Pro Tip: How to improve your score on What's My Name?

Meet Nelson Dellis

He’s a familiar face for most Lumosity Members by now. Nelson Dellis has won the USA Memory Championship 5 times and, more importantly for this context, he also holds the world record for memorizing the most names in 15 minutes: 235.

So when he heard about our new game, What’s my Name?, he was immediately keen to try memorizing all 100 faces. Excitingly for us, he decided to take us along with him to learn his strategies.

Nelson’s Advice

Create an image, link it to a feature. Visualize an image that helps you think of the name, then link that image to a feature on that person’s face. For example, Nelson meets a character named, Michelle, and imagines seashells in front of her glasses.

The key to this step is to truly take the time to visualize that image in your head. Don’t just think about it conceptually, picture it. Once you see it in your mind’s eye, it will be much harder to forget.

After doing that, everytime Nelson sees Michelle with her big glasses, he’ll be reminded of that seashell visual. From there, he’ll remember that her name had something to do with “shell” and be able to figure out the rest – Michelle.

The weirder, the better. Have you ever seen an image or film scene so bizarre that you could never erase it from your memory? You can use that mechanism to your advantage by making your visualizations as weird and vivid as possible. After experimenting a bit with Nelson’s first piece of advice, we’ve found that the most effective visuals almost always fall into this category.

Review, review, review. Creating these visual associations can go a long way, but as with all things memory-related, repetition is key. Luckily you can play a round of What’s My Name in just a couple minutes, so take advantage and get some practice in!

Be consistent! Nelson says this is the most important part of the process. It goes hand in hand with reviewing, but it means showing up to do a little practice each day. Sounds like a good excuse to build a long Lumosity streak. Give it a try!