Study Prof

…at least when it comes to reviewing info you want to recall, like your class notes on the Kreb Cycle or the Quadratic Formula. If you catch yourself going over the same notes again and again, trying to wedge it into your gray matter, there is a better way. Oodles (no, really, OOODLES) of good research to show that mnemonics (memory strategies) can increase your recall. That means less review for you (see this article for a run down of the research).

And using mnemonic techniques doesn’t require that you have thick glasses, a lack of fashion sense, and a passion for Star Trek: The Next Generation. In fact, the article linked above begins with an account of how mnemonics were used to beef up recall among learning disabled middle school kids in the inner city.

What are mnemonics (nim OHN iks)? It’s just a fancy word for strategies to help you recall something. For instance, most of us learned the colors of the rainbow with the mnemonic ROY G. BIV, which stands for … you still remember, don’t you … Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Indigo, Violet. But there are much better mnemonic techniques than that, so keep reading.

The key word method is one strategy most of us never learned in school. It’s a shame, because this is arguably the most effective and versatile method of them all. I used a variation of this technique my first semester in grad school to memorize the bones of the human skull. For our first exam in Osteology, not only did we need to be able to identify all 23 bones (ethmoid, sphenoid, vomer, zygomatic, occipital, parietal, blahblahblah), we also had to name all the bones that each of those articulated with. The ethmoid– just one of the 23 bones–connects to 12 others. That’s a heap o’ memorizing, friends and neighbors. But using the keyword technique, I was done studying in thirty minutes, and I made a 100 on the test! This is especially significant as I have been known to forget my own birthday, names of current roommates, and where I was when I found out JFK was shot (I was still a gleam in my daddy’s eye, if you’re wondering). Talking with my classmates after the exam, I found that no one else had made a perfect score nor had any of them studied less than four hours. Most had studied around 8 to 10 hours and made 70s or low 80s. Wow! I was hooked.

Here’s a quick run down of how to use the keyword method of mnemonics.

1. Identify the items to be linked together in your memory. Examples; Path of incoming air (in order):
   Pharynx, larynx, trachea, left and right bronchia, bronchioles, alveolus. Divisions of the animal kingdom (in order):
   Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Family, Genus, Species. The Quadratic Formula. The current top five contestants on American Idol. Whatever.
2. Come up with a key word or symbol for each item. The key word should be easy for you to picture. For example, with Kingdom in the second example above we could use “king” as the key word. We’ll use a filing cabinet for “phylum,” a glass of water for “class,” a general barking out orders for “order,” the Simpsons for “family,” Albert Einstein for “genus” (genius), and big Chuck Darwin for “species,” since he wrote On the Origin of Species. If you can’t picture Charles Darwin (you slacker) you might more easily be able to envision whats-her-name, the boney female lead in the movie Species.
3. Now link your key words together in a story. The stranger, funnier, more disturbing, more emotional, and more multi-sensory your story is, the easier it will be to remember. We have to go in order, so let’s start with our KING…let’s make it the Lion King to link it in our minds with the animal kingdom … the lion KING leaps up on top of a very expensive looking mahogany FILING CABINET. His claws scratch deep furrows in the wood, and you think how expensive that must be. The cabinet can’t hold his weight and falls over, hitting a table covered with hundreds of GLASSes of water. The glasses fall to the floor, loudly shattering, and splashing a general (Patton? Napoleon?) who starts barking out ORDERs for his soldiers to clean up that mess. His soldiers are made up of the Simpson FAMILY, all in uniform. Maggie, Lisa, Bart, and Marge get right to work, but Homer is nowhere to be seen. They stop their sweeping and mopping to yell loudly for Homer to come and help. Homer finally shows up, but it isn’t Homer, it Al Einstein, the relative GENIUS, and he’s got Charles Darwin in a head lock and is beating him with a copy of his book, On the Origin of SPECIES (or whats-her-name boney chick for the pop-cultured contingent). If you clearly imagine this story as you read it, you will find that not only can you recall kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, species, in that order; you can also pick out any item in the series–class, for example–and recall what comes before and after it.

In answer to your question … yes, it does take longer to come up with the key words and come up with the story than to go over it in your notes and hope it sinks in. However, you won’t have to review it fifty times and still not be able to recall it perfectly on the test two weeks later. Remember the story about my Osteology test? Took me thirty minutes, people–even with my embarassingly shoddy memory.

Try it. It works!

For more detail and examples, check out The Brain Book, by Peter Russell.