Associating a concept with a certain image, person, or picture can help boost your recall. [2] X Expert Source Ted Coopersmith, MBAAcademic Tutor Expert Interview. 10 July 2020.
Memories that are easy to split up and spatially organize are best suited for the associative method - things like the stanzas of a poem, components of a machine or the procedure for cooking eggs. Memories that can’t be divided up are less well-suited - like the basic idea of Abstract Expressionist painting, the history of the War of the Roses or remembering how to ask someone out.
For this reason, if you have a list of discrete items that don’t fit together in any way, it’ll be harder to shape your second “key” memories. For our example, we’ll simply imagine being a tiny little man walking around inside a 1911 slide.
“First we’ll encounter the barrel bushing, and inside it, I can see the barrel poking out. Behind the barrel and the breech face as we walk further back I’ll see a tiny hole through which I can see the firing pin, and to its left will be the extractor against the side of the slide; when I make it to the very back, I’ll reach the hammer stop. "
Rote memorization is very good for manual tasks and short lists of items like a shopping list, starting a car, or ironing a shirt. Rote memorization is not very good for memorizing a large number of separate items or single complex ideas like the elements of the periodic table from left to right, the idea of dialectical materialism, or the components of a car engine. [5] X Research source
At first you’ll get a lot wrong - don’t get frustrated! This is just your brain getting used to the work. Keep at it, and within a few minutes, you’ll be able to remember everything you’ve memorized.
If you’ve ever memorized a phone number, you might have noticed the way we write them - they’re set up to be chunk-memorized. For instance, the White House phone number, (202) 456-1111 is easier to remember as three numbers - 202, 456 and 1111 - than it is to remember as a single complex number, 2,024,561,111. Chunking isn’t a great strategy for big, complex things and concepts that don’t break down into parts easily. For example, it’s not easy to figure out what “memorizable” chunks would be for memorizing the concept of civil rights, the definition of nationhood or a list of similar phone numbers. [8] X Research source
Chaining is great for a limited number of items in an arbitrary list without any seeming relation to each other (for instance, the list tree, bird, keyboard, bottle). It’s hard to apply a strategy like chunking because there aren’t any real categories to break stuff down.
Peanut butter and espresso bean sandwich wrapped in ethernet cable with a screwdriver going through it.
Peanut butter and espresso bean sandwich wrapped in ethernet cable with a screwdriver going through it=peanut butter, espresso beans, bread, ethernet cable, screwdriver bit
In math, the mnemonic “PEMDAS” is used to recall the orders of operations. In English grammar, the mnemonic “FANBOY” is used to remember different conjunctions. [15] X Expert Source Ted Coopersmith, MBAAcademic Tutor Expert Interview. 10 July 2020.
