Mnemonic- its Advantages

Mnemonic- its Advantages

 Any memory improving strategy can, of course, be termed a mnemonic strategy, but in its more specific meaning, mnemonic refers to artificial memory aids such as stories, rhymes, acronyms, and more complex strategies involving verbal mediators or visual imagery , such as the journey method or method of loci, the pegword method, and the keyword method.

We will get to each of these in due course, but first we need to consider the benefits and limitations of such mnemonics, and in particular when you should use them in the course of study and when you should not.

The most important thing to understand is that mnemonics do not help you understand your material. They do not help with comprehension; they do not help you make meaningful connections.

The purpose of mnemonics is simply to help you remember something — not by understanding it, not by incorporating it into your developing “expert database”, but simply in the manner of a parrot. They are used to enable you to regurgitate information.

That sounds terribly contemptuous, but if I considered there was no value in mnemonics I wouldn’t be devoting this book to them. The ability to regurgitate information on demand is undeniably a useful one — indeed, in the context of examinations, often a vital one!

Even in the context of material you need to understand, there are often details that must simply be memorized — names of things, technical words, lists of principles, and so on. Moreover, mnemonics can help you remember tags or labels that allow you to access clusters of meaningful information — for example, headings of a speech or main points for exam essays.For both these reasons, mnemonics are a valuable assistance to building up expertise in a subject, as well as in helping you ‘cram’ for an exam.

However, despite a number of studies showing the effectiveness of mnemonic strategies, these remain the least frequently used formal memory aid used by students.Perhaps the main reason for this is that their effectiveness is not intuitively obvious — truly, no one really believes that these ‘tricks’ can so remarkably improve memory until they try them for themselves.

But I can help you believe (and belief is vitally necessary if you’re going to make the effort to use, and keep on using, any memory strategy) if I explain why they work. It’s also important to understand the principles involved if you’re going to fully master these techniques — by which I mean, know when and when not to use them, and how to use them flexibly.