Why Can I Remember Faces Better Than Names?

That person looks so familiar, but you just can’t think of their name. Don’t be embarrassed—your brain’s got an unfair advantage at remembering faces over names.

A large part of the visual brain is devoted to seeing faces. Picking out a face amid an out-of-focus haze is a matter of survival: soon after birth, we must find our mother’s face—the source of nourishment and our first protector. Research shows that just a few hours after birth, a baby can spot facial features even if there is no actual face—just a curved line with two dots above it.

This preprogrammed preference for spotting possible faces is carried throughout our lives. Our social ancestors needed it to recognize friends, cooperate for survival, and distinguish potential rivals. Our visual processing centers, toward the back of the brain, have a sophisticated “facial vocabulary,” capable of storing around 10,000 faces. You are far less likely to recall a name, however, because your brain stores them separately as semantic memories with no obvious link to what they look like.

Memories are more likely to be stored long term if they also carry an emotional attachment; unless you had a meaningful exchange with someone, you’re likely to have long forgotten their name but still remember their face if you spot them a few months later.

i see faces

The preprogrammed preference for recognizing faces means we end up seeing them in the strangest of places, such as inanimate objects.