Some basic memory techniques people use

Memory techniques sometimes called “mnemonics” are leveraging different parts of the brain to remember things better. Regardless of memory technique used, a core principle to remembering better is learning how to use what the psychologists call “elaborative encoding,” which refers to the formation of new memories as they are encoded using information that is already known. So you want to link what you do not know yet to what you already know.

Let’s look at a few of the basic memory techniques for learning more easily and remembering better:

Repetition

The classic study technique is using repetition and drills to remember essential information.  Repeating information you are trying to remember is a brute force way of retaining the information.  Techniques such as spaced repetition can help make it more efficient or “less brute.”  Also using devices such as flash cards and or learning software such as Quizlet, Memrise, or Anki can help tremendously.

Combining these devices with the technique of spaced repetition will improve your long-term retention.  Also, reciting things out loud as well as writing can help activate more parts of the brain. The more ways you interact with material you are memorizing, the better your associations will be.

With index cards, you can use the Leitner System, which applies spaced repetition.  This approach to memorization uses time intervals. Rather than cramming information into your brain all in one sitting, spaced repetition encourages learners to space out learning over periods of time.  Software such as Anki can apply spaced repetition techniques as well to greatly improve your absorption and retention of the information.

Images and visuals

Remembering images to associate with key words or ideas is an essential, core strategy for memorizing.  This is why diagrams and iconic imagery are used extensively in teaching material, because visual memory helps with retention.  It helps to picture material vividly or even in a bizarre way.  Attaching emotion, such as humor or surprise can help improve retention and recall.

Grouping or Chunking

Grouping things into chunks helps people remember things.  The average short-term memory can hold about 7 digits at a time.  That’s not a lot.  You can group information to help take a load off your short term memory.  Phone numbers are typically grouped using dashes, which helps people remember the full number better.  For example, if we have to remember a phone number, it is much easier to remember 7833023884 when it is split into groups such as (783) 302-3884.  Chunking data, numbers, and lists helps to stretch your short term memory capacity.

This general concept works for other things besides numbers too.  For example, let’s say you want to remember a random list of 10 things such as cherry, rose, radio, moon, cheetah, chili, Mickey, mafia, jam, and lace.  Grouping this list by making composite memories would help get it down to about 5 things to remember.  For example, we could think of a Cherry’s rose, a radio under the moon, a cheetah eating chili, Mickey running into the mafia, and straining jam using lace.  

Acronyms

Acronyms are words or phrases that are usually made of the first letter of the list or multiple-word description you are trying to remember.  For example, HOMES is an acronym for the names of the Great Lakes: Huron, Ontario, Michigan, Erie, Superior.

Acronyms tend to be easier to construct when you can build a word or phrase that has consonants and vowels, and when the order of the list is not as essential. 

When I was a volunteer Emergency Medical Technician (EMT) back in my high school and college days, I remember learning a helpful acronym for understanding and documenting an emergency patient’s medical conditions: SAMPLE, which unpacked as:

• S – Signs/Symptoms
• A – Allergies
• M – Medications
• P – Past Pertinent medical history
• L – Last Oral Intake
• E – Events Leading Up To Present Illness or Injury

I would often have this written on a piece of tape that I stuck to my pant leg and as I would talk with the patient I would ask these questions and document the responses.  I came to appreciate mnemonics even more from those experiences.  During emergency situations, having handy acronyms like this can literally be a matter of life or death.

Later in my career, when I became an international development professional working overseas, where I volunteered as a first responder and underwent a lot of training in dealing with a host of emergencies and disasters.  

One acronym that really stuck for prioritizing and treating medical casualties during a crisis is MARCH, which unpacks as:

• M – Massive hemorrhaging
• A – Airway
• R – Respiratory
• C – Circulation
• H – Hypothermia

When receiving training prior to taking their overseas posts, U.S. diplomats are now trained to apply this acronym and many others to deal with medical emergencies as they arise on the battlefield, an underdeveloped country, or in a developed country.

It is interesting to see these techniques used in different languages around the world.  This technique is used for remembering lists of things by unpacking a smaller, more compressed word into several words or phrases.  For example, a Spanish tutor of mine, Anaïs Lanka, once shared with me that she used “reticlorfagene” as the acronym for remembering the order of taxa for classifying animals in biology which uncompresses to: reino (Kingdom), tipo (Phylum), clase (Class), orden (Order), familia (Family), género (Genus) y especie (Species).  In this case it was interesting to see that this Spanish mnemonic uses the first two letters instead of just the first letter to build an acronym memorable for the Spanish speaker. 

I recall using a mnemonic for remembering the taxa that went something like: “King Phillip Came Over For Good Soup” which translated into: “Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Family, Genus, Species.”  This sort of technique is called an acrostic; it works similarly to an acronym but it works slightly differently. 

Acrostics

Acrostics are a close cousin to acronyms except the first letters of the list you are trying to remember are used to construct a new, more memorable phrase.

The example most of us learn when first learning to read music is “Every Good Boy Does Fine” which corresponds to the notes  on the lines of the musical stuff: E, G, B, D, F.  

Another memorable acrostic to remember the planets (until Pluto was removed from the list) was: My Very Educated Mother Just Served Us Nine Pizzas.   This corresponds to the planets in order from the center of the solar system outward: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto.

Let’s say you want to remember a list such as the following:

TV, Bear, Ariel, Gun, Foam, Ivy, Thor, Koala, Tape, Snow

For this list, an acronym is not the most useful technique because TBAGFITKTS is hard to pronounce and remember.  That’s where acrostics come in.  They take the would-be acronym and assign more meaningful words in some phrase you can more easily remember.  So we might turn this into a phrase like: To Be A Good Friend Is The Key To Success.  Remembering that is easy.  Then you can reassociate the items in the list more readily to the first letters of the acrostic phrase.  

Acrostics can be more efficient than acronyms to build if you want to impose a certain order to the list.  For example, our acronym example for remembering the Great Lakes was HOMES, that is an easy acronym to remember, but the lakes are not necessarily in a meaningful order.  However, if we used the acrostic “Super Heroes Must Eat Oats” then that happens to correspond to the Great Lakes in order from largest to smallest.  But SHMEO might not be the most memorable acronym per se, especially since it smashes too many consonants together.  So we can build an acrostic out of an otherwise nonsensical acronym.

Some popular acrostics from school days you might remember include: 

Please Excuse My Dear Aunt Sally for remembering the order of operations.  Or some remember this by the associated acronym, PEMDAS, which unpacks to be “Parentheses, Exponents, Multiplication, Division, Addition, Subtraction.”

There are some lesser known acrostics that might have been used by the author to more easily remember and recite their works.  For example, Edgar Allan Poe had a poem called “An Acrostic” that was an acrostic that spelled “Elizabeth” as the starting letter of each line:

Elizabeth it is in vain you say
“Lov not” – thou sayest it in so sweet a way:
In vain those words from thee or L.E.L,
Zantippe’s talents had enforced so well:
Ah if that language from they heart arise,
Breathe it less gently forth – and veil thine eyes.
Endymion, recollect, when Luna tried
To cure his love – was cured of all beside –
His folly – pride – and passion – for he died.

Edgar Allan Poe — “An Acrostic”

Rhymes

Many might remember the elementary school rhymes to help remember grammar and spelling rules such as “i before e except after c.”  

Rhymes can be useful for remembering data as well, such as “Thirty days hath September, April, June, and November.”  

Jingles or short songs

Jingles use musical memory of tone and rhythm to encode information for auditory recall.  Just as some people can remember songs with ease, they can use that musical memory to learn things and remember as well.  Did you know that the Alphabet song we learn as children is the same musical cadence as Twinkle Twinkle Little Star.  When our parents would sing Twinkle Twinkle to us, that actually helped us form mental impressions that allowed us to more easily learn the Alphabet song later.

Musical memory is very powerful and long-lasting.  To this day, I remember in elementary school learning a song for reciting all of the American States in alphabetical order.

My 10-year-old daughter taught herself the first 50-digits of pi based on a song she learned.

When these sorts of memory techniques are combined with spatial locations through techniques such as a Memory Palace, then they are much more powerful.