Tansel Ali memorised two phone books in a month. He can help you remember a name

Each week, Good Weekend’s how-to column shares expert advice on how to navigate some of modern life’s big – and small – challenges. This week: How to remember a name.

“Names are just abstract words when you think about it,” explains Tansel Ali, a four-time Australian memory champion. He says it’s not surprising so many of us are bad with names: they have no meaning when we first encounter them.

His big hack, and the one that famously helped him memorise two entire Yellow Pages phone books in less than a month, is  to create visual associations. For example, Ali says, “Each time you see [someone called Sandra], you might see sand in her hair, which will become the trigger for her name.” Or someone called Steve might be imagined as having a “stiff” or rigid posture.

Ali adds that the best part about creating image associations is that they can compound with new information. In the Steve example, he may tell you he has three dogs, so now they’re in that imagined scene with him.

If this sounds like a lot of work for your imagination, Ali can confirm that it is: “When you start out learning these skills, it will take a bit of time,” he says. Like any other discipline, memory requires training: “But the more you train, the quicker and better you get at it.”

Ali says a newer reason we forget names has to do with “cognitive switching”: “Scrolling all the time is like having 50 browser tabs open at once,” he says: it affects our ability to focus. “For example, if you’re on TikTok for an hour and then suddenly try to read a book, you’re not going to be able to read more than a few pages. And when you do, you’ll be like, ‘What did I just read?’ ” Such cognitive loading makes our brains so tired that our  ability to retain salient information (including names) is severely limited.

So what about the old trick of repeating someone’s name three times after first hearing it? According to Ali, it just doesn’t work: “You’re just repeating abstract information, something that doesn’t make sense, so you’re not really remembering it.”