Use of Mnemonic Techniques

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Most people have seen movies or read books or at least heard of the famous Arthur Conan Doyles Sherlock Holmes or Agatha Christies Hercules Poirot and stood fascinated by their intellect and their stories in general. I suppose by that example was created “Mentalist” – also a detective series with lead character Patrick Jane, also a man with a great mind and intellect which leaves you with a question mark above your head. How? Aside from their excellent deductive and inductive skills as well as intuition, their ability to extract important, along with unimportant information from their “mind palace”, as Sherlock Holmes calls it, it’s rather fascinating. I have come to learn that Patrick Jane (Mentalist) and Sherlock Holmes use mnemonic strategies to remember things to solve criminal cases they are working on. Even though it sounded a bit like science fiction, given the fact I have heard of it only from the movies and series, I was intrigued and wanted to see a bit more into it.

Mnemonic techniques are strategies to improve memory, and to recall large pieces of information. “Since the ancient Greeks, mnemonic techniques have been used to facilitate accurate recollection of information when external sources of reference were unavailable.” (Yates, 1966) There are many mnemonic techniques that exist, they are only limited by the each user’s imagination. The nine basic mnemonic techniques; Music, Name, Expression/Word, Model, Ode/Rhyme, Note Organization, Image, Connection, and Spelling Mnemonics. “Of the large number of existing mnemonic strategies, one of the oldest and most effective is the Method of Loci (MOL; also known as the ‘memory palace’ technique, Spence, 1984).“ (Legge, Madan and Enoch 1) Lots of memory contest champions...

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...puters. Every new information we can store. We can search for that information anywhere because we are always connected to the internet. These days we think our phones make us smart, they are just devices that give information. We search for the information, we use it for some purpose we need, and then we just forget it. We rely too much on our technology. We should ask ourselves questions; Why don’t we improve our minds? Why we started to trust technology more than our brain? Should we do something about it? If we continue like this with technology, our brains will become useless.

Works Cited

Foer, Joshua. CNN. 11 June 2012. .

Legge, Eric L.G., et al. "Building a memory palace in minutes." Acta Psychologica (2012): 380-390.

Yates, Frances. "The Art of Memory." London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1966.

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