Strategies

What mnemonics are, and what they are for

Aids to memory such as acronyms, rhymes, linking information by creating visual images or making up a story, are called mnemonics. Mnemonic strategies have been recommended as appropriate for remembering the following types of information:

• shopping lists
• vocabulary
• appointments
• speeches
• facts
• names & faces
• dates
• phone numbers
• ideas
• jokes
• dramatic parts
• poems
• numbers

Mnemonics are undoubtedly effective for rote memorization, but they do require a lot of work to master.

Mnemonics can also help you learn basic facts and new vocabulary, which you need to acquire when learning a new subject. However, mastering a subject is not simply a matter of knowing a lot. An expert has a well-organized network of memory codes into which new information can be easily integrated. Mnemonic techniques on their own do not help you understand the meaning of facts, and do not therefore help you develop expertise in a subject.

Moreover, although mnemonics are usually the best strategies for memorizing by rote, for most tasks there are easier strategies which are sufficiently effective to be preferable for many people:

• written or electronic records
• rote repetition

The value of lists

For many tasks and for most people, a written list is far less effort, far more likely to be used, and far more reliable.

Many people discard the idea of lists because they have found they usually forget to use them. However, research has confirmed what many of us already know from experience — even if you forget to refer to your list, you are much more likely to recall items that you have written down. The act of writing (and perhaps the opportunity to visualize your list) are sufficient to improve your memory.

Imagery in mnemonics

Visual imagery underlies most mnemonic strategies. The best known are the list-learning strategies — the method of loci, the pegword method, and the link method. While these are undoubtedly effective strategies, they perhaps have less value as general strategic tools than the transformational elaborative strategies — the keyword method, and face-name association.

The role of imagery in helping memory is largely misunderstood (see the myth of imagery). Methods that use words rather than images have been shown to be equally effective. Imagery has one major advantage, and that is the ease with which two items can be connected using imagery. Imagery also has one major disadvantage, and that is the difficulty many people have with creating images.

Verbal mnemonic strategies include the use of acronyms, rhymes, and the more complex coding method (for memorizing numbers) and the story method (the verbal equivalent of the linking mnemonic).

As we all know, rhyme and rhythm help make information more memorable. Here's a few ideas that may help you use them more effectively.

Rhythm and rhyme are of course quite separate things, and are processed in different regions of the brain. However, they do share some commonalities in why and how they benefit memory. Rhyme and rhythm impose pattern. For that reason, rhyme and rhythm are particularly valuable when information is not inherently meaningful.

Remember that organization is the key to memory. If information cannot be meaningfully organized, it must be organized by other means.

Imposing a pattern, by using, for example, rhyme and/or rhythm, is one of those means.

Patterns are remembered because they are orderly. An important aspect of order is that it is predictable. When we can anticipate the next part of a sequence or pattern, we encode that information better, probably because our attention has been focused on structurally important points.

There is another aspect to patterns, and to rhyme and rhythm in particular. They help recall by limiting the possible solutions. In the same way that being told the name you want to remember starts with “B” helps your search your memory, so knowing that the next word rhymes with “time” will help your search. Of course, knowing the sound ending of a word helps far more than simply knowing the initial letter, and when this is in the context of a verse, you are usually also constrained by meaning, reducing the possibilities immensely.

Rhythm isn’t quite so helpful, yet it too helps constrain the possibilities by specifying the number of syllables you are searching for.

It is clear from this that for rhyme in particular, it is most effective if the rhyming words are significant words. For example, “In fourteen hundred and ninety two, Columbus sailed the ocean blue” is pretty good (not brilliant), because “two” is a significant word, and “blue” is sufficiently strongly associated with the ocean (another significant word, since it suggests why we remember him). On the other hand, this verse for remembering England’s kings and queens is not particularly good:

“Willie, Willie, Harry, Steve,
Harry, Dick, John, Harry Three,
Edward One, Two, Three, Dick Two,
Henry Four, Five, Six, then who?
Edward Four, Five, Dick the Bad,
Harrys twain and Ned, the lad.
Mary, Lizzie, James the Vain,
Charlie, Charlie, James again.
William and Mary, Anne o'Gloria,
Four Georges, William and Victoria.
Edward Seven, Georgie Five,
Edward, George and Liz (alive)”

The fact that it is in verse, providing rhyme and rhythm as mnemonic aids, is obviously helpful, but its effectiveness is lessened by the fact that the rhyming words are forced, with little significance to them.

Rhythm has another function, one it doesn’t share with rhyme. Rhythm groups information.

Grouping is of course another fundamental means of making something easy to remember. We can only hold a very limited number of bits of information in our mind at one time, so grouping is necessary for this alone. But in addition, grouping information into a meaningful cluster, or at least one where all bits are closely related, is what organization (the key to memory — can I say it too often?) is all about.

Studies indicate that groups of three are most effective. The gap between such groups can be quite tiny, provided it is discernible by the listener. The way we customarily group phone numbers is a reflection of that.

If you can’t group the information entirely in threes, twos are apparently better than fours (i.e., a 7 figure number would be broken into 3-2-2: 982 34 67). Having said that, I would add that I would imagine that meaningfulness might override this preference; if a four-digit number had meaning in itself, say a famous date, I would group it that way rather than breaking it into smaller chunks and losing the meaning.

But let us never forget the importance of individual difference. Baddeley[1] cites the case of a Scottish professor who had amazing memory abilities. One of his feats was to recall the value of pi to the first thousand decimal places — a feat he would not have bothered to perform if it had not been “so easy”! Apparently, he found that simply arranging the digits in rows of 50, with each row grouped in lots of 5 digits, and reciting them in a particular rhythm, made them very easy (for him) to memorize: “rather like learning a Bach fugue”. The psychologist who observed him doing this feat (Ian Hunter, known for his book, “Memory”) said he did the whole thing in 150 seconds, pausing only (for breath) after the first 500. The rhythm and tempo was basically 5 digits per second, with half a second between each group.

There’s also some evidence to suggest those with musical abilities may benefit more from rhythm, and even rhyme (musically trained people tend to have better verbal skills, and, intriguingly, a 1993 study[2] found a positive correlation between pitch discrimination and an understanding of rhyme and alliteration in children).

The “3 Rs” — rhyme, rhythm, and repetition. It’s not a fair analogy, because these differ considerably in their importance, but I couldn’t resist it.

I want to repeat something I’ve said before — because it is absolutely fundamental. Repetition is essential to memory.

There is sometimes a feeling among novice learners that mnemonic strategies “do away” with the need for repetition. They do not. Nothing does. What memory strategies of all kinds do is reduce the need for repetition. Nothing eliminates the need for repetition.

Even experiences that seem to be examples of “one-trial” learning (i.e., the single experience is enough to remember it forever) are probably re-experienced mentally a number of times. Can you think of any single experience you had, or fact you learned, that you experienced/heard/saw only once, and NEVER thought about again for a long time, until something recalled it to mind?

It’s a difficult thing to prove or disprove, of course.

However, for practical purposes, it is enough to note that, yes, if we want to remember something, we must repeat it. If we’re using a mnemonic strategy to help us remember, we must include the mnemonic cue in our remembering. Thus, if you’re trying to remember that the man with a nose like a beak was called Bill Taylor, don’t omit any of your associative links in your remembering until they’re firmly cemented. I say that because if the “answer” (nose like a beak à Bill Taylor) pops up readily, it’s easy to not bother with remembering the linking information (beak = bill; pay the tailor’s bill). However, if you want the information to stick, you want to make sure those associations are all firmly embedded.

Rhyme and rhythm are mnemonic cues of a different sort, but however effectively you might use them (and if you use them wisely they can be very effective), you still can’t avoid the need for repetition.

Always remember the essential rules of repetition:

• space it out
• space it at increasing intervals

(see my article on practice for more on this)

Interesting resource:

The Omnificent English Dictionary In Limerick Form:: A wonderful idea for remembering those difficult or rare words, if you’re learning English as a second-language or simply want to expand your vocabulary.

This article first appeared in the Memory Key Newsletter for June 2005

We forget someone’s name, and our response might be: “Oh I’ve always been terrible at remembering names!” Or: “I’m getting old; I really can’t remember things anymore.” Or: nothing — we shrug it off without thought. What our response might be depends on our age and our personality, but that response has nothing to do with the reason we forgot.

We forget things for a number of short-term reasons: we’re tired; we’re distracted by other thoughts; we’re feeling emotional. But underneath all that, at all ages and in all situations, there is one fundamental reason why we fail to remember something: we didn’t encode it well enough at the time we learned/experienced it. And, yes, that is a strategy failure, and possibly also a reflection of those same factors (tired, distracted, emotional), but again, at bottom there is one fundamental reason: we didn’t realize what we needed to do to ensure we would remember it. This is a failure of self-monitoring, and self-monitoring is a crucial, and under-appreciated, strategy.

I’ve written about self-monitoring as a study skill, but self-monitoring is a far broader strategy than that. It applies to children and to seniors; it applies to remembering names and intentions and facts and experiences and skills. And it has a lot to do with cognitive fluency.

Cognitive fluency is as simple a concept as it sounds: it’s about how easy it is to think about something. We use this ease as a measure of familiarity — if it’s easy, we assume we’ve met it before. The easier it is, the more familiar we assume it is. Things that are familiar are (rule of thumb) assumed to be safe, seen as more attractive, make us feel more confident.

And are assumed to be known — that is, we don’t need to put any effort into encoding this information, because clearly we already know it.

Familiarity is a heuristic (rule of thumb) for several attributes. Fluency is a heuristic for familiarity.

Heuristics are vital — without these, we literally couldn’t function. The world is far too complex a place for us to deal with it without a whole heap of these rules of thumb. But the problem with them is that they are not rules, they are rules of thumb — guidelines, indicators. Meaning that a lot of the time, they’re wrong.

That’s why it’s not enough to unthinkingly rely on fluency as a guide to whether or not you need to make a deliberate effort to encode/learn something.

The secret to getting around the weaknesses of fluency is effective testing.

Notice I said effective.

If you intend to buy some bread on the way home from work, does the fact that you reminded yourself when you got to work constitute an effective test? Not in itself. If you are introduced to someone and you remember their name long enough to use it when you say goodbye, does this constitute an effective test? Again, not in itself. If you’re learning the periodic table and at the end of your study session are able to reel off all the elements in the right order, can you say you have learned this, and move on to something else? Not yet.

Effective testing has three elements: time, context, and feedback.

The feedback component should be self-evident, but apparently is not. It’s no good being tested or testing yourself, if your answer is wrong and you don’t know it! Of course, it’s not always possible to get feedback — and we don’t need feedback if we really are right. But how do we know if we’re right? Again, we use fluency to tell us. If the answer comes easily, we assume it’s correct. Most of the time it will be — but not always. So if you do have some means of checking your answer, you should take it.

[A brief aside to teachers and parents of school-aged students: Here in New Zealand we have a national qualifying exam (actually a series of exams) for our older secondary school students. The NCEA is quite innovative in many ways (you can read about it here if you’re curious), and since its introduction a few years ago there has been a great deal of controversy about it. As a parent of students who have gone through and are going through this process, I have had many criticisms about it myself. However, there are a number of good things about it, and one of these (which has nothing to do with the nature of the exams) is a process which I believe is extremely rare in the world (for a national exam): every exam paper is returned to the student. This is quite a logistical nightmare of course, when you consider each subject has several different papers (as an example, my younger son, sitting Level 2 this year, did 18 papers) and every paper has a different marker. But I believe the feedback really is worth it. Every test, whatever its ostensible purpose, should also be a learning experience. And to be a good learning experience, the student needs feedback.]

But time and context are the important, and under-appreciated, elements. A major reason why people fail to realize they haven’t properly encoded/learned something, is that they retrieve it easily soon after encoding, as in my examples above. But at this point, the information is still floating around in an accessible state. It hasn’t been consolidated; it hasn’t been properly filed in long-term memory. Retrieval this soon after encoding tells you (almost) nothing (obviously, if you did fail to retrieve it at this point, that would tell you something!).

So effective testing requires a certain amount of time to pass. And as I discussed when I talked about retrieval practice, it really requires quite a lot of time to pass before you can draw a line under it and say, ok, this is now done.

The third element is the least obvious. Context.

Why do we recognize the librarian when we see her at the library, but don’t recognize her at the supermarket? She’s out of context. Why does remembering we need to buy bread on the way home no good if we remember it when we arrive at work? Because successful intention remembering is all about remembering at the right time and in the right place.

Effective encoding means that we will be able to remember when we need the information. In some cases (like intention memory), that means tying the information to a particular context — so effective testing involves trying to retrieve the information in response to the right contextual cue.

In most cases, it means testing across a variety of contexts, to ensure you have multiple access points to the information.

Successful remembering requires effective monitoring at the time of encoding (when you encounter the information). Effective monitoring requires you not to be fooled by easy fluency, but to test yourself effectively, across time and context. These principles apply to all memory situations and across all ages.

Additional resources:

If you want to know more about cognitive fluency and its effect on the mind (rather than memory specifically), there's nice article in the Boston Globe. As an addendum (I'd read the more general and in-depth article in the Globe first), Miller-McCune have a brief article on one particular aspect of cognitive fluency -- the effect of names.

Miller-McCune have have a good article on the value of testing and the motivating benefits of failure.

Common everyday memory strategies

The most frequently used everyday memory strategies are:

• writing calendar or diary notes
• putting things in a special place
• writing reminder notes
• writing shopping lists
• using face-name associations
• mentally rehearsing information
• using a timer
• asking someone else to help

Of these, all but two are external memory aids. With the exception of face-name associations, mnemonic strategies (the foundation of most memory-improvement courses) are little used.

How effective are these strategies?

In general, external aids are regarded as easier to use, more accurate, and more dependable. In particular, external aids are preferred for reminding oneself to do things (planning memory). Mental strategies however, are equally preferred as retrieval cues for stored information. The preferred strategies are mentally retracing (for retrieving stored information) and mentally rehearsing (for storing information for later retrieval).

Note that these preferred strategies are not those that are most effective, but those strategies that are least effortful. The popularity of asking someone to help you remember has surprised researchers, but in this context it is readily understandable — asking someone is easiest strategy of all! It is not, however, particularly effective.

Older people in particular, are less inclined to use a strategy merely because it is effective. For them it is far more important that a strategy be familiar and easy to use.

Learning effective strategies does require effort, but once you have mastered them, the effort involved in using them is not great. The reason most people fail to use effective strategies is that they haven’t mastered them properly. A properly mastered skill is executed automatically, with little effort. (see Skill learning)

The evidence that diet, physical exercise, and mental stimulation all help prevent age-related cognitive decline and reduce the risk of mild cognitive impairment and Alzheimer’s, is now very convincing.

Studies of mice and (rather intriguingly) beagles, have provided evidence that ‘enriched’ environments — ones that provide opportunities for regular exercise and mental stimulation — reduce or prevent age-related cognitive decline, and reduce the risk of Alzheimer’s.

Studies of genetically engineered mice have also now shown how an enriched environment protects against Alzheimer’s — by preventing accumulation of beta-amyloid, and helping these peptides to be cleared away.

It’s been suggested that the benefits of physical and mental activity, which now seem undeniable, may simply be a matter of blood flow — that physical and mental activity stimulates growth of new blood vessels and keeps existing vessels open and functional.

These findings from animal studies have been supported by a number of human studies.

Physical exercise

A large, six-year study of adults aged 65 and older found that physical fitness and exercise were both associated with a significantly lower risk of dementia. Encouragingly, for those who are more frail, even modest amounts of exercise (such as walking 15 minutes a day) appear beneficial, and the more frail the person was, the more they benefited from regular exercise.

Education

Findings from two long-running studies of aging and cognition — the Nun Study and the Religious Orders Study — have revealed that formal education helps protect people from the effects of Alzheimer’s disease.

Note that I said “from the effects”. Education doesn’t prevent or delay the disease from developing, but it does provide a “cognitive reserve”, which allows the individual to function normally in the presence of brain abnormalities (the presence of an Alzheimer’s pathology is thus only evident when the brain is autopsied post-mortem).

As you would expect, the more years of education, the greater the cognitive reserve — the less effect the same number of plaques have on cognitive performance. It’s worth noting that the populations in these studies are all relatively well-educated — even the least educated had some college attendance — suggesting that the effect of education would be even more marked in the general population.

However, there is some evidence that, once the disease progresses to the point that it has noticeable effects, those effects progress faster. This is thought to be simply because the damage is so much greater by the time it becomes observable in behavior.

A general population study still in train has provided preliminary findings indicating that prevalence of mild cognitive impairment also is less common among those with more education.

Higher education also seems to help protect older adults from cognitive decline in general. One reason is clearly the cognitive reserve aspect, but an imaging study has also revealed another reason. In young adults performing memory tasks, more education was associated with less use of the frontal lobes and more use of the temporal lobes. For older adults doing the same tasks, more education was associated with less use of the temporal lobes and more use of the frontal lobes. Previous research has indicated frontal activity is greater in old adults, compared to young; this study therefore implies that this effect is related to the educational level in the older participants. The higher the education, the more likely the older adult is to recruit frontal regions, resulting in a better memory performance.

An earlier brain-scan study also provided support for the theory that the brain may change tactics as it ages, and that older people whose brain is more flexible can compensate for some aspects of memory decline.

Results from a large study of older adults from a biracial community in Chicago suggest that the benefits of education are not necessarily education per se. Although both education and occupation were associated with Alzheimer's risk in this study, their effects were substantially reduced when cognitive activity was taken into account.

In keeping with these findings, several smaller studies have also provided evidence that other aspects of mental activity are also associated with a reduced risk of cognitive decline and dementia.

Mental activity

People with Alzheimer's have been found to be more likely to have had less mentally stimulating careers, and those who are more active in high school and have higher IQ scores are apparently less likely to have mild memory and thinking problems and dementia as older adults.

A study of 469 people aged 75 and older found that those who participated at least twice weekly in reading, playing games (chess, checkers, backgammon or cards), playing musical instruments, and dancing were significantly less likely to develop dementia. Although the evidence on crossword puzzles was not quite statistically significant, those who did crossword puzzles four days a week had a much lower risk of dementia than those who did one puzzle a week.

Another study of 700 seniors found that more frequent participation in cognitively stimulating activities, such as reading books, newspapers or magazines, engaging in crosswords or card games, was significantly associated with a reduced risk of Alzheimer’s disease.

And more recently, a comprehensive review of the research into 'cognitive reserve', involving 29,000 individuals across 22 studies, concluded that complex mental activity across people’s lives almost halves the risk of dementia. Encouragingly, all the studies also agreed that it was never too late to build cognitive reserve.

Looking at the question of cognitive decline in general, a large-scale British study of people aged 35—55 found that those who scored highest on tests of cognitive ability made regular cultural visits to theatres, art galleries and stately homes. Other activities were also associated with higher cognitive ability (in order of importance):

• reading, and listening to music
• involvement in clubs and voluntary organisations
• participation in courses and evening classes

Interestingly, the association was stronger among men.

Another study, of people aged 30—88, has found that those who were fluent in two languages rather than just one, were sharper mentally. This was true at all age groups, but bilinguals were also much less likely to suffer from the mental decline associated with old age. The participants were all middle class, and educated to degree level.

Social networks

There has been some evidence suggesting that simply talking helps keep your mind sharp at all ages, and that older people with more extensive social networks are less likely to suffer cognitive impairment.

More recently, a study has provided evidence that social networks also offer a 'cognitive reserve' that protects people from the ravages of Alzheimer's disease. To determine social network, participants were asked about the number of children they have and see monthly; about the number of relatives, excluding spouse and children, and friends to whom they feel close and with whom they felt at ease and could talk to about private matters and could call upon for help, and how many of these people they see monthly. Their social network was the number of these individuals seen at least once per month.

Post-mortem analysis revealed that, as the size of the social network increased, the same amount of Alzheimer’s pathology in the brain (i.e., extent of plaques and tangles) had less effect on cognitive test scores. In other words, for persons without much pathology, social network size had little effect on cognition. However, as the amount of pathology increased, the apparent protective effect on cognition also increased.

What you can do

The thought that your education, occupation, degree of physical fitness, and social involvedness, over the years, affects your risk of losing cognitive function, may relieve your anxieties or depress you. But if it depresses you, take heart from a recently-reported pilot study involving people aged 35–69. These people had some mild memory complaints but performed normally on tests. Nevertheless, in a mere two weeks, a program combining a brain healthy diet plan (5 small meals a day; diet rich in omega-3 fats, antioxidants and low-glycemic carbohydrates like whole grains), relaxation exercises, cardiovascular conditioning (daily walks), and mental exercise (such as crosswords and brain teasers) resulted in these participants' brain metabolism decreasing 5% in working memory regions, suggesting an increased efficiency. Compared to the control group, participants also performed better in verbal fluency, and felt as if they were performing better.

Flashcards are cards with a word (or phrase) on one side and its translation on the other. You can buy ready-made flashcards, and these can certainly be helpful, particularly if you're inexperienced at learning another language. However, it is more effective if you make them yourself. Not only will the cards be customized to your own use, but the activity of selecting words and writing them down help you learn them.

A standard way of using flashcards is simply to go through a set number each day, separating out those you have trouble with, so you can review them more often. Keep these ones handy so that you can go through them at odd moments during the day when you're waiting for something.

Use the flashcards as a handy way to group words in different ways. Deal out the cards and move them around, looking for connections.

If you have word-family flashcards (recommended) - e.g., cards with various related forms of a word - you can make different sentences with your cards. You could also play cards with them, if you have others to play with. You could play a version of rummy, for example, where the sets are infinitive, present tense, future tense, past perfect. Use your imagination!

A bingo game with flashcards is another fun way to practice. Construct bingo cards (large cards divided into a certain number of spaces the same size as your flashcards) with the native language words on it. While this is better played with others, you can at a pinch play with yourself, simply picking out a flashcard from the pile and seeing how quickly you can match it with its counterpart.

Learning words in isolation will not help you much in dealing with words in context. You do need to practice reading/writing/speaking/listening sentences. But flashcards are a useful means of memorizing vocabulary.

Flashcard software

VTrain (Vocabulary Trainer): is flashcard software apparently used in the language labs of 40 Universities and hundreds of high schools; it's free for educational establishments. It's shareware.

The more hyped and less plausible passive Mozart Effect

The so-called "Mozart effect" refers to two quite different phenomena. The one that has received the most media play concerns the almost magical (and mythical) effect of Mozart's music on intelligence. It is the result of a misrepresentation of the research results. Rauscher, Shaw, and Ky's 1993 study found that 10 minutes of exposure to Mozart's Sonata for Two Pianos in D Major K. 448 temporarily enhanced performance on three spatial reasoning tasks.

The source of the misunderstanding lay in the fact that spatial reasoning is a component of IQ tests, and the researchers reported an increase of some 8 or 9 points in students' IQ scores after listening to the music. The effect lasted some ten to fifteen minutes.

Even in this limited sense, the effect has not been consistently replicated - indeed, it would be fair to say it has more usually failed to be replicated. Moreover, a meta-analysis of studies that have investigated this effect has found that any cognitive improvement "is small and does not reflect any change in IQ or reasoning ability in general, but instead derives entirely from performance on one specific type of cognitive task and has a simple neuropsychological explanation"₁.

There does seem to be a case that particular types of music can have an effect on brainwaves - there has been some interesting work done on its possible therapeutic role in reducing epileptic seizures - but the main effect of music seems to be through its effect on arousal.

Most of the research done into the Mozart Effect has continued the example of the original researchers by comparing the effect of listening to Mozart's music with listening to silence or to a relaxation tape. Obviously enough, these various situations would be expected to differentially affect mood and level of arousal (which are known to have a, small and unreliable, effect on cognition). There is evidence that when this effect is controlled for, the Mozart effect (which we may note is also small and unreliable) disappears.

The more plausible active Mozart effect

There is however another Mozart effect that promises to be more useful. This is the possibility that formal training in music yields nonmusical benefits. Once again, the media are keen to hypothesize that this effect is on IQ (what is the media's obsession with IQ?). There does however seem to be growing evidence that musical training benefits other faculties - specifically, verbal memory.

More articles on the Mozart Effect

http://faculty.washington.edu/chudler/music.html#mem

https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2003/jan/10/artsfeatures.shopping

http://www.theguardian.com/arts/fridayreview/story/0,12102,871350,00.html

BBC radio programme: http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/science/mozarteffect.shtml

Creating a face-name association

• Select a distinctive feature of the face (nose).
• Select a word or phrase that sounds like the name (con rat for Conrad).
• Create an interactive image linking the distinctive feature with the keyword(s) (a man in a prisoner’s uniform — con — rides a rat that slides down the nose).

To remember the name on seeing the face again, you must:

• Identify the distinctive feature that you used when encoding (nose).
• Use that feature to help you retrieve the interactive image (a con riding a rat sliding down a nose).
• Derive the keyword(s) from the image (con rat).
• Use the keyword to help you retrieve the name (Conrad).

Drawbacks to the face-name association method

To use the face-name association method in a social situation requires a great deal of practice.

The other drawback to this method is that it requires you to select a distinctive feature. This is not always easy, particularly when you’re distracted and time is short (which is usually the case when you’re being introduced to someone). But finding a distinctive feature is absolutely crucial to the strategy’s effectiveness.

Face-name association only works well to the extent that the selected distinctive feature is an effective cue.

Let's look a little deeper into the value of mnemonics for knowledge acquisition. By “knowledge acquisition”, I mean the sort of information you learn from textbooks — information that is not personal, that you need for the long-term.

In this context, I believe the chief value of mnemonic strategies is to help you recall information that needs to be remembered in a particular order. Thus we use mnemonics to help us remember the order of the planets, the order of musical notes on the stave, the order of the colors in a rainbow.

Sometimes we impose an order to make something easier to remember. Thus, HOMES is an established acronym to help people remember the Great Lakes of North America (Huron, Ontario, Michigan, Erie, Superior). The order of the lakes has no meaning, except that, ordered in such a way, the initial letters form a word.

Notice that, of course, the sole assistance this acronym offers is to serve as a reminder cue, by telling you the initial letters of the lakes (and how many there are). You have to already know the names of the lakes.

Other mnemonics for the Great Lakes provide slightly more information, by involving a meaningful order. Thus, “Sam's Horse Must Eat Oats” orders the lakes according to size, and “Sergeant Major Hates Eating Onions” tells you the order of the lakes from west to east.

None of these help you remember the actual names of the lakes.

You could use words similar in sound to the lakes’ names, to help in remembering the names. However, this may well result in a mnemonic that is harder to remember. For example, “Superior Mitch Again sees a Herons’ Eyrie Entire” makes far less sense and is a much harder sentence to remember than “Sergeant Major Hates Eating Onions”.

All this emphasizes the main point about mnemonics, a point that sometimes gets a little lost in the shuffle. Mnemonics are adjuncts to learning. They have their place, and they are extremely effective for their purpose, but you have to remember that their purpose is very limited. Thus, if you wished to learn the Periodic Table of Elements (a question about ways of memorizing the Periodic Table was actually what provoked this article), then you could simply devise a first-letter mnemonic for the table, such as:

He Helps Limping Beggars Borrow Crutches Nicely Or Fairly Near. Naturally Magazines Allow Simple Punctuation Should Clear Arguments. (the first 18 elements, i.e., the first three rows of the Table).

And of course, this won’t help you in any way if you are not already very familiar with the names of the elements. Nor will it tell you anything at all about the significance of the Periodic Table.

Why would you want to memorize the Periodic Table of Elements?

I don’t mean this question to indicate contempt for the task, I actually believe deeply in the value of having core information tamped down, as it were, deep into your knowledge base. You cannot develop any expertise in a subject without knowing the core facts — really knowing, in the same way you know your name and birthdate and, maybe, the names of the players in your favorite sports team, or the words to a favorite song, or the names of the characters in your favorite TV show. (Mnemonics do not, in fact, play a role when you have that depth of knowledge. Once you know something at the level of instant accessibility, you don’t need a mnemonic. But mnemonics can be of great help in the early stages of developing your knowledge.)

But let’s return to the question. Why do I ask it? Because, whenever you want to learn something, you should ask yourself why. Not in the spirit of “does it really matter?”, but with the purpose of establishing precisely your goal. Notice the word “precisely”. It’s not enough to simply say, “Well, I need to know the Periodic Table because I’m studying chemistry, and the teacher tells me I have to know it.” Why does your teacher insist you learn the Periodic Table? How does it help your understanding of chemistry?

The Great Lakes of North America are simply several large bodies of water in geographical proximity. Knowing their names is of no deep significance, has no larger meaning. The Periodic Table, however, does have larger meaning. The order of elements is no arbitrary thing, and the placement of an element in a particular place in the Table is deeply significant.

The Periodic Table arranges the elements in such a way as to demonstrate the pattern underlying the physical and chemical similarities between elements. If you know where an element is in the Table, you know a great deal about the element.

To know that, however, you must understand a great deal more about the Periodic Table than simply the order of the elements. The order of the elements tells you nothing in itself.

So, what is it that you really need to know? Not the order, as such. Not simply: Hydrogen Helium Lithium Beryllium Boron Carbon Nitrogen Oxygen Fluorine Neon Sodium Magnesium Aluminum Silicon Phosphorus Sulfur Chlorine Argon Potassium Calcium Scandium Titanium Vanadium Chromium Manganese Iron Cobalt Nickel Copper Zinc Gallium Germanium Arsenic Selenium Bromine Krypton etc. The Periodic Table is a table for good reason, and you should never lose sight of that.

The rows have significance. The columns have significance. You don’t want to be able to say, “Oh, Scandium. That’s between Calcium and Titanium.” So?

More to the point would be if you knew Scandium was in row 4 and column 3B — that would tell you something (if you knew the significance of the rows and columns).

I’m not knocking the use of mnemonics to learn this sort of information. Mnemonics, used wisely, can facilitate your learning in the beginning. But, if the information you want to memorize has any meaning, you need to combine the use of mnemonic strategies with the use of strategies that are appropriate for meaningful learning. Never forget that the purpose of mnemonic strategies is to help with arbitrary information, facts that have no meaningful connection with each other.

Thus, to master the Periodic Table, you should look at the underlying principles and the meaningful clusters. Use mnemonics to memorize members of meaningful clusters, by all means. Just remember to clearly articulate precisely what you need to know (and then, redefine your goals at intervals as your knowledge grows), and organize the information in ways that support those precise goals. Then apply your mnemonics judiciously.

Speed-reading techniques

Like many memory improvement courses, speed-reading programs tend to make inflated claims. Also like memory programs, most speed-reading programs proffer the same advice. In essence, speed-reading techniques involve the following components:

• learning to see more in a single eye fixation
• eliminating subvocalization ("saying" the words in your head as you read them)
• using your index finger as a visual guide down the page
• active reading

How reading works

The first thing you need to understand about reading is that it proceeds in jerks. Though we might think our eyes are traveling smoothly along the lines, this is an illusion. What happens is that the eyes gaze steadily for around 240 milliseconds (for a college student; less practiced readers take longer) and then jerk along (during which nothing is registered), then stop again. We "read" during the eye fixations.

Now the duration of these fixations is not hugely different between readers of different abilities - a first-grade child takes about 330 ms, which is not a vast difference when you consider the chasm between a first-grade reader and an educated adult. What does change significantly is the number of fixations. Thus, to read a 100-word passage, our first-grade reader takes some 183 fixations, while our college reader takes only 75. From this, it is calculated that the first-grade reader is taking in 0.55 of a word in each fixation (100/183), while the college reader is grasping 1.33 words in each fixation (100/75). And from this, the reading rate is calculated. [These figures are of course only indicative - different types of reading matter will obviously produce different figures; the degree to which comprehension is emphasized also makes a difference].

This is not, of course, the whole story. We also can pick up some information about letters on either side of the fixation point - about 10 to 11 letter positions right of the fixation point (or left, if you're reading in a script that goes from right to left) for specific letter information, and about 15 positions for information about word length.

It is these facts that set bounds on how fast a person can read. It has been calculated that, even being very generous with the figures (reducing the duration of fixation to 200 ms; using the upper limit of how many letters we can see at one time), the upper limit for reading speed would be about 900 wpm.

How speed-reading works

This, then, is one of the things speed-reading programs aim to tackle - to increase the span of letters you can see in one fixation, and to alter the number of fixations. It is not, however, clear that (a) you can in fact train people to increase this span, or (b) it would be useful to do so.

What research does show, is that speed readers, while they don't change the length of their fixations, do significantly differ from normal readers in the pattern of their jumps. One researcher concluded from the pattern of eye movements, that speed-readers are in fact skimming.

Now there is certainly nothing wrong with skimming. Indeed, it is an extremely valuable skill, and if you wish to improve your skill at skimming, then it may well be worthwhile for you to use a speed-reading program to do so. On the other hand, there is no particular evidence that such programs do anything more than modestly improve your skimming skills.

Testing speed-reading skills

One study compared expert speed-readers against other groups of superior readers. While the speed-readers were fastest (444 words per minute - a respectable speed (250 wpm is average) but nowhere near the claims made by many of these programs), their comprehension was relatively low (71%). [1]

Interestingly, the speed-readers' speed was about twice that when they knew their speed was being tested but their comprehension would not be. In other words, like the rest of us, they slowed down markedly when they wanted to understand what they were reading (and what otherwise is the point of reading something?)

Well, actually, there is one circumstance when you read and do not look to understand or retain what you read - which brings us back to skimming.

So, how did our speed-readers compare on skimming skills? Two tasks were used to assess these:

• to pick the best title to passages presented at rates of 7500, 1500 and 300 wpm
• to write summaries of 6000-word passages presented at 24000, 6000, 1500 and 375 wpm

The speed readers were in fact no better than the other groups at picking titles, and though they were best at writing summaries when the passages were presented at 1500 wpm, they were no better than the others at the other rates of presentation. In an extra test of recall of important details, the speed readers in fact did worst.

Reading for understanding

Please don't mistake me, I am not condemning speed-reading - merely their often extravagant claims. Learning to skim (if you have not developed this skill on your own, and many have) is clearly worthwhile. Learning not to subvocalize - yes, I think there's value in that too. I cannot speak to any research, but I know from my own experience that when I am reading slowly, either because the material demands the effort or because I wish to make the book last longer, I make myself 'hear' the words in my head. Subvocalization does slow you down - if you wish to read faster that you can speak, you need to discard the habit.

And lastly, active reading. Well, that deserves a whole chapter of its own. So for now, for those who don't know what it means, I shall simply define it. Active reading is about thinking when you read. It is about asking yourself (and the book) questions. It is about anticipating what is going to be said, and relating what you read to what you already know, and making inferences about what you've read. Active reading is about understanding, and thus it is an essential part of reading to remember.

So that too, is a very useful skill.

This article originally appeared in the July 2002 newsletter.