Can't recall a person's name? You are not alone

With smartphones at our fingertips, we are increasingly relying on technology to remember things for us —even people's names

- Shephali Bhatt

artik Parija prides himself on his elephantine memory, yet lately, names have begun to slip away. "I've had moments when I reconnect with someone from the pre-internet days, vividly recall our shared history but momentarily blank on their name," says the 49-year-old entrepreneur from Bengaluru. He recalls awkwardly steering such conversations without naming the person, while his mind scrambles to retrieve that "fundamental piece of personal connection." This lapse has emerged only in the past three years, he says. "It feels profoundly strange, like the fuzzy confusion after pulling an all-nighter before an exam."

Don't chalk it up to age. Screenwriter Shoaib Zulfi Nazeer has noticed this since his mid-20s. "Back in school and college, everyone was a peer, and you heard names so often that remembering them was easy. After I moved to Mumbai in 2018 and started approaching people online for networking, I realised I struggled with remembering names," says the 32-year-old from Roorkee. Nazeer has co-written dialogues for movies like Three of Us (2022) and Superboys of Malegaon (2024).

The common thread in their experience of forgetting names is the influx of digital communication. Both describe how the flood of information has fragmented attention so much that even after regular, sometimes deep, conversations with people, they find it hard to fully register or retain that primary detail about a person: their name.

As communication shifts from verbal to textual in the digital age, we interact with far more people at once. But the cues have changed: instead of calling a name out loud, we open chatboxes after seeing someone's content in a feed, type a few letters before their name auto-fills in a messaging app, or scroll to their chat in the inbox and ping them directly. The act of saying or mentally repeating a name has diminished, perhaps explaining why names slip from memory mid-conversation.