the number to 70,000 decimal places.
14
Master mnemonicists, who compete
in championships of memory, can memorize the order of a deck of cards in
under sixty seconds and can repeat a poem verbatim after only a minute or
two of studying. These feats are quite impressive, and even better, they can
be learned by anyone patient enough to apply them. How do they work?
One common, and useful, mnemonic is known as the keyword method.
The method works by first taking a foreign-language word and converting it
into something it sounds like in your native language. If I were doing this
with French, for example, I might take the word
chavirer
(to capsize) and
convert it into “shave an ear,” to which it is close enough in sound for the
latter to serve as an effective cue for recalling the original word. Next I create
a mental image that combines the sounds-like version of the foreign word and
an image of its translation in a fantastical and vivid setting that is bizarre and
hard to forget. In this case, I could imagine a giant ear shaving a long beard
while sitting in a boat that capsizes. Then, whenever I need
to remember what
“capsize” is in French, I think of capsizing,
recall my elaborate picture, which
links to “shaving an ear” and thus . . .
chavirer
. This process sounds
needlessly complicated and elaborate at first, but it benefits from converting a
difficult association (between arbitrary sounds and a new meaning) into a few
links that are much easier to associate and remember. With practice, each
conversion of this type may take only fifteen to twenty seconds, and it really
does help with remembering foreign-language words. This particular kind of
mnemonic works for this purpose, but there are others that work for
remembering lists, numbers, maps, or sequences of steps in a procedure. For
a good introduction to this topic, I highly recommend Joshua Foer’s book
Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering
Everything
.
Mnemonics work well, and with practice, anyone can do them. Why, then,
are they not front and center in this chapter, instead of at the end? I believe
that mnemonics, like SRS, are incredibly powerful tools. And as tools, they
can open new possibilities for people who are not familiar with them.
However, as someone who has spent much time exploring them and applying
them to real-world learning, their applications are quite a bit narrower than
they first appear, and in many real-world settings they simply aren’t worth
the hassle.
I believe there are two disadvantages to mnemonics. The first is that the
most impressive mnemonics systems (like the one for memorizing thousands
of digits of the mathematical constant
pi
), also require a considerable up-front
investment. After you’re done, you can memorize digits easily, but this isn’t
actually a very useful task. Most of our society adapts around the fact that
people generally cannot memorize digits, so we have paper and computers do
it for us. The second disadvantage is that recalling from mnemonics is often
not as automatic as directly remembering something. Knowing a mnemonic
for a foreign-language word is better than failing to remember it entirely, but
it’s still too slow to allow you to fluently form sentences out of mnemonically
remembered words. Thus mnemonics can act as a bridge for difficult-to-
remember information, but it’s usually not the final step in creating memories
that will endure forever.
Mnemonics, therefore, are an incredibly powerful if somewhat brittle tool.
If you are doing a task that requires memorizing highly dense information in
a very specific format, especially if the information is going to be used over a
few weeks or months, they can enable you to do things with your mind that
you might not have thought possible. Alternatively, they can be used as an
intermediate strategy to smooth initial information acquisition when the
information is quite dense. I’ve found them useful for language learning and
terminology, and, paired with SRS, they can form an effective bridge from
feeling as though there’s no way you can possibly remember everything to
remembering it so deeply that you can’t possibly forget. Indeed, in a world
before paper, computers, and other externalized memories, mnemonics were
the main game in town. However, in the modern world, which has developed
excellent coping mechanisms for the fact that most people cannot remember
things as a computer can, I feel that mnemonics tend to serve more as cool
tricks than as a foundation you should base your learning efforts on. Still,
there is a devoted subset of ultralearners who are fiercely committed to
applying
these techniques, so my word shouldn’t be the final verdict.
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