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.

This way of deciding between options is quite common. When someone asks us whether we want an apple or an orange, we often will imagine what the experience of each is like, and see which simulated experience feels the most positive. So sometimes when we say that we “want” something, what we mean is that when we imagine that thing it produces a positive experience.

Perhaps it was no coincidence that my memory of swimming involved the peak intensity of the experience (jumping into the cold water was a more intense experience for me than any other aspect of swimming). There is a rule of thumb known as the peak-end rule which says that we base our judgement of how good or bad experiences are mostly on their peak intensity and the way that they end. So if an experience is quite pleasant on average but contains a few seconds of very negative experience and ends poorly, we are likely to view that experience after the fact as having been unpleasant. For swimming, not only is the peak intensity rather unpleasant for me, but the ending is as well. It often involves walking around wet, cold, and smelling of chlorine.

Some remarkable studies have been performed that confirm half of this peak-end rule. They involve giving 50% of a group of people (selected at random) an unpleasant experience, and the other half the same unpleasant experience with a shorter, somewhat less unpleasant experience tacked on the end of the primary experience. The latter group views the entire experience as having been less unpleasant than the former group does, and would be more willing to subject themselves to the experience again. This holds even though the latter group had more total moment to moment unpleasantness than the former group, and were subjected to unpleasantness for longer.

A similar issue to my swimming one can arise for experiences that we have never actually had before. When deciding whether we want them, we imagine what they are like, but this can be quite different from what they are in fact like. I have heard it said that this arises particularly often for sexual fantasies. People believe that they would really enjoy a particular experience (they do, in fact, enjoy imagining having that experience) but when they actually have it they find that it is unenjoyable in practice. And something akin to this is at risk of happening when people consider the question of whether they want to have children. If the visual image that the thought of having kids produces is one of sitting by a fireplace while beaming proudly at two well-behaved children with beaming smiles, then the feeling produced may well be “I want that!” But if the image is instead one of changing diapers, or trying to get your kids to stop screaming, or being woken up by a baby after two hours of sleep, the resulting feeling of wanting could be quite different.

Consider the problem that arises from these considerations. When we decide whether we want something, we often rely on our simulation or memory of that thing to make a decision. But our simulations and memories of experiences are not the same as the experiences themselves, and can be inaccurate representations. When we imagine something we run the risk of not understanding what that experience is really like. Therefore, when we say that we want something, we may only want it because of the particular aspects of it we happened to simulation, or because of inaccuracies in our simulation. However, if we force ourselves to think of many different aspects of the experience in question, rather than just one small part, that may lead to less arbitrary conclusions about what it is that we want. If your wanting depends heavily on the fact that (by chance, or due to a certain design feature of the human brain) you happened to imagine a particular part of the experience rather than another part of it, then the fact that you think you want it may not be very meaningful.

Nowadays, when I think about whether I want to swim, I try to get myself to imagine what the vast majority of the experience is like, not just the beginning and the end. I imagine actually swimming in the pool, which produces a positive mental state, rather than only thinking about jumping into the pool, which produces a negative one. As you’d expect, this produces a stronger feeling of wanting to swim than I had before.