Improve
your
memory
Mnemonics is a temporary assistance, just making the material familiar enough to the long term memory then you will find yourself have discarded the mnemonics (believe me) & will help you remember the material if you didn't use it for a long period of time.
1-Simple mnemonics: by using interesting sentence to associate related words
Well Known Examples:
a) Colors of the spectrum: sentence: Richard of York goes battling in vain colors: Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Indigo, Violet in reversed manner: Virgins in bed give you odd reactions!! wow can u forget this!
b) Stars classification by letters: mnemonic: Oh, be a fine girl, kiss me right now; sweetheart Letters: O, B, A, F, G, K, M, R, N & S
c) Green Cross code for teaching children to cross the road safely: SPLINK Stop at a safe place; on the pavement; S-P look & listen; L if traffic is coming , let it pass; I when no traffic is near, cross; N keep looking & listen while cross K
Some types of simple mnemonics:
a) Initial letters: [Orders of balls at bottom end of snooker table] God Bless You (Green, Brown, Yellow) [Orders of balls should be potted] You Go Brown Before Potting Black (Yellow, Green, Brown, Blue, Pink, Black)
b) Meaningful acronyms: [Great lakes of north America] HOMES (Huron, Ontario, Michigan, Erie, Superior)
c) Meaningless acronyms: [Branches of psychology] GIGSEILM (General,Individual,Genetic,Social,Educational,Industrial,Legal,Medical)
d) Associative mnemonics: Difference between [Stalagmites & Stalactites] (When a woman has ants in her pants, the mites go up & the tights come down)
e) Digits represented by no. of letters: I wish I know the square root of 2 1. 4 1 4 = 1.414
f) Distinction between Practice (noun) & practise (verb) Practice with C, A noun I can only be. Practise with S, Is only verb ,I guess. Also Advice & Advise
g) The Great Fire Of LONDON In sixteen hundred & sixty-six LONDON burned like a rotten sticks.
h) Discovery of America Columbus sailed the ocean blue In fourteen hundred & ninety-two
2-Place memory: Here you use a place you are familiar with (your home, your room, specific road or way to school &so on) In your minds eye you make an ordered association with the place It has advantage of random access
Example: Items: Ball, Ruler, Flowers, Pen, Radio Place: way to school First you got out of home, you saw a boy playing with a Ball, you continue walking you see a ruler upon which the cars stop for the red light, then you see your familiar street but full with Flowers that you walk through, then you see a man open the supermarket door with a pen not a key!!&continue to find that your familiar square has a huge radio in the center, sounds loudly!! for all people.
Tips: 1)The association must be bizarre enough & usually your first thing you think of coz when you come to recall the memory, it will be the first thing you think of.
2)The association can be anything else better from your very own imagination & your impression about the thing you want to recall [Erythromycin: Erythro] may gives impression of earth to me but gives far association to other person , you know d:-(
3)The place may be your own room & only visualize things in order around your room (you may start with your bed then your disk then may be chair & you can make also sub-classification of the item associated to your disk to the disk's parts) with no association action just visualize as something in your room.
3-Associated numbers: Here you have to make a list of the numbers and its association that is easy for you (at least from 1 to 12&if you want you can make to 100 or more) may be
a) Special occasion related to number (Public festival, your birth day,....)
b) Numbers with known association (7 or 9 to cats spirits differ as your country,13 to pessimism,...)
c) Rhyme: One :Gun Two :Shoe Three :Tree Four :Door Five :Hive[bee cell] Six :Sticks Seven :Heaven Eight :Gate Nine :Wine Ten :Pen(or Hen) Eleven :Devon Twelve :Delve[Dig] Zero :Hero(of your choice) NOW: You can associate up to 12 items in order & with random access of any item and continue upward or downward & you can sub- associate each item with its available information (as a picture collect all the symbolized informations) so you will find that you control all the subject as a tree with collective pictures (all the other sentences that use the items symbolized can be recalled without any effort from the ordinary (long term) memory.
Example: you want to memorize no. like this 84649380 so you must custom yourself to mention the no. with its rhyme so you can visualize each no. as you read it & so associate it with the other numbers in sequence (see later-chain memory) so it looks like [Gate-Door-Sticks-Door-Wine-Tree-Gate-Hero] its simple to associate ,isn't it? have fun ; )
Tips: In saving no.s in memory, you may divide it to groups of 2 or 3 no.s [(32776687)(32-77-66-87)] & the initial 2or3 no.s of phone no.s can save effort if you know the areas phone codes ,so you have to memorize less numbers.
4-Chain memory: Here you associate each item in the list to the previous one to it, its much like place memory but simpler
Lets take an example of: Ball, Ruler, Flowers, Pen, Radio To associate (Ball to Ruler) you can imagine yourself playing with the ball like hockey but with the Ruler (Ruler to Flowers) you can imagine the Ruler has Flower drawings on it or even real Flowers! (Flowers to Pen) you can imagine yourself writing with Flowers not a pen (Pen to radio) you can then imagine yourself listening to the Radio from the Pen and tune the stations by rolling the middle of the Pen around its axial axis.
Tips: 1)Again you better make the associations that match you best and ensure the recovery of saved data.
2)The items itself can not be direct tactile items but may be meaningless words or names (mostly) so you have to be creative and find a good visual item to it then use the chain or place mnemonics or whatever you want with it.
3)In social sciences you better represent the idea to more vital family & persons applications that it is more interpretable to you [situations from daily life]
Things to take in consideration when make visual associations:
1)Its really like advertising , make yourself always as its director.
2)Use really giant proportion of the items (Giant Shoes, Giant Pen,…)
3)Make it in action, moving, the more unpleasant the sight the more you will remember it than the pleasant ones (Shooting, Murdering, Accidents,…).
4)As a director you may choose bright attractive colors as you can.
5)Try using the most interesting matter or hobby to you (Football players & clubs, Cars as place memory,……..&so on)
6)Try to make it strange & illogical as you can. How to remember persons' names: 1)Pay some attention to the name of the person.
2)Look at his (her) face normally
don't stare ,find the most outstanding part of the face (Small mouth, Thin lips, Wide eyes, Wings like ears,...)
3)Associate the name (after finding meaningful action or item to it) to the person's outstanding part of the face.
4)The name may mean something to you ,or remind you with other person have the same name that you can associate to. As you see it is an growing experience ,the more you remember ,the easier you find association.
5)You can associate as many informations about the person to this initial NAME-FACE association. *You can memorize as many faces as you wish if you mastered this method.
Other ways to use these methods:
1)Remember speeches, conversations&articles by associating the KEY WORDS of each topic in chain so you never miss the line & you can also use it to memorize a large list of jokes to tell it to your friends!!
2)Remember dates by making your own associations of each month to things that can be visualized then you associate the day no. &month &year (year may relate to personal or world event that you really know) to the desired date occasion.
3)Learning new language by relating the foreign vocabulary to the corresponding native vocabulary. *Countless applications can be made.
Some may comment to these methods as follow:
"All that i learnt is some nonsense pictures and relations not really related to the subject i want to learn, i better understand and I'll do better" first you really study as usual & understand but there is some informations that later you'll not able to recall due to the huge amount of other informations you already have, that it will be impossible to recall it by your ordinary memory except if you study & repeat the subject many times and you may forget or interfere BUT in these aids you study it less frequent, more efficiently and never interfere as each item has its own visualization & association (except if 2 items have similar visualization or association then you have to find other strange association to one of them to ensure it will never interfere) *In the exam you will visualize pictures with colors (may be of chemical tests or anything) very clear to answer, the only things you must fear is things you memorize with the ordinary way.
How to improve your observation power? 1)Take a blank paper, write all the things in your own bedroom, one by one, all of them, without entering it.
2)Enter your room and check the things you forgot to mention then get out again.
3)Write again all the things in the room, it'll be more accurate.
4)Check the room, repeat this until you make it completely right.
5)Now by putting this in mind, every place you enter, you will have more observation about it.
How to remember Faces: 1)Take a blank paper, visualize a familiar face in your mind's eyes, write all the face features in words, describe the face shape, hair, eyebrows, eyes, nose, chin cleft & everything you remember.
2)The next time you see him (her), reevaluate your description.
3)Now you can write the description again more accurately & every time your observation ability increase and will be more automatically.
Some exercises: 1)Take a photo, examine the overall view then examine in detail every line & shade in it till you can see it accurately in mind it is not easy, you may start with the newspapers' cartoons then more complicated ones. 2)When you are watching a movie in TV or video try to observe everything in the scene as you write on paper, start with the basic things in the scene then observe each item in detail as you are describing it & also the actors in the scene.
Links
These sites are completely
perfect and I really can't recommend one over the other, I just recommend
concentrating on one site, not to be distracted with various values for the
same item ( number 1 mnemonic may be gun here and may be sun in another site,
u got me :) )
