Mnemonics

Remembering information when one needs it, whether it is the name of an old friend one meets on the street, the answer to a question in a game of Trivial Pursuit, or the facts needed to answer a question on an exam is a challenge all people have faced. Mnemonics are aids or techniques for organizing information and encoding information to help an individual recall it when he or she needs it. The word mnemonic is derived from the ancient Greek word mnemonikos (“of memory”), and the first reported use of mnemonics appears in Cicero's De Oratore. In Cicero's account, the poet Simonides was dining with many other guests in the home of a wealthy merchant after having recited one of his poems. During the affair, Simonides was summoned outside the banquet hall. While Simonides was outside, the roof collapsed, crushing all the guests beyond recognition, but Simonides was able to identify all the bodies by remembering where each person had been sitting. Simonides' technique came to be known as the method of loci, and it has proven to be widely applicable.

In the method of loci, an individual associates the information he or she wants to remember with a series of familiar locations, such as rooms in the individual's house or landmarks on his or her route to work. For example, when arriving at home, you might park in the garage, enter through the laundry room, proceed through the kitchen, go through your bedroom to the closet, and so forth. You use this sequence by forming a mental image of each location in the sequence and of each item of information to be remembered, and then “placing” the images for the information you want to remember in one of the locations. Later, you can retrieve the information you wanted by retracing your path, stopping at each location to pick up the needed information.

Although an individual may not be familiar with the term mnemonics or the method of loci, it is almost certain that he or she uses a number of mnemonic devices. For example, if you want to remember the number of days in July, you are likely to use the familiar poem, “Thirty days hath September, …” Your spelling may have been improved by learning “i before e except after c.” Many people learned their letters with the help of the alphabet song. A teacher may have helped you to distinguish between stalactites and stalagmites by pointing out that stalactites hang tight to the ceiling and stalagmites need all their might to grow up from the ground. If you ever wanted to be able to remember the first 15 digits of pi, you might try learning the following sentence: “Yes, I need a drink, alcoholic, of course, after the heavy sessions involving quantum mechanics.” Once you are able to remember the sentence, you simply count the number of letters in order (e.g., Yes I need = 3.14). As you can see, the use of mnemonics is pervasive, and mnemonic devices take many forms.

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