Photos: Depositphotos / Illustration: Yulia Zamzhitskaya
“Scarlet Waltz. Flies from the ravine Copper farewells, grass finale. Gray clay, anxiety, ceremony, silence. The slate depths of leaf fall Fall into giant arcades..."
No, this is not a masterpiece of Silver Age poetry, but a mnemonic rule for remembering amino acids. The words in the poem begin with the same letter as the name of the amino acid: from alanine to histidine to arginine - yes, these are the names of amino acids. It becomes clear why memorization techniques were needed and that “slate” is not the worst word.
Every teacher has his own favorite mnemonic rules: they are learned from colleagues, invented together with students, and some are passed down from generation to generation for decades. Let's remember the techniques with which you can move away from cramming rules and concepts.
Rhyme
At school we were taught to memorize not long complex rules, but short rhythmic rhymes. This also works in adulthood. If you can’t rhyme the information you need, you can select lines and phrases rhythmically, and also combine them with the motive of your favorite song.
The technique is suitable if you need to remember a sequence of numbers that are not related to each other (for example, the number of a bank card or a friend’s car, a telephone number or a combination for an intercom).
Example:
We need to remember the phone number 151-46-63. The last number is three, so you need to find a rhyme for it, for example, “speak.” The result will be a rhyme like this:
“One, five, one, four, six, six, three. Do not tell anybody".
Use abbreviations
In life, we often use various letter abbreviations that we associate with the full name. The method, when only the first letter or part remains of each word, is suitable for memorizing long phrases, names, terms, the components of which are not logically connected.
Example:
We need to remember the list of products that we need to buy on the way home: apples, mayonnaise, oranges, tomatoes, bleach, arugula. To do this, you can group words into several abbreviations that are easy to remember. For example, it might look like this: MOUTH and PIT.
If the list is a little shorter, you can use parts of words rather than letters to form a memorable word. So, if you need to remember the words “pasta” and “lemon,” you can add the first syllables of the words and remember them as LIMA. Association with the capital of Peru will allow you to quickly remember what exactly you need to take in the store.
What is mnemonics?
Mnemonics or mnemonics
- These are specially developed techniques and methods that make it easier to memorize certain types of information. In some textbooks and courses, authors use the term “mnemonics” to denote the entire set of techniques and methods for memorizing information used for certain data, and the term “mnemonics” is interpreted as the practical application of methods defined for a given specific mnemonics.
The main principle of any mnemonics is the replacement of abstract objects with concepts that have a visual, auditory or, less often, other sensory representation, linking objects with existing information (building associations) to simplify its memorization.
Come up with associations
If you have well-developed imaginative thinking, this technique will be the most effective and interesting. It consists of coming up with an association between several words, objects or facts that, at first glance, have nothing in common with each other. Use your imagination, because the association can and should be unusual and even absurd - this way you will better remember the necessary information.
Here you can use images of relatives, singers, actors, artists, directors and all those who are firmly entrenched in our minds.
Example:
You just can’t remember the name of your new neighbor in the country. Outwardly, he reminds you of your cousin and has the same name. Come up with and remember the following association: “This neighbor is like a brother to me.” Next time, your brain itself will give you the name you need through association - it will be enough just to think about your brother when you meet your neighbor again.
Memory training
Daily training is necessary not only for muscles, but also for memory. The more intensely you strain your brain, forcing it to work, the more your ability to analyze and remember information increases. Such exercises destroy mental routine and stimulate the emergence and development of new paths.
Basic requirements for exercises for brain and memory training:
- Complexity.
The task should provide new knowledge and cause mental effort. You can start learning a foreign language, learn to play a musical instrument, or learn how to solve Sudoku.
- Novelty.
If an activity is familiar and has already been practiced, then it will be of no use, even if it is difficult and intellectually exhausting. In order for memory and intelligence to develop, it is necessary to get out of the usual circle and occupy yourself with something new and unknown.
- Interest.
It is recommended to choose tasks that are exciting so that you don’t feel the urge to abandon them after a couple of days. The training should be challenging, but the desire to do it should not disappear any longer.
Use Cicero's method
This method continues the technique of creating associations and is suitable when you need to remember a daily routine, a piece of text, a list of phone calls - any sequence.
The Roman orator Cicero, who is famous for his speeches, did not use notes when speaking to the public. He reproduced historical dates, names and quotes from memory. The following method helped him in this: the speaker mentally arranged the units that needed to be remembered in a well-known room in a certain order. During his speech, Cicero imagined the room and easily remembered the necessary names and dates.
The method is also called the place method or the Roman room method.
Example:
You need to remember the sequence of words: puppy, cheese, ruler, plasticine, puddle. Mentally, you imagine your room, in which you know every detail, and walk through it, sorting through the objects one by one:
“There is a puppy sitting in front of the room. I go inside and to the left of the door I see a chest of drawers with a cheese sandwich on it. I pass by the chest of drawers and see a desk, and on it there is a yellow ruler, it immediately catches my eye. I move on, approach the window and see a plasticine figure on the windowsill. Turning it over in my hands, I head to the exit of the room and pass by a sofa, the wooden legs of which are swollen from water, as it is standing in a puddle.”
Development of a system for mnemonic memorization of numbers
Quite a long time ago I set myself the goal of learning to memorize numbers, mainly just as a task for self-development; I did not find any obvious practical benefit. However, I want to remember phone numbers, transport routes, dates. It was difficult for me to find and start using a ready-made solution, but I wanted to work on my own.
- Prerequisites
- How to check if the system is good?
- Checking several systems
- How to create a better system
- Repository link and afterword
- Mnemonics are a method of remembering using chains of associations. The most convenient way to remember chains of words is by imagining each word as an image and linking them together. The brain remembers such graphic-spatial information more easily. For example, you can memorize key words from each abstract for a report. At the same time, it is important to choose the images correctly; they must be of the same order and not too abstract, otherwise their interaction will not be so colorful and will be difficult to remember.
- To remember numbers, numbers are encoded with letters - each number is associated with several vowels, usually from 1 to 3. Two- and three-digit numbers are encoded in one word of two and three syllables, respectively. Or, more precisely, two or three occurrences of vowels; there may be only one syllable. For example, if 1 is D, 2 is P, then 11 is grandfather, 12 is depot, and 22 is just a butt.
- Thus, to quickly memorize numbers, you need to know by heart which numbers correspond to which letters and come up with words and link them into chains.
- In practice, coming up with words each time is slow, so you need to learn 100 words for numbers from 0 to 99. Professionals sometimes know words up to numbers up to 999.
- At the same time, for some reason, the mnemonic systems that I found use such correspondences that it is difficult to come up with words, and not very easy to remember either. They use letters that sound or spell like numbers to make the correspondence easier to remember. Although it doesn’t get any easier, because... 1-2 numbers are not similar, but there are many options for “similarity”.
- I would like to separately note that I did not undertake to use the mnemonic system in English, because it seemed to me that my knowledge of the language was not enough; after all, I cannot think quickly in it.
- So the question arises, is it possible to choose more convenient matches? It was planned to use exhaustive search or machine learning methods for selection.
Since I consider the main disadvantage of the systems found to be the difficulty of composing words for some numbers, I would like to count the number of words.
Instead of using any book, I used a ready-made frequency dictionary. The dictionary is based on the national corpus of the Russian language, which, in turn, includes an analysis of many books and poems of different genres.
The frequency dictionary is available as a csv file, which I decided to analyze. Below are screenshots from the Jupyter Notebook; for those interested, there is a link to github at the end of the article.
As you can see, the data contains:
- the word itself (lemma)
- part of speech designation
- four frequency metrics described in the introduction to the dictionary
I chose one frequency metric because I only care about ranking. Through trial and error, it turned out that the nouns are “s”.
That leaves two columns and 22,050 words.
However, among these words there are many that I do not know. In addition, I don’t want “rare” letters to be the main ones in the code, so I decided to select words that do not have such rare letters. As it turned out later, the idea was not very workable, but still.
Having chosen “simple” and “complex” letters, let’s count their number. In addition, we will display the total number of consonants in the word.
Note:
- allchars corresponds to the number of digits that can be encrypted with this word
- chars is something that can be directly mapped to a number if you have the appropriate mapping (I'm on purpose)
- this code is the only one in this article that does not work “instantly”, but takes about 10 seconds; I didn't think about how to do it faster
Next, I thought that I needed to select words with 2-3 consonants, without “complex” letters, and also choose those that I know. You can cut off the list sorted by frequency at your discretion. As I later found out, this idea is also not very good, because... The distribution of words is uneven: after all, among the rare words there are many well-known ones.
Anyway, 2500 words were included in the “good” words, since I don’t know what tape and spud are. Of these, 707 words encoded numbers from 10 to 99 and 1,793 numbers from 100 to 999. It should be noted that 707 words are not that much for 90 numbers, less than 10 words per number, and this includes abstract and unknowns.
Next I set the following functions:
- getallcombos recursively counts all combinations that can be used to encode a number using mapping (dictionary number: letters) (ns - number as a string); returns a list of combinations
- testmaping checks how many words from words_for_test (DataFrame with our columns, including chars - only consonants) can encode numbers from 10 to 100 according to the provided mapping; returns a list with the number of words for each number
- testresult prints some statistics; Taking into account the experience in preparation, for the article I left only the line with “0-5 words”, which shows how many numbers were encoded with 0 words, how many with only 1 word, etc.
Thus, to check any mapping, it is enough to set it and call the testing function.
The first system I came across was Giordano. Many mobile applications for teaching mnemonics are based on it, and it is also mentioned on the Internet, see, for example, here.
She was the one who seemed difficult to work with. Try, for example, to come up with words for 84 or 11. I note that in the applications there are ready-made images for numbers, but then you need to remember exactly them, a hundred of them. In this case, there is another option to remember some of your own, close images.
Anyway, the test results are:
The results for all words are difficult to immediately interpret, but for “simple” words it is clear that for 22 numbers there is not a single word at all.
Another mapping, based on which letter the name of the number begins with, is given on one self-development site. Let's check:
As you can see, it has become much worse; there are no words at all for 8 digits. I note that, for example, there are few words where there are only two consonant letters R. But it is even more a bad idea to use only rare letters like Ш and Ш for the code.
In the process of selecting a better system, the following steps included:
- [0, 4, 7, 11, 15] Our baseline from the Giordano system
- Think about a brute force or machine learning algorithm. I didn't come up with this and decided it was better to adjust based on the frequency of occurrence of the letters.
- [4, 8, 11, 15, 19] First, I took all the popular letters and coded them. I did not use the letters ФЧШШЧ.
- [1, 1, 5, 5, 7] Added all letters. It has already become somewhat better, but there are still numbers that cannot be encoded, this is an unacceptable deterioration.
- [1, 2, 5, 9, 16] I had previously used the frequency of letters from the Internet, but then I decided to calculate it myself in the corpus, rearranged the letters, it didn’t get any better.
- [0, 0, 1, 3, 5] And then I realized the now obvious thing. Have you guessed it?
I realized that it is not the frequency of occurrence of letters in a word as a whole that is important, but the frequency of their occurrence in 1st and 2nd places in a word (for encoding two-digit numbers). It is necessary that for each number there are such letters that the probability of finding one of these letters at the beginning or at the end of the word is the same.
We count frequencies in 1st place, 2nd place and 2 places at once:
It then seemed easier to me to copy the output into a spreadsheet editor and select a cipher so that the frequencies were distributed as evenly as possible between the encoded digits.
Let's look at the result:
As you can see, for “simple” words there are still uncodable letters. For example, because no word contains PP, and the letter CH was not in “simple” words. In the end, I decided that it would be more correct to count by all letters.
Let's look at the words that were included in the final list for some numbers:
As you can see, the actual words fit somewhat less. We cannot use despondency, war, guilt, stench, wind, new, new, and also words that we do not know. However, there are still many good words for all numbers, including three-digit numbers.
The laptop code, data and article text are here: Github
I hope you liked it, and I will also be glad to receive advice:
- how do you remember numbers?
- how to make a complete search of valid mapping options?
- how to quickly master the method?
- Please write in private messages about typos and possible improvements in the design of the article.
Use the Aivazovsky method
Using this method, which is attributed to the famous marine painter, you can connect photographic memory. She will come to the rescue when you need to remember in the smallest detail any view, picture or image of a loved one.
Look at an object, landscape or person for three to five seconds, trying to remember the details. Then close your eyes and mentally imagine the object in the smallest detail. Ask yourself questions about the details of this image and mentally answer. Then open your eyes for one second, look at the object again and complete the image. Squint your eyes and try to achieve the brightest possible image of the object. Repeat the last two steps several times.
Practice visualization
The technique will allow you to remember numbers and names well. To do this, you need to figuratively, in detail, imagine the information being remembered.
Example:
You need to remember the name. Imagine each of its letters: they are covered with ivy, some have flowers growing on them, and so on. How many letters are there in total? Recalculate. Which one is the first? What is the second one like, what does it look like? As a result, you will be able to break information down into components and remember each one. And when the brain receives a request on this topic, it will simply put together the puzzle.
