Lesson 2: Improving Memory - Mnemonics

Techniques for improving or enhancing memory are known as mnemonic devices (from the Greek word Mnemosyne, the goddess of memory).

Mnemonic devices

How many Mnemonics can you name?

Mnemonic devices use information that is already stored in LTM.

Acronyms

Acronyms are pronounceable words formed from the first letters of a sequence of words. The acronym doesn’t have to be a real word. An acronym is often a pronounceable abbreviation. The letters of the abbreviation act as a retrieval aid in the recall of more complex material.

Acronyms are formed using a type of chunking procedure. ANZAC, for example, is an abbreviation of ‘Australian and New Zealand Army Corps’, and EFTPOS is an abbreviation of ‘electronic funds transfer (at the) point of sale’. For both examples, the abbreviation is a pronounceable word.

What Acronyms can you think of?

Narrative Chaining

Linking otherwise unrelated items to one another (‘chaining’) to form a meaningful sequence or story (‘narrative’).

Make up a story to help remember the following words: Dog, ball, house, petrol, supermarket, party, chairs, box.

The playful dog retrieved a ball that was thrown towards a house. The owner of the property worked at a petrol station on weekdays and a supermarket on weekends. His wife was planning a party for their five-year-old son. The games planned were musical chairs, and Jack in the box.

Acrostics function by taking the first letters of each word in a sentence, or the first letter of each line in a poem, and using them to create a new word or sentence. Examples:

Acrostics

‘my very energetic mother just sits up near pop’ (Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto).

In music classes you may have learned the phrase ‘every good boy deserves fruit’. The first letters of these words are the same as the names of the musical notes on the lines of a staff (E, G, B, D, F).