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Mnemonics are memory aids or little tricks that you can learn to retain information. There are many different types of these techniques, included here the most popular and useful ones.
There are some very popular mnemonic systems that you may even know already. "Thirty days hath September.." is a popular trick many of us use to remember the days of the months. You can make up your own songs that rhyme to remember other things as well.
Perhaps your English instructor taught you "I before E except after C," so that you remember how to spell words with those letters. You can do this yourself. Suppose that in Algebra class you had to remember that a negative times another negative always equals a positive number.
You could start a chant like this: "Negative times negative equals positive, but positive times positive also equals positive." Repeat it over and over until it becomes second nature just like the month and spelling mnemonics.
Four Easy Mnemonic Techniques:
1. Use your visual memory. Picture the words or phrases in your head. See them. Turning written material into pictures is a very helpful tool to remember things.
If you can visualize the planets, why not the Presidents of the United States? Just "see" the things that you need to remember in your head. This will make the information so more real and unusual to you that you will remember it.
2. Make that information important or meaningful to you. This is for those times that you have a bunch of material that you can't understand in the least. This will make sense of it. If you have spelling words that you don't understand, relate the word to one you do.
Let's say that you have the word bedazzled, and you have trouble remembering how to spell it. Think of a word that reminds you of it. Frazzled is similar. Let's simply remember that it is BE (before) Dazzled= Bedazzled!
3. Connect the information to something that is already familiar to you. This especially works if you link the new info with something you already know very well. If you hear that mosquitos cause heartworm, then when you think of heartworm you will associate it with itching.
4. Make really strange and ridiculous comparisons or sentences that will stand out in your mind. Often funny ones work the best. Here is an example of this.
You need to remember the term "political fat cats", so you VISUALIZE a big, fat cat with a silly grin. This one also uses visualization, as most of these techniques do.
Other Mnemonic Tips and Ideas
You can also use mnemonics to remember a very long list of objects. Suppose that you couldn't remember the names of body parts. On your head, for example, you have two eyes, a nose, a mouth, and two ears. You could remember it like this. H= 4E+1N+1M Another, much easier way is to list the object that you want remembered like this:
Mouth
Eyes
Ears
Nose
You just make one word, helping you to remember. Like this:
These spell out MEEN: Mouth, ears, eyes, nose.
Suppose you want to remember this number: 298375293837. In order to do this, simply "chunk" your digits. Chunking digits is taking a very large number and breaking it down. Here is an example:
When you group by threes this is what you have this list: 298 375 293 837
When you group by fours this is the result:
2983 7529 3837
These smaller numbers are much easier to remember.
This is why our social security numbers are easy for some of us to remember. You probably "chunk" your digits as well.
Hopefully these mnemonic techniques will help your memory to retain more information than you ever imagined.
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