You know what I'm talking about, right? When people had to remember a list of something for a test, they'd come up with some clever sentence where the first letter of each word in the sentence corresponded to the first letter of each item in the list they wanted to recall. The ones I remember people using were for the planets and for the classifications of life. You remember that one, don't you?
King Philip Came Over And Ordered A Pizza For Lunch With Sauce.
Which, as we all know, stands for Kingdom, Phylum, Carnivore, Ostriches, Aphorisms, Oxygen, A'a, Phylum (part II), Foxtrot, Lunch, Wolfram, Species. Couldn't be simpler or more straightforward.
I always had more trouble remembering the mnemonic devices than I did whatever they were supposed to be mnemoning. Like the planets. When people were like, oh, you should just use the mnemonic device, I'd be like, okay, let's see - My Very Something Mother....um...alright, I know it's some kind of mother, so, hmm, what's a good adjective that could stand for Earth...? The whole point of the device was lost on me, because I was forced to use reverse mnemonification to reconstruct it.
I think that was largely because the devices always seemed so random. I mean, who's King Philip? Why was he coming over again? And what in the world does that have to do with genuses? If you're going to take the time to memorize something, why not just remember what you actually need to know, instead of going through the rigmarole of constructing some nonsense sentence that you then need to take the time to deconstruct for its first letters. Seems like a waste of time, especially in a test taking environment. No wonder our schools are doing so poorly. There's just not enough time to mnemonicize. All these kids, sitting there at test time, going, "Okay....My...Very...Elegant...Mothe..." Sorry, kid, time's up. Pencils down.
An educational system based on the mnemonic device is doomed to fail. It's time to demnemonicize our children.
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8 comments:
You accept guest bloggers? I like it.
My favorite mnemonic device that is totally stupid is for the Canadian provinces: Big Apples Shine Mostly On Quiet Nights, Probably Not Now. The fact that I remember it is only because of the many hours I spent puzzling over its meaning back in the fifth grade.
Yeah, I proposed making both of guest bloggers a while back -- I thought I signed you up to, but I'll make sure that's done.
Anyway, I always liked the King Philip one. Big Apples Shine is not so great because it's so nonsensical -- I just think BASM and then it's Ontario and then Quebec and then all the little ones that only contain adorable little fishing villages.
Point is, Joe's not the target market for mnenomic devices, since he has an uncanny ability to just remember stuff.
The only thing I want to know is, why, from a cognitive kind of standpoint, is it easier for most people to remember one set of nine words (the nonsense sentence about the planets) to get to another set of nine words (the planets)? Clearly, for the device to work, you must have stored the names of the planets somewhere in your brain. Why does the sentence allow easier access? I'd love to hear from one of our cognitive development/neuroscientist readers about that one.
Speaking as a cognitive development neuroscientist-ish person (I got a Master's in it, for what that's worth), I think it's a matter of sentences often constituting a "chunk" of information for a lot of people, whereas the nine (now eight) planets would be nine (now eight) distinct chunks of information. And the order in which those chunks would be arranged is a lot of information in itself, while the order of a sentence is in a more familiar, relatively standardized order (every sentence in English does to some extent), and thus easier to retrieve. The sentence is a more cohesive trigger that elicits the retrieval of a larger amount of information than would be quickly retrievable otherwise. That is, unless you're a memory freak like Joe.
By the way, here's a better (i.e. more internally cohesive) sentence for the Canadian provinces: Big Assholes Suck Moose Orifice Quite Nicely, Punk-ass Northern Nutjobs.
Awesome. Thanks to our cognitive/etc. readers for the quick response. I think I'm going to write another entry about having eight planets versus nine, by the way.
Joe, I totally agree. I think there's like one that worked for me, but I can't even remember. I always would end up getting to the test and remember the little mneumonic device, but then not remember what it stood for.
I think excellent intellect and memory must be genetic.
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