From our childhood experiences of nursery rhymes and stories, we recognize the power of rhyme, rhythm, and narrative to hold our interest and make information memorable – these are the elements that underpin many effective memory strategies in later life.
Almost any material becomes more memorable if it is given the form of a story. This approach may be combined with vivid associations that you can readily recapture every time the story is told. Imagine, for example, that you want to remember the names Johnson, Ripley, Appleby, Willmott, and Grown. One story you could spin from this list might be: ‘ John’s son steals from the orchard, but he rips his trousers on the fence and drops his apple, which will run mottled and brown before he gets borne. ‘ It does not matter that the story is nonsense, nor that it only gives you clues to the names (you could misremember Apple as Appleton).
There is a framework with a narrative linking the different elements, and often, that is enough to jog memories into the light of day.
Using first letters and acronyms
Another technique is to take the initial letters of each item in the list and create a sentence of words beginning with these letters. A well-known example is Richard Of Gave Battle In Vain for the colors in the spectrum (red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet). Anyone who did music at school is likely to recall the mnemonic Every Good Boy Deserves Favour for the notes on the five lines of the treble stave (the spaces, very conveniently, spell the word FACE). The corresponding mnemonics for the bass stave are Good Boys Deserve Favour Always for the lines, and All Cows Eat Grass for the spaces. Sometimes, the initial letters of a sequence of facts can be arranged so that they form a word that serves as a mnemonic. Such words are called acronyms. For example, in chemistry, OILRIG stands for ‘oxidation is loss, the reduction is gain. Inventing Yam’s useful acronyms and mnemonics can be entertaining. If you sometimes forget that Peter and Christine have children called Simon, Elsa, and Andrew, you can rearrange all their initials for man acronyms, such as SPACE, or another word that contains all the initials, such as CAPErS. If you incorporate this mnemonic into a visual image, it will be even easier to remember.
Making it rhyme
Before the invention of writing, and in many cultures long afterward, stories were sung or recited from memory. Rhythm, rhyme, and melody were used to provide a framework that aided their memorization. We see this clearly when someone attempts to recall the lyrics of a song by humming the first few notes of the tune or reciting the first lines of the lyrics to remind them of the tune. In some types of poems, such as a limerick, the powerful effects of rhythm and rhyme can prompt us to ‘remember’ words we have never actually heard. Try this example:
There was an old lady from Kent
Who wobbled wherever she
One leg Nas long
And not very
And the other little and
Rhyme and rhythm figure in a host of verbal memory aids, like the spelling rhyme I before e except after c (not to forget its conclusion, ‘or when rounded as ‘a’, as in neighbor and weigh ‘ ). The old rhyme that begins Thirty days hath September, April, June, and November has not been bettered as a way of remembering the number of days in each month, and many people know the weather forecasting rhyme: Red sky at night, shepherd’s delight; Red sky in the morning, shepherd’s warning. Farmers were once aided by rhymes such as In May, get a weed hook, a crotch, and a glove, and weed out such weeds as the corn do not love. Other popular jingles help to renounce tricky sequences in history. Try this one for remembering the medieval kings of England: Willy, Willy,
Harry One, Steve and Harry, Dick and John …
Or this one for keeping track of what happened to Henry VIII’s wives:
Divorced, beheaded, dead;
Divorced, beheaded, survived.
Memorise The Calendar
Do you know the day of the week your birthday will fall in 2002? Or the birthdays of your family? By memorizing the 12-digit number 744-863-852 -742, you can easily work out the answers to questions like this without using a diary.
How does this work? It’s actually very simple. These 12 digits give the dates of the first Monday in each month of 2002. The first Monday in January is the 7th, in February, the 4th, and so on. So, if your birthday is March 21st and the first Monday in March is the 4th, then it is easy to add 7 to get Monday the 11th, and 7 again to get Monday the 18th, and then add 3 days – Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. So March 21st will be on a Thursday. Try using this method to work out the day on which your actual birthday or some other events of a known date will occur. Once you have memorized the 12-digit number, you can use it again for 2003 simply by remembering either that each digit will go down by one or that each digit now stands for the first Tuesday of each month. But beware of leap years: after February 29th, the day numbers go down by 2 rather than by 1.
