he is quite the opposite. If he not only did not want to blow up the building but was, in fact, repulsed by the idea of hurting other people and only carried out the bombing due to his mistaken belief about the action saving the world, then it seems as though he was, in fact, being genuinely good rather than evil since his intentions were very good, and he likely underwent enormous stress and effort (including overcoming his psychological revulsion to murder) only for the purpose of doing what he felt was right.

At this point, some people may object that such a person with schizophrenia should still be blamed for his bad action since he has a responsibility to act in “accord with the truth” and to verify the reality of his beliefs prior to acting. But this argument fails to take into account the experience of people suffering from schizophrenia: in some cases, they have no inkling whatsoever that they are delusional. If a person’s delusion does not seem delusional to them in the least, how can they be blamed for failing to see or question if they’re delusional?

Another objection that may arise relates to the belief some people have that “good cannot come from evil” (or, similarly, that “evil cannot come from good”), which in this context may imply that even though the mentally ill person believes that they are doing a good thing by blowing up a building, the potential goodness of their intention is tainted by the evilness of the consequences. An example can help illustrate the problem with this way of thinking.

Consider a hypothetical situation where we are forced to make the choice of pulling either one of two levers. Suppose that the first lever will lead, with a 90% probability, to the horrifying torture and death of one thousand people and with a 10% probability of us receiving one million dollars in cash. The second lever will lead, with a 90% probability, to us receiving moderate injuries and with a 10% probability of one person being subjected to horrifying torture and death. Pretty much everyone who believes in morality, I think, would agree that pulling the second lever is the moral thing to do (since it makes the torture and death of others much less likely), whereas (psychological consequences aside) it is selfishly better for the individual to pull the first lever (since, that way injuries to our own body are avoided and there is a chance at nabbing the million dollars of cash). On the other hand, if a person were to really pull the second lever, despite that being the obvious ethical choice, there is still a 10% chance that a stranger would be subjected to horrifying torture and death because of that decision. To argue that “good cannot come from evil” (in the way discussed above) is to imply that the morality of my choice depends on whether (due to random chance alone) pulling the second lever led to bad consequences. When attempting to act ethically, however, all I can do is act in a way that (probabilistically) maximizes the amount of good that I believe my action tends to do. To hold me accountable for the actual realized consequences of my action, even though those consequences could never be known to me in advance, is to effectively determine how good I am based on the random roll of a die. The implication would be that ten people could carry out the same action for precisely the same reason, and yet nine of them would be labeled good, and the tenth labeled bad, simply because the tenth was unlucky. This is a conclusion that I think few people are willing to live with.

But what are the practical, real-world consequences of goodness being based on intentions rather than actions? We have seen already that it may alter our assessment of the insane. More bizarrely, though, it may influence our opinion of the deeply religious as well. People who commit acts that (they genuinely believe) are inspired by God’s will but (according to those who do not believe in the same religion) are of a heinous and destructive nature and are very often labeled as “evil.” But in many cases, religious fanatics are absolutely convinced that their actions are “right” and even good for humankind. In such circumstances, it seems that “delusional” would be a fairer label to apply than “bad.” Going a step further, it seems likely that many extraordinarily good people who devoted their lives to doing what they knew was right were, in fact, doing great harm because of false religious or spiritual beliefs. Take, for example, the case of Christian witch burners, some of whom must have genuinely believed that by murdering (what we know to be) innocent people, they were removing a great evil from the earth.

This piece was first written on July 29, 2009, and first appeared on my website on July 3, 2025.