Role Of Mnemonics In Memory

Mnemonics are techniques aimed to improve your memory, so you can easily recall things and information that are otherwise difficult to remember. These techniques are not occurring or done very often, but they are based on the fundamental ideas of learning and memory. Mnemonics systems and techniques have been in practice, since 2,500 years, but have only been studied by means of scientific experiment in about 40 years.

Mnemonics are used, so you can easily remember things. As you can see, it might be a rhyme or a short song, a phrase or something that is, to a fairly significant extent, which can be easily recalled. A purpose or reason for using mnemonics is to encode information that is not so easy to remember, in a manner that makes remembering things, a much easier task.

There are many popular mnemonic devices that have been popularly used; some of them are listed below.

* The Method of Loci

The Method of Loci (loci is a Latin word which means “places “) is a memory enhancement system that allows you to recall information efficiently and promptly, without taking much effort. It uses familiar information about your environment and memory that is related to space. For example, if you use the direction in going to your office from your home, the features of the town that you see as you walk are the information that you need to memorize.

* Acronyms and acrostics

Acronyms are words created from the first letters of each word in a name or phrase. Acrostics are compositions such as a poem or word puzzle in which the first or last letter of each line spells a word, a name, a message or the alphabet. An example, when you need to remember the colours of the rainbow, you use this phrase:  “Richard of York Gave Battle in Vain “, where the first letters in bold can translate to colors red, yellow, green, blue and violet of the spectrum.

* Rhymes

Rhymes are short poems with words in end lines that sound similar or corresponds with another word. Examples of rhymes:

(1)  Thirty days hath September,

    April, June and November (and so on)   

(2)  In fourteen hundred and ninety two, Columbus sailed the Ocean Blue.

* Chunking and Organization

Chunking is a method of remembering or dealing with huge information by grouping it into smaller, easy to assimilate “chunks “. A good example of this device is the telephone number in the US, which consists of 10 digits. When broken down into 3-digit chunks, it becomes easier to remember.

* Imagery

Imagery is the use of particular words that generate ocular depiction of ideas in our minds. The Method of Loci mentioned above is a form of an imagery mnemonic device. Imagery is easier to work with small pieces of information. For example, when you’ve just been introduced to someone named Peggy, you simply imagine the pirate with a wooden leg and the name will instantly come to your mind.  Or, if the name is “Harry “, you can imagine a big, North American brown bear - a grizzly bear that goes by the name.