[Howard Treesong]

I have this exact problem when I meet one person alone. When I meet a group of people, however, I'm the exact opposite -- I'm usually 100% remembering a group of names. I think this is because I assume when I meet one person that I should be able to simply remember their name; in contrast, when I meet a group of five people at the same time, I know need to focus on who is who -- and when I do that, I can get names to sink in easily.

There are a zillion mental tricks to use. One of my favorites is to find some slighly odd thing about a person (a loud shirt, facial expression, shoe, or whatever), exaggerate it, and then associate that with their name.