Thursday, 19 June 2014
Memory and Mnemonic Devices
By PSYCH CENTRAL STAFF
Mnemonic devices are
techniques a person can use to help them improve their ability to remember
something. In other words, it’s amemory technique to
help your brain better encode and recall important information. It’s a simple
shortcut that helps us 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 memorizing
information so that it “sticks” within our brain longer and can be recalled
more easily in the future.
Popular mnemonic devices
include:
The Method of Loci
The Method of Loci is a
mnemonic device that dates back to Ancient Greek times, making it one of the
oldest ways of memorizing we know of. Using the Method of Loci is easy. First,
imagine a place with which you are familiar. For instance, if you use your
house, the rooms in your house become the objects of information you need to
memorize. Another example is to use the route to your work or school, with
landmarks along the way becoming the information you need to memorize.
You go through a list of
words or concepts needing memorization, and associate each word with one of
your locations. You should go in order so that you will be able to retrieve all
of the information in the future.
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 Fudge. The notes on the bass staff are ACEG, which
commonly translates into the acrostic All Cows Eat Grass.
Rhymes
A rhyme is a saying that
has similar terminal sounds at the end of each line. 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.
- Thirty
days hath September,
April, June, and November;
All the rest have thirty-one,
Save February, with twenty-eight days clear,
And twenty-nine each leap year.
Chunking &
Organization
Chunking is simply a way
of breaking down larger pieces of information into smaller, organized “chunks”
of more easily-managed information. Telephone numbers in the United States are
a perfect example of this — 10 digits broken into 3 chunks, allowing almost
everyone to remember an entire phone number with ease. Since short-term human
memory is limited to approximately 7 items of information, placing larger
quantities of information into smaller containers helps our brains remember
more, and more easily.
Organizing information
into either objective or subjective categories also helps. Objective
organization is placing information into well-recognized, logical categories.
Trees and grass are plants; a cricket is an insect. Subjective organization is
categorizing seemingly unrelated items in a way that helps you recall the items
later. This can also be useful because it breaks down the amount of information
to learn. If you can divide a list of items into a fewer number of categories,
then all you have to remember is the categories (fewer items), which will serve
as memory cues in the future.
Imagery
Visual imagery is a great
way to help memorize items for some people. For instance, it’s often used to
memorize pairs of words (green grass, yellow sun, blue water, etc.). The Method
of Loci, mentioned above, is a form of using imagery for memorization. By
recalling specific imagery, it can help us recall information we associated
with that imagery.
Imagery usually works
best with smaller pieces of information. For instance, when trying to remember
someone’s name you’ve just been introduced to. You can imagine a pirate with a
wooden leg for “Peggy,” or a big grizzly bear for “Harry.”
