How many (people) names can an average human being remember? How many of those names actually belong to people they know? Does this persons gender make a difference? And where exactly in the brain are names stored?

Are you asking about names of people, names of objects, or both?

Gender definitely makes a difference. Women remember the names of every woman her man once dated. We men can’t remember a damn thing. That’s why we need instant replay. We’ve already forgotten what just happened.

I am so glad you asked these questions. I study brains for a living and nothing makes me happier than when people ask questions about them on Fluther because they are the most amazing machines in the universe. There is another Fluther user, girlofscience, who also studies brains. She might be able to help you out, too.

You are asking some very difficult and interesting questions! Let’s go through them one at a time.

1. How many (people) names can an average human being remember?

I don’t think a real scientist could answer this question, and here is why: how would you design an experiment that tests how many names someone is capable of remembering?

When I test people’s memories in my lab, I usually use two kinds of tests. One is called a free recall test, and the other is a recognition test. In a free recall test, you ask a person to generate as many answers as s/he can remember. So in this case, you would be asking a person to list as many names as s/he could think of.

Why don’t you try it? See how many names you can think of, right now.

A recognition test gives you a list of names and asks how many of them you recognize. You could test yourself on this one, too: go to a website with baby names and see how many are familiar.

I think what you will probably find is that you get completely different numbers depending on what kind of test you use. So what does it mean to be able to remember a name? Is it recognizing a name, recalling a name, or something else entirely?

No matter what kind of test you use, I bet you will find that in the long term, your memory for names—like your memory for just about anything—doesn’t really have a clear boundary. As far as we know, you can keep learning forever.

2. How many of those names actually belong to people they know?

I think this would be another one that would be hard to answer scientifically. What does it mean to “know” someone? Would celebrities count? Dead family members? Does it change what you mean by “memory” if it’s a real person with the name or just the name? Is this question about memory, or about how we organize the information we file away, or something else entirely? I would be willing to bet the raw answer to this question varies a lot from one person to another and is contingent on a lot of things beyond just memory capacity.

3. Does this persons gender make a difference?

This is an especially interesting question! Not to mention controversial. As a group, women tend to have better verbal memories, so it would be safe to assume that they also tend to remember people names better than men. The question I want to pose back to you is: what does this mean for any individual woman?

4. And where exactly in the brain are names stored?

If you could answer this question you would win so many prizes and millions of dollars! A very famous neuroscientist named Karl Lashley spent literally decades trying to figure out where the brain stores memories. After years of searching, he is quoted as saying, “I sometimes feel that the necessary conclusion is that learning just is not possible.”

But you and I both know better, and today we have sort of a better idea. The best we can do is that memories are probably stored throughout our cerebral cortex in networks of cells that all talk to each other and store the memory as a dynamic manifestation of their communication with each other. Isn’t that neat?

I have to remember the names of about three hundred truck drivers on average. The ones I can see face to face are easiest. Some of them I talk to on the phone and have never met in person, and those are harder, unless they have a very noticeable accent. A funny thing, if I give a driver a funny nickname, it is easier to remember their real name. Not sure how that works, but one TMC driver I kept mixing up with two others. So I started calling him Poindexter (don’t ask where this shit comes from), and soon I could remember his REAL name. Same thing with the guy that drives for Conway Express. I started calling him Tim (Conway, get it? get it?) and soon I was able to remember his real name was Wayne.

So being average, I’d say about 300. All of them. My female co-worker is better with names than I am, but she has been there longer. I would guess a brain has a Rolodex, no? =)

As a teacher you have to learn the names of all your students, and many of them you remember as they move up through the school, so if you have been at a school a long time the you may know upwards of 300 pupils names in one go, plus family friends, collegues etc…
The brain and memory are a mysterious concept and nikipedia’s answer is fabulous, if I could give more lurve I would!

Passive memory I’d say more than 2000, i.e. you will recognize a name as being familiar. Active memory I’d say about 500, i.e. you will retrieve the name based on a familiar description e.g. the name of my favorite teacher in high school etc.

Where exactly in the brain are names stored? Names are part of the so-called declarative memory which consists of facts (e.g. BMW is a car) and your own autobiography (episodic memory). The names are in a “database” in areas of the cerebral cortex related to the hippocampus. The hippocampus is a kind of “SQL” statement generator carrying out , INSERT, UPDATE and SELECT queries.

Names are also associated with faces. Face recognition occupies a huge area in our cerebral cortex. Associations help us use different SQL queries to retrieve the same name, e.g. who was this guy with the strange hair and his tongue sticking out? Who was this guy telling us energy and mass are the same thing?

The better we are at storing additional associations the higher the total number of names we can remember.

@mattbrowne: What are you basing those numbers on?

Memories are absolutely not stored in the hippocampus. I cannot emphasize this point strongly enough. This is a common misconception shared by people who fundamentally misunderstand the neurobiology of memory.

This is incorrect in two domains: that of structure, and that of function. The structural misconception is that the hippocampus is uniquely valuable in memory storage or encoding. In reality, the surrounding medial temporal lobe structures—the entorhinal cortex, perirhinal cortex, and parahippocampal cortex—are just as important, if not more.

So let’s revise our terminology, and from here on out we’ll talk about the medial temporal lobe (MTL) rather than just the hippocampus.

In the domain of function, the MTL is definitely not a storage site for memory. How do we know this? If it were, then when you damaged someone’s medial temporal lobes, that person would lose all of his memories, right? And that’s not what happens. Instead, people whose MTLs were damaged lost the ability to make new memories, not the ability to remember old memories*. As far as we can tell, the MTL acts as a very temporary holding pool and slowly interleaves memories into existing cortical networks. These cortical networks are where memories are physically stored. (We think.)

*This is not entirely accurate. There is a highly-debated retrograde amnesia gradient in people with MTL damage. Some recent memories may be stored in the MTL, or it may be necessary for retrieving those memories, or maybe for retrieving all memories. This is a big and ongoing controversy in the field. I have my own opinions about what’s really going on, but have tried to stick to what is generally accepted in this answer.

@nikipedia – I wrote ‘The names are in a “database” in areas of the cerebral cortex related to the hippocampus. The hippocampus is a kind of “SQL” statement generator carrying out INSERT, UPDATE and SELECT queries.’

Maybe the word ‘connected’ instead of ‘related’ would make it more clear.

@mattbrowne: I’m perfectly capable of reading what you wrote. “The names are in a ‘database’ in areas of the cerebral cortex related to the hippocampus” clearly implies that (1) the hippocampus is a neocortical structure (which is false) and (2) the hippocampus is a component of the storage space. Of course, it is understandable that you would make these mistakes since you don’t have a background in neuroscience.

@nikipedia – It’s always a delight talking to experts, even when they don’t have a background in tactfulness and first order logic. My implications are different. The limbic system (which includes the hippocampus) plays an important role in almost everything the cerebral cortex does. I tried to point out the role of the hippocampus for long-term memory. Long-term potentiation seems like one of the key cellular mechanisms for learning and memory with the persistent increase in synaptic strength which happens in the hippocampus too. I tried to paint the picture using the SQL comparison. I’m not sure whether you know this particular acronym, but I’m happy to explain it to you. An SQL interpreter handles queries, but it’s not the database itself.

I have a great memory for everything but names. The trick to remembering them is to associate them with something else.

Not EVERYONE remembers. stevegtexas@aol.com I love the question about how many names can the average person remember. obviously, it is important to people or there would not be so many blogs/articles under the web browsers about the subject of memory. I think i could name quite a few names out of my high school year book from the year i graduated. I can remember people that i went to 1st and 2nd grade with…. teachers that i had from kindergarten on up…. but i dont remember them all. is it a bad thing? does it mean something if i dont remember peoples names or teachers names… nah… i dont think so. Some people we are closer to than others, and it makes it easier to remember. Remembering faces is not too hard…. but, some people look like others. If someone showed you a picture of a united states president, could you name the picture, as opposed to say, a former french president? Either way, i try to be personally friendly with everyone, so if i forget their name, I know one thing for sure…. I tried to be nice to them. :)- John Steven Grissom- fort worth texas USA. stevegtexas@aol.com

welcome to fluther @johnstevengrissom