Increase your brainpower

"Statistically, the most common form of memory loss occurs through natural aging," says Baddeley. "You become worse at encoding and retrieving new information, particularly arbitrary information, such as people's names." One way to battle this brain drain is by recruiting help from your sense of sight.

"Your visual sense takes up roughly 60 percent of your brain area," says Frank Felberbaum, a memory-training expert and the author of The Business of Memory. So if you want to remember someone's name, turn it into a visual image and link it to a prominent part of the person's appearance.

In Felberbaum's case, he says, picture falling (fel) beer (ber) bombs (baum) hitting him on the nose. The key is to pick a facial feature that's both distinctive and unlikely to change over time; results may vary with Hollywood starlets and members of the Jackson family.