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(Fadul 2017)
Mnemonic devices are techniques a person can use to help them improve their ability to remember something. In other words, it’s a memory technique to help your brain better encode and recall important information. Using these simple shortcuts can help us to associate the information we want to remember with an image, a sentence, or a word.
Mnemonic devices are very old, with some dating back to ancient Greek times. Virtually everybody uses them, even if they don’t know their name. It’s simply a way of memorising information so that it “sticks” within our brain longer and can be recalled more easily in the future. (See also Education and Neuroscience)
Try some of the following methods:
The Memory Palace or Method of Loci
Imagination, Association and Location are the three fundamental principles underlying the use of mnemonics. Working together, you can use these principles to generate powerful mnemonic systems.
Visualisation: is what you use to create and strengthen the associations needed to create effective mnemonics. Your imagination is what you use to create mnemonics that are potent for you. The more strongly you imagine and visualise a situation, the more effectively it will stick in your mind for later recall. The imagery you use in your mnemonics can be as violent, vivid, or sensual as you like, as long as it helps you to remember.
Association: this is the method by which you link a thing to be remembered to a way of remembering it. You can create associations by:
Location: gives you two things: a coherent context into which you can place information so that it hangs together, and a way of separating one mnemonic from another. The best way to do this is to imagine a place with which you are familiar. For instance, you can use your house, the rooms in your house can be used to separate yet connect different pieces of information you need to memorise. You could also use the layout of your school or work place. Alternatively you could use the route you take home, to work or school, with landmarks along the way becoming the information you need to memorise.
You go through a list of words or concepts needing memorisation, and associate each word with one of your locations. You should go in order so that you will be able to later retrieve all of the information in still in the correct order. This also help you to commit the information to your long term memory.
Techniques make your mnemonics more memorable:
A Quick Example:
Consider the following shopping list: lettuce, bacon, onion rings, SD card and oranges. We want to memorise it.
To remember the list, we have to place each item somewhere in our mind palace. This of course can mean one item per room or several items per room, each one in a special spot in the room. The simplest method is to put each item in its own room, when you are confident enough, create additional trapping space in each room. Thus, a small 5-room house could be easily a 5, 10 or 15 places memory palace.
To place an item, we have to visualise it in the room, and to make sure we remember it it has to be a memorable image so we could use any of the techniques above.
Example:
Begin with the list. When we enter the front door, we are greeted by Kermit the frog, only this Kermit is made of lettuce, like a talking lettuce. Can you visualise it? Feel the freshness of Lettuce leaves? In the living room a stampede of pigs followed by Kevin Bacon with a fork! In the kitchen, Scarlett Johansson plays hoola-hop with an onion ring. You enter the bedroom, and to your surprise, the bed is a gigantic SD card: you can hide the bed by pressing it in to be read as it disappears into the wall. Finally, you walk outside or on the balcony to find that the sun is now a big, luminous orange. It starts to drip juice everwhere.
By combining Visualisation, Association and Location these mental images and the list we need to remember can be committed to long term memory.
Mind Maps
Mind maps can be used to memorise notes and to make connections. See the Virtual Library Mind Maps page for more information.
Chunking
What is chunking? 'Chunking' refers to organising or grouping separate pieces of information together. When information is 'chunked' into groups, you can remember the information easier by remembering the groups as opposed to each piece of information separately. The types of groups can also act as a cue to help you remember what is in each group. See also Neuroscience and Education
How to chunk information There are several ways to chunk information. Chunking techniques include grouping, finding patterns, and organising. The technique you use to chunk will depend on the information you are chunking. Sometimes more than one technique will be possible but with some practice and insight it will be possible to determine which technique will work best for you.
Grouping You can organise information into groups arbitrarily. For example if you have to remember a 10 digit number you can break it into groups of numbers. Eg. To remember a mobile number of 0481521651 we break it in groups of 4 , 3, 3 to get 0481 521 651 which is easier to recall.
Patterns Another way to chunk information is by finding patterns in the information. When you find a pattern in information you just need to remember the pattern rather than a list of separate pieces of information. For example, if you have to remember the letter sequence ADGJMPSVY you may notice that these letters are just every third letter of the alphabet. So instead of remembering each individual letter, you can just remember the pattern used to find these letters.
Organising Another chunking technique involves organising the information based on its meaning. For example, let's say you have to memorise the age of everyone in a group of people. You can chunk the information by organising people by their age, then, for each age group, remember the people that belong to that group. Mind mapping may be useful for this.
Chunking and short term memory Chunking information can also help overcome some of the limitations of short term memory. We can generally only have 4 things in our short term memory at a time (this has been revised down from Millers 1956 claim of 7 +/- 2). By chunking information we can remember more.
Mnemonic devices are very old, with some dating back to ancient Greek times. Virtually everybody uses them, even if they don’t know their name. It’s simply a way of memorising information so that it “sticks” within our brain longer and can be recalled more easily in the future. (See also Education and Neuroscience)
Try some of the following methods:
The Memory Palace or Method of Loci
Imagination, Association and Location are the three fundamental principles underlying the use of mnemonics. Working together, you can use these principles to generate powerful mnemonic systems.
Visualisation: is what you use to create and strengthen the associations needed to create effective mnemonics. Your imagination is what you use to create mnemonics that are potent for you. The more strongly you imagine and visualise a situation, the more effectively it will stick in your mind for later recall. The imagery you use in your mnemonics can be as violent, vivid, or sensual as you like, as long as it helps you to remember.
Association: this is the method by which you link a thing to be remembered to a way of remembering it. You can create associations by:
- Placing things on top of each other.
- Crashing things together.
- Merging images together.
- Wrapping them around each other.
- Rotating them around each other or having them dancing together.
- Linking them using the same color, smell, shape, or feeling.
- As an example, you might link the number 1 with a goldfish by visualizing a number 1 painted on its side.
Location: gives you two things: a coherent context into which you can place information so that it hangs together, and a way of separating one mnemonic from another. The best way to do this is to imagine a place with which you are familiar. For instance, you can use your house, the rooms in your house can be used to separate yet connect different pieces of information you need to memorise. You could also use the layout of your school or work place. Alternatively you could use the route you take home, to work or school, with landmarks along the way becoming the information you need to memorise.
You go through a list of words or concepts needing memorisation, and associate each word with one of your locations. You should go in order so that you will be able to later retrieve all of the information in still in the correct order. This also help you to commit the information to your long term memory.
Techniques make your mnemonics more memorable:
- Use positive, pleasant images. Your brain often blocks out unpleasant ones.
- Use vivid, colorful, sense-laden images – these are easier to remember than drab ones.
- Use all your senses to code information or dress up an image. Remember that your mnemonic can contain sounds, smells, tastes, touch, movements and feelings as well as pictures.
- Give your image three dimensions, movement and space to make it more vivid. You can use movement either to maintain the flow of association, or to help you to remember actions.
- Exaggerate the size of important parts of the image.
- Use humor! Funny or peculiar things are easier to remember than normal ones.
- Similarly, rude rhymes are very difficult to forget!
- Symbols (red traffic lights, pointing fingers, road signs, etc.) can code quite complex messages quickly and effectively.
A Quick Example:
Consider the following shopping list: lettuce, bacon, onion rings, SD card and oranges. We want to memorise it.
To remember the list, we have to place each item somewhere in our mind palace. This of course can mean one item per room or several items per room, each one in a special spot in the room. The simplest method is to put each item in its own room, when you are confident enough, create additional trapping space in each room. Thus, a small 5-room house could be easily a 5, 10 or 15 places memory palace.
To place an item, we have to visualise it in the room, and to make sure we remember it it has to be a memorable image so we could use any of the techniques above.
Example:
Begin with the list. When we enter the front door, we are greeted by Kermit the frog, only this Kermit is made of lettuce, like a talking lettuce. Can you visualise it? Feel the freshness of Lettuce leaves? In the living room a stampede of pigs followed by Kevin Bacon with a fork! In the kitchen, Scarlett Johansson plays hoola-hop with an onion ring. You enter the bedroom, and to your surprise, the bed is a gigantic SD card: you can hide the bed by pressing it in to be read as it disappears into the wall. Finally, you walk outside or on the balcony to find that the sun is now a big, luminous orange. It starts to drip juice everwhere.
By combining Visualisation, Association and Location these mental images and the list we need to remember can be committed to long term memory.
Mind Maps
Mind maps can be used to memorise notes and to make connections. See the Virtual Library Mind Maps page for more information.
Chunking
What is chunking? 'Chunking' refers to organising or grouping separate pieces of information together. When information is 'chunked' into groups, you can remember the information easier by remembering the groups as opposed to each piece of information separately. The types of groups can also act as a cue to help you remember what is in each group. See also Neuroscience and Education
How to chunk information There are several ways to chunk information. Chunking techniques include grouping, finding patterns, and organising. The technique you use to chunk will depend on the information you are chunking. Sometimes more than one technique will be possible but with some practice and insight it will be possible to determine which technique will work best for you.
Grouping You can organise information into groups arbitrarily. For example if you have to remember a 10 digit number you can break it into groups of numbers. Eg. To remember a mobile number of 0481521651 we break it in groups of 4 , 3, 3 to get 0481 521 651 which is easier to recall.
Patterns Another way to chunk information is by finding patterns in the information. When you find a pattern in information you just need to remember the pattern rather than a list of separate pieces of information. For example, if you have to remember the letter sequence ADGJMPSVY you may notice that these letters are just every third letter of the alphabet. So instead of remembering each individual letter, you can just remember the pattern used to find these letters.
Organising Another chunking technique involves organising the information based on its meaning. For example, let's say you have to memorise the age of everyone in a group of people. You can chunk the information by organising people by their age, then, for each age group, remember the people that belong to that group. Mind mapping may be useful for this.
Chunking and short term memory Chunking information can also help overcome some of the limitations of short term memory. We can generally only have 4 things in our short term memory at a time (this has been revised down from Millers 1956 claim of 7 +/- 2). By chunking information we can remember more.
Acronyms
An acronym is a word formed from the first letters or groups of letters in a name or phrase. An acrostic is a series of lines from which particular letters (such as the first letters of all lines) from a word or phrase. These can be used as mnemonic devices by taking the first letters of words or names that need to be remembered and developing an acronym or acrostic.
For instance, in music, students must remember the order of notes so that they can identify and play the correct note while reading music. The notes of the treble staff are EGBDF. The common acrostic used for this are Every Good Boy Does Fine or Every Good Boy Deserves Fruit. The notes on the bass staff are ACEG, which commonly translates into the acrostic All Cows Eat Grass.
Rhymes
Rhymes are easier to remember because they can be stored by acoustic encoding in our brains. For example:
Repetition
Repetition or rote learning alone will not commit information to long term memory. However, repetition is most useful when using these other methods first and then using repetition such as:
- reviewing your notes over days, weeks and months
- continually reviewing and revising your mnemomics
- converting your notes to flash cards and using for revision
- using the memorised information when writing essays and practice papers
An acronym is a word formed from the first letters or groups of letters in a name or phrase. An acrostic is a series of lines from which particular letters (such as the first letters of all lines) from a word or phrase. These can be used as mnemonic devices by taking the first letters of words or names that need to be remembered and developing an acronym or acrostic.
For instance, in music, students must remember the order of notes so that they can identify and play the correct note while reading music. The notes of the treble staff are EGBDF. The common acrostic used for this are Every Good Boy Does Fine or Every Good Boy Deserves Fruit. The notes on the bass staff are ACEG, which commonly translates into the acrostic All Cows Eat Grass.
Rhymes
Rhymes are easier to remember because they can be stored by acoustic encoding in our brains. For example:
- In fourteen hundred and ninety-two Columbus sailed the Ocean Blue.
- 30 days hath September,
April, June, and November;
All the rest have 31,
Save February, with 28 days clear,
And 29 each leap year.
Repetition
Repetition or rote learning alone will not commit information to long term memory. However, repetition is most useful when using these other methods first and then using repetition such as:
- reviewing your notes over days, weeks and months
- continually reviewing and revising your mnemomics
- converting your notes to flash cards and using for revision
- using the memorised information when writing essays and practice papers
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References
Berenguel, R. (2011). Learn to Remember Everything: The Memory Palace Technique. Retrieved from http://www.mostlymaths.net/2011/03/learn-to-remember-everything-memory.html
Build Your Memory. (2015). Mnemonics and memory improvement techniques. Retrieved from http://www.buildyourmemory.com/mnemonics.php
Fadul, D. (2017). Memory Techniques: Memory Palace, from Roman times to today. Chess News. Retrieved from http://en.chessbase.com/post/memory-techniques-memory-palace-from-roman-times-to-today
Intelegen Inc. (2011). MNEMONIC TECHNIQUES AND SPECIFIC MEMORY. Retrieved from
http://www.web-us.com/memory/mnemonic_techniques.htm
Mind Tools. (2012). Memory Improvement Techniques. Retrieved 5 February 2015, from http://www.mindtools.com/memory.html
Psych Central,. (2014). Memory and Mnemonic Devices. Retrieved from
http://psychcentral.com/lib/memory-and-mnemonic-devices/0004376
Berenguel, R. (2011). Learn to Remember Everything: The Memory Palace Technique. Retrieved from http://www.mostlymaths.net/2011/03/learn-to-remember-everything-memory.html
Build Your Memory. (2015). Mnemonics and memory improvement techniques. Retrieved from http://www.buildyourmemory.com/mnemonics.php
Fadul, D. (2017). Memory Techniques: Memory Palace, from Roman times to today. Chess News. Retrieved from http://en.chessbase.com/post/memory-techniques-memory-palace-from-roman-times-to-today
Intelegen Inc. (2011). MNEMONIC TECHNIQUES AND SPECIFIC MEMORY. Retrieved from
http://www.web-us.com/memory/mnemonic_techniques.htm
Mind Tools. (2012). Memory Improvement Techniques. Retrieved 5 February 2015, from http://www.mindtools.com/memory.html
Psych Central,. (2014). Memory and Mnemonic Devices. Retrieved from
http://psychcentral.com/lib/memory-and-mnemonic-devices/0004376
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Cathy Costello teacher librarian virtual library
