Memory Skills

Memory Skills

Good memory helps in any process of learning. Further, the element of memory is significant in any kind of examination. The skill for memorising may differ from person to person. It depends on a person's IQ as well.

There are certain memory techniques or memory crutches that will help us in remembering lessons. A few indications are given below.

Mnemonics

(a) Acronym: The artificial word VIBGYOR not only reminds us of the seven colours in white sunlight, but helps us to remember them in the order of the frequencies or wavelengths of the component colours. This is an example of mnemonics, as mentioned earlier. Perhaps we would not remember the colours, but for the popular invented combination of letters. Such a combination where each letter is a cue to an idea you need to remember is called an acronym. LASER for Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation is another example.

(b) Acrostic: Another well-known mnemonic is the sentence, My very educated mother just showed us nine planets. Look at the first letter of each word in the sentence. We can list the nine planets in the order of their distances from the
sun, Mercury being the closest and Pluto the farthest. The others are respectively Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. This system of employing the first letter of each word to remind us of a word or an idea is sometimes referred to as an acrostic.

Pegging

First choose ten items and fix them firmly in your mind in a sequential order. For example, gun for one, shoe for two, tree for three, door for four, hive for five, and so on. Then associate each one of the words you want to memorise with your permanent pegs gun, shoe, tree, door, hive, etc. This may sound contrived, but those who have practiced this system tell that it is effective in memorising ten or twenty items in a sequential order.

Rhyming

Render the information inverse forms. It may be noted that we remember verse more easily than prose. Young kids often learn the English alphabet using a verse rhyming with the line, "Twinkle, twinkle, little star".

Chunking

Dividing the body into smaller bits for easy memorisation, as in fixing eight digit telephone numbers in your mind. It is hard for us to remember a number like 67896342. So we split it into 6789 and 6342, and commit them to memory.

There are other methods like the Roman room and Loci. Basically many of these stress on the fundamental principle of associating a new piece of information on a known thing. In any case first we should organise the material to be learnt and remembered before adopting any of these styles. Try to go from the simple to the complex. Also, you should develop a deep interest in the topic to be mastered.

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