How do we remember a name?

Is remembering the name of someone you’re thinking about in your head the same mental process as remembering the name of someone you see in front of you?

There are essentially four ways we remember a person, and in any particular encounter, we may use any or all of them. That there are four ways speaks to how important other people are to our human existence.

Two ways we remember people are based on their physical appearance, primarily their faces. These memories are stored in various parts of the visual system, culminating separately in the fusiform face area (FFA) in each hemisphere. The two FFAs complement each other by storing different representations of some of the faces. More on that later.

The other two ways we remember people are things about them. The left and right hemispheres remember different, complementary things based our our experiences with the person being remembered. The left hemisphere tends to remember the facts about a person: their name, nature of your relation, telephone number, family members, quirks, home town, profession, etc. The right hemisphere tends to remember the shared experiences you have, including friendship, romantic and sexual connection, emotional events, etc.

The two ways we remember their faces are also different, as I mentioned. The right FFA is larger than the left FFA, and this reflects both functional and quantitative differences. The right FFA is at the end of a long chain of other visual processing areas that result in storing representations of how a human face looks from various angles and lighting conditions. These intermediate representations are shared among all the people you know, and only in the right FFA do they all come together, apparently firing a single neuron that is that person. This is the basis of the Halle Berry neuron that got some press a few years back. It is likely that there is also a single neuron that fires for all of the important people in your life (maybe 300).

The left FFA also encodes the faces of some of the people in your life, but a much smaller number, and the encoding is different. The left FFA is limited to highly important people in your life (maybe 30), and the faces are encoded in the way that a caricature is drawn, emphasizing the key and differentiating elements of the the face, and mostly from a frontal view. The value of the FFA representation of a face is that it can recognize faces it knows at a much farther distance and much quicker.

Now I can try to answer the original question based on these four mechanisms.

If you’re thinking about someone, you are usually drawing on your memories of that person. These memories arise from mental associations stored in the two hemispheres relative to some previous fact or experience. Whether the thought about the person resulted from a factual inducement or an experiential inducement will determine which hemisphere first brings the person to consciousness.

When you see someone in front of you, your visual cortex automatically, and without interfering with ongoing cognitive processes, identifies the individual. At a distance, the left FFA will recognize the person first, and as the person gets closer, the right FFA will corroborate (or correct) the initial recognition.

So the answer to the question is no. As humans we have may use any of four mechanisms to remember a name.