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GUIDANCE PLUS

Your guide to total recall

Memorising lessons could be child's play with the techniques of acronyms, acrostics, rhyming ...

I HAD indicated certain memory techniques such as the use of acronyms and acrostics in my series on essay-type examinations. There are other techniques such as rhyming, loci method, chunking, and pegging.

Acronyms

In acronyms, we use each first letter from a group of words to form a word that may be an artificial one. LASER for Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation is an example. You should remember that though acronyms are good memory aids, they do not help comprehension or appreciation of the subject content. Sometimes it may be difficult to make easy-to-remember acronyms. Further, you may even forget the acronym. Remember the old man who made knots in his clothes to remind him of the items to be bought from the market, but forgot the items represented by each knot, while he stood before the vendor.

Acrostics

In an acrostic, you make a sentence instead of an artificial word. Acrostics help to remember a number of items in a specific order. "My very educated mother just showed us nine planets" helps you remember the names of the nine planets in the order of their distances from the sun: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune and Pluto.

See another example, one from biology. The wide variety of organisms in a kingdom, subdivided into subgroups and arranged from the largest to the smallest would read like this:

Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Family, Genus, Species

These can be remembered using this sentence: King Phyl Came Over For Good Spaghetti.

Compared to acrostics, acronyms are more easily made. However, acrostics also suffer from the drawback that they do not aid understanding.

Rhyming

We remember verse better than prose. Most of us can recollect some of the poems we learnt in the elementary school, since they rhymed and perhaps could be sung as songs. Almost all the books on religion and science in ancient India were in the verse form, permitting easy memorisation in an age in which there was no printing.

It is a good idea to convert important points into a line with rhymes. You know how nursery teachers teach the tiny-tots the sequence of the alphabet by making the 26 letters rhyme with "twinkle twinkle little star," You do not have to be a great poet to draft quickly a couple of rhyming lines.

Loci method

In the loci method, you associate each item on a list with a particular location - a combination of visual memory and association. Let us say you want to remember the names of our Presidents in the chronological order. The list reads thus: Dr. Rajendra Prasad, Dr. S. Radhakrishnan, Dr. Zakir Hussain, V.V. Giri, Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed, Neelam Sanjiva Reddy, Giani Zail Singh, R. Venkataraman, Dr. S.D. Sharma, K.R. Narayanan and Dr. A.P.J. Abdul Kalam.

You want to remember the sequence. You are of course familiar with the layout of your house. Imagine that the presidents are seated in the house in the proper order. You seat Dr. Rajendra Prasad in a fine chair in the front verandah. Next to him sits Dr. Radhakrishnan with a learned philosopher's look. Then you enter the drawing room. In the first single chair sits Dr. Zakir Hussain wearing his dark glasses smiling at V.V. Giri seated next to him. At the far end of the drawing room is Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed with his Gandhi cap. In the living room coming next sits Sanjeeva Reddy with a coloured cap chatting actively with Zail Singh wearing his turban. The other eminent men can also be imagined to be in your home in the right sequence, at predetermined locations.

You may visualise walking in your house and paying respects to the great men. In this example, you are associating each name with a specific landmark in your house.

This principle can be used effectively to help memorise names or points in a lesson, in a specific order. This method is more effective than trying to remember the names without any signpost for reference. As a part of essential drill, try to memorise a few sets initially so that the landmarks are firmly fixed in your mind. There is a variation known as the Roman Room method where you associate the items with specific objects in the house.

Chunking

This is method is useful for remembering numbers, although it can be applied for other things as well. Normally short-term memory is limited to five or six digits or items at a time. Imagine that you have to remember a telephone number with 13 digits. Instead of trying to remember all of them in one go, split it to three chunks of five, five, and three digits and try them.

Pegging

This method uses the basic principle of associating an unknown thing with a known object. First make a list of 10 or 20 convenient pegs or keywords that you can easily recall in the right sequence. For example, ant, butterfly, cat, dog, elephant, fox, giraffe, hyena, and so on. These are easily remembered since they are all living beings and their first letters follow the alphabetical order.

If you want to remember eight things in a particular order imagine funny pictures of each one of them with the first eight pegs we have fixed in our minds.

Let us say that the first three items to be remembered are clock, calculator, and measuring tape. You visualise ants moving along a clock, a butterfly fluttering with a calculator on its back, and a cat trying to unwind a measuring tape.

The more amusing the pictures, the more easily would you remember the sequence. If you make a list of twenty pegs and remember them, almost all practical requirements can be met.

The method may not sound effective to a stranger, but many memory experts have proved the singular effectiveness of this method. Some use pegs such as bun, toe, tree, door, hive, etc. to rhyme with one, two, three, four, and so on.

This is a simple yet successful method that is popular. Children often commit poems to memory by reading them over and over.

There should be some effort to over learn, since what is committed to short-term memory may not last for long.

Some people suggest a formula known by the acronym MURDER - Mood, Understand, Recall, Digest, Expand, Review.

Mood - create a positive mood for studying

Understand - learn with concentration

Recall - recall after learning each unit of the lessons

Digest - make further attempts to embed the ideas more firmly in your mind by going to further sources

Expand - Ask questions on the content and think of applications in new environments

Review - Go over the contents and the learning strategies you had adopted

B.S. WARRIER

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