By Naitzy Garcia
You’re studying and studying, but can’t retain the information, no matter how many times you review it? However, if you were asked for directions, you’d know to Never Eat Soggy Waffles? That is a mnemonic; a golden tool to help create shortcuts for information we want to remember. This same tool is used by top participants at the “World Memory Championship”, who credit their success not to the anatomy of their brain, but to their training with mnemonics.
What are Mnemonics?
Mnemonics were developed by the Greeks , named after their goddess “Mnemosyne”. They are memory-enhancing tools, techniques, devices, etc. It’s a powerful way to learn large amounts of information, and is designed to help the brain encode and later recall the information with more ease. They work by connecting new information being learned to an individual’s prior knowledge using cues. They create associations between the information the individual is trying to remember with either a visual picture, a unique sentence, or a single word.
What does research say?
There were two studies done comparing the benefits of using mnemonic tools.
In the first study, Stalder (2005) provided acronyms to an intro psych class and showed that students who used the acronyms scored more points on acronym related items than those who did not; the results showed a 90% vs. 61% on one of the exams (1).
In the second study, healthy controls and aMCI patients were included in a study where the results showed that mnemonic strategy training was significantly more beneficial than matched-exposure immediately after training, p =.006, pη2 = .16, and at one month, p<.001, pη2 = .35, regardless of diagnostic group (5).
Mnemonics all around us
Mnemonics are nothing new; they are all around us, and it’s a tool we have been exposed to since elementary school. The most common being: Please Excuse My Dear Aunt Sally, Never Eat Soggy Waffles, and I before E except after C. These are a couple of examples that have been ingrained in us, and we use quite often. Even the word mnemonic is a mnemonic- Memory Needs Every Method Of Nurturing Its Capacity (4).
Types of Mnemonics
There are many types of mnemonics, and some work better than others for each individual.
Acronym: Taking the first letter of each word and creating a single word.
- PEMDAS
- HOMES
Acrostics: Creating sentences using the first letter of the words you need to remember.
- “Never Eat Soggy Waffles
- “Please Excuse My Dear Aunt Sally”.
Method of Loci: Memorizing familiar locations in natural order by creating visual images of words with each location and recalling by taking a mental walk (4).
Peg system: Associating items by employing cue words represented by numbers.
- These words are substituted for the number to be remembered and associated with new information with a pre-memorized list of words (or pegs) and numbers (4).
- Ex. “ One Bun” is your pre-memorized list of words. You need one gallon of milk, and in order to make homemade buns I need milk to mix into the dry ingredients.
Encoding Mnemonic: Recording information into a more easily remembered/meaningful format.
- 74125 translates to cardinals in the phonetic system
- Some businesses have a phone number ending in a word that, when entered into your phone, brings up the last four digits of their phone number (Ex. 888-956-HELP).
- 5 tomatoes (to-ate-ohs) = 5280 ft = 1 mile
How mnemonics are useful in college education and the real world
How or why are mnemonics useful to you as a college student? Repeated retrieval practice of the mnemonics allows us to remember the information, which may explain why people still remember acronyms like “HOMES” and acrostics like “Please Excuse My Dear Aunt Sally”. The way they work is by helping encode and recall through reconstructing or creating cues by linking keywords with definitions and retrieving the information (4). It’s said that mnemonics work best when they form clear links between the known information and the unknown, and when practiced.
One of the most stressful aspects of college is trying to retain all the information you’re learning, especially the material relevant to your career. This tool is a great way to reduce the stress of trying to remember a million things versus learning one keyword or phrase and remembering its parts.
Creating mnemonics
Creating a mnemonic is simple. As mentioned above, there are many tools that we can use, including the two most commonly used ones: acronyms and acrostics.
Say you’re learning about Freud’s Psychosexual stages, you have memorized each stage and know its contents but, cannot remember the order. You recognize that if you were asked to freely write it, you would not be as confident as if you were to choose from a multiple choice section. This is where a mnemonic would come in handy.
- Identify the content you are having the most difficulty with.
- Order of Stages
- Decide which type of mnemonic would be best for the way the information is laid out.
- Acrostics
Using acrostics, take the first letter of every term we had to know, which in this case would be: O for oral stage, A for anal stage, P for phallic stage, L for latent stage, and G for genital stage. To remember the order of the stages, we keep the letters in order and make a fun sentence we will remember!
For girls, an easy one could be “Obviously Applying Pink Lip Gloss”.
For males “Offense Always Plays Long, Guaranteed”.
Make a separate sheet full of your mnemonics for a quick review before your test, ensuring you don’t mix them up.
Conclusion
In conclusion, mnemonics are tools that help translate information into a form that makes it easier to retain than its original information. Adding personal touches to your mnemonics allows for better retention as it feels more like retrieving a memory with cues than it feels like retrieving information from a lecture 2 months ago. These are tools that have the flexibility to be implemented in daily life like the method of loci reminding you what groceries you need or what to pack for your trip. The tools act as a bridge between the new knowledge and the old knowledge, and after crossing that bridge reaching successful recall.
Now you know what mnemonics are and how to create them. With that being said, now you know if you want to be more confident before a test then “Never Eat SOggy Waffles”!
References
- Putnam, A. L. (2015). Mnemonics in education: Current research and applications. Translational Issues in Psychological Science, 1(2), 130–139.
https://doi.org/10.1037/tps0000023
- Radović, T., & Manzey, D. (2019). The Impact of a Mnemonic Acronym on Learning and Performing a Procedural Task and Its Resilience toward Interruptions. Frontiers in Psychology, 10(2522).
https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2019.02522
- Dresler, M., Shirer, W. R., Konrad, B. N., Müller, N. C. J., Wagner, I. C., Fernández, G., Czisch, M., & Greicius, M. D. (2017). Mnemonic Training Reshapes Brain Networks to Support Superior Memory. Neuron, 93(5), 1227-1235.e6. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuron.2017.02.003
- Akpan, Dr. J., E. Notar, Dr. C., & Beard, Dr. L. (2021). The Impact of Mnemonics as Instructional Tool. Journal of Education and Human Development, 10(3). https://doi.org/10.15640/jehd.v10n3a3
Hampstead, B. M., Sathian, K., Phillips, P. A., Amaraneni, A., Delaune, W. R., & Stringer, A. Y. (2012). Mnemonic strategy training improves memory for object location associations in both healthy elderly and patients with amnestic mild cognitive impairment: a randomized, single-blind study. Neuropsychology, 26(3), 385–399. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0027545