You know how it goes. You bump into someone in the street, and you start talking to them. You know exactly who they are—you’ve met them before, after all—and you recognize their face immediately. But you cannot for the life of you remember their name. 

It’s a common and somewhat sticky social situation (that only becomes even stickier if you have to introduce them to someone else), but nonetheless, it raises an interesting question: why do we tend to remember people’s faces more easily than their names? Predictably, this all comes down to a neat bit of human psychology and the endless complexity of the human brain. 

THE BRAIN’S RECOGNITION DIVIDE

Located on the lateral side of the temporal lobe’s fusiform gyrus (a region just behind and slightly above your ear, roughly speaking) is a highly specialized part of the brain that neuroscientists have dubbed the fusiform face area, or FFA. First described in the 1990s, researchers used early live brain scanning techniques to show that the FFA bursts into life whenever a person looks at a face, but that it remains curiously inactive whenever a person looks at regular objects, like houses or motor vehicles. Later research showed that trauma to this specific region of the brain can ultimately impair a person’s ability to recognize faces, further solidifying the theory that this small, approximately blueberry-sized part of the brain has a distinct and important role in facial recognition. 

In fact, having a distinct region dedicated to faces means that our brains are so hard-wired to notice them that we have a curious tendency to see them everywhere. If you’ve ever noticed the oddly face-like look of a set of bathroom taps or a random rock formation in the Scottish Highlands, then you’ve experienced a psychological phenomenon called pareidolia, which is rooted in our brain’s and our FFA’s tendency to seek out faces wherever we look. But while our brain clearly has a specific region dedicated to facial recognition, the same can’t be said for remembering people’s names. 

True, our brains have several specific regions dedicated to storing, remembering, and recalling words—and names, after all, are just a specific kind of word. And true, research has suggested that our brains seem to deal with names somewhat differently from ordinary words, and so might indeed keep them in a separate lexical store. (It’s for that reason that, if you were to blank on someone’s name you’d still be able to talk about their appearance or describe what they’re wearing, because these more plainly semantic words are dealt with in a different way from the fairly random labels or “names” we attach to people.) But despite this, the reason why retrieving someone’s name from it is so much harder than recognizing their face is that, in psychological terms, recognition and recall are two very different processes. 

FACES OVER NAMES

When you come face-to-face with someone (pun intended), all your brain has to do is figure out whether this is a face you have encountered before, to which the answer is a simple yes or no. When it comes to recalling their name, the information isn’t readily given to us in the same way as a person walking up to us and essentially presenting us with their face. 

As a result, our brain isn’t answering a simple yes or no question in this instance, but battling through a morass of lexical connections and stores of vocabulary to retrieve the specific label that we have, at some point in the past, attached to this individual’s face. This lexical retrieval is understandably a far more complicated and mentally taxing process than a simple facial recognition task, and is therefore more prone to errors, or at least to taking a little longer than we might wish it to. 

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