When you walk into any bookshop, you’ll find many self-help books that encourage using mnemonics as a memory improvement technique. Mnemonics is a study technique that utilizes just about anything that can help you remember or recall just about, well, anything. One way of doing this is by assigning images to certain information you want to learn or memorize. Let’s try something fun that will help you see just how powerful mnemonics can be in terms of accelerating your learning process.
Let’s try to learn the alphabet backwards:
Z Y X W V U T S R Q P O N M L K J I H G F E D C B A. You could do your best by simply memorizing the whole thing, which may seem a bit daunting at first. Rightly so because you’re probably looking at the reverse alphabet as a whole and thinking to yourself how on earth will you be able to memorize all of it in one fell swoop? I’m actually hoping you felt that way so that you’ll be able to appreciate the following mnemonic techniques better, which can help you memorize the whole thing in 5 minutes or less.
CHUNKING
Chunking means grouping several of the letters into more manageable chunks of, say, 3 to 4 letters. It’s no different from having to cut your favorite fillet mignon into smaller pieces before eating them as swallowing the whole thing can be fatal. Or like the way telephone numbers – especially those with area codes – are chunked together. Chunking the reverse alphabet would look like this: ZYXW VUTS RQP ONM LKJ IHG FED CBA
GRAPHICS
There’s much truth to the saying that a picture paints a thousand words. Our minds think in pictures and can process them faster, particularly attaching your short-term memory, which in this case is studying the alphabet backwards, to an already existing idea or mental peg in your long-term memory. Simply put,learning in pictures is easier. So how do you use graphics? Associate each of the letters with a picture in your mind – the crazier the better. Why? The crazier it is, the more memorable it becomes and the better your mind is able to retain it. For example, you can associate an electric guitar-wailing zebra to the letter Z. How’s that for crazy huh? Do the same for all the other letters and see if you don’t memorize the whole thing better and faster.
You can use mnemonics to assign passwords that are very hard for hackers to figure out but easy for you to remember. You can think of key sentences and use the first letters of each word as a mnemonic cue for your password.
● I Love My Wife Very Much = ilmwvm or 1LMWVM
● My Dog’s Name Is Barkley = mdn1b
● Psalms Is My Favorite Book In The Bible = p1mfb1tb
