“Indian Constitution empowers the Supreme Court to issue five types of writs. Can you tell fast what are they? Simply remember ‘CPM Head Quarters’ and the answer lies in the capital letters in it: ‘C’ stands for Certiorari, ‘P’ stands for Prohibition, ‘M’ for Mandamus, ‘H’ for Habeus Corpus and ‘Q’ stands for Quo Warranto.’’
Mr A. Nasim, Deputy Superintendent of Police (Special Branch) in Pathanamthitta has got hundreds of such coinages in his treasury of Mnemonics.
To the 50 Scheduled Caste candidates preparing for the PSC examinations, the two-hour lecture on memory tricks by the police official, organised by Pathanamthitta Employment Exchange, was a memorable experience.
The DySP who has developed his own tricks of Mnemonics also taught them how to remember answers to various questions relating to the national highways in the State, number of players in various international games, headquarters of various international organisations, important dates to remember, etc, showing them that there is no need to “waste time and mug up all these datas.’’
Instead, they can easily remember various information through stories and interesting coinages of words and phrases.
We can store any number of images and data in our brain. But, often we find ourselves at loss to retrieve them owing to absence of its proper cataloguing, says Mr Nasim.
He said the human memory was far better at storing images and stories than dry facts or figures. We have to interact with the images which we wanted to remember. Associating images with imagination is the easy way to remember things which we often find difficult to mug up, he adds.
Mr. Nasim is a post-graduate in Commerce (Kerala University) and Police Administration (Annamalai University). Taking classes on Mnemonics for school children, and candidates for various competitive examinations is his hobby.
According to him, Mnemonic’ is another word for memory tools used as techniques for remembering information that is otherwise quite difficult to recall.
Imagination and association are two parts of the memory Encoding difficult-to-remember information in a way that is much easier to remember is the very idea behind the behind it, says he.
