6 Mnemonic Techniques To Help You Remember Information

I’ve talked about strategies to help you transfer information from your working memory to your long-term memory in another article, so let’s focus on a few mnemonic techniques you can use to assist that process – and the subsequent recall of that information.

For those not familiar with the term, a mnemonic is “any learning technique that aids information retention or retrieval (remembering) in the human memory.”

Many people will already know a few mnemonics, maybe without realizing that’s what they are.

Mnemonics (which is a broader term for the study and development of specific mnemonics and “brain hacks”) is a large topic, so I’ll provide an introduction here to some of the most popular techniques.

Acronyms / Initialisms

These are some of the simplest techniques, and ones that you may be using already.

Here’s one that most people will know, to help them remember the notes on the lines of a treble clef: Every Good Boy Deserves Fruit. (This is one of many variations on the same theme.)

And the way it works is simple – you take a list of things you need to remember (often but not necessarily in sequence), and you use those to create a sentence or phrase, where each letter starts with one of the letters from the list of what you need to remember.

Here’s another example, to help you remember the order of the planets in our solar system: My Very Excellent Mother Just Served Us Nine Pizzas.

Of course, you still need to know the names of the planets (i.e. Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto), but the mnemonic means you will never forget the order, from the sun outwards, again.

The sentence you come up with does not need to make a lot of sense – and, in fact, the more creative and bizarre it is, the better you will remember it.

This technique is perfect for shorter lists, but less suited for longer lists, because the sentence you would come up with might be overly complex.

Rhymes

Again, you probably already know at least a couple of these:

Thirty days have November,
April, June, and September.
With 28 there is but one.
All the rest have thirty-one

…and:

i before e except after c

These are not exactly great poems, but the rhyming components are what make these work so well.

Having said that, these are often hard to come up with, and are not as generically useful as some of the other systems I’ll come to next.

Link Method

Humans love stories, and this method takes full advantage of this fact.

You would typically use the Link Method when you have a list of things you need to remember (e.g. a shopping list or list of errands).

Here’s how it might work if your shopping list consisted of a loaf of bread, a pint of milk, a bottle of laundry detergent, a water bowl for the dog, and a pair of socks:

1. You start with the first item on the list, the loaf.
2. You then link that first item to the next item, so you might picture (I’ll talk more about this later on) the loaf of bread transforming into a giant milk bottle.
3. You then continue the story by linking the next item, so you could picture pouring the contents of your giant milk bottle into your washing machine, where magically it is now laundry detergent.
4. Next, you would link in the water bowl, so you might picture a top-loading washing machine shrinking down to the size of a dog’s water bowl, so that your dog can take a drink.
5. And lastly, you might imagine that, while your dog is drinking the water, a multi-coloured sock appears on each of his ears.

This is a somewhat trivial example of course, because five items is not a particularly long list, but it should be enough to convey the general principle being used.

There are a few things you’ll notice here:

1. The more bizarre the mental image, the easier it will be to remember.
2. You can and should dramatically change the size of items.
3. Nothing needs to make logical sense.
4. Your story does not need to be physically possible.
5. This method, like the following ones, relies on your ability to create vivid mental images – the more clearly you can see these items in your mind as you create the story, the better.

(These points are also relevant to the techniques described further down.)

The Link Method works best for relatively short lists (e.g. up to 20 items), although with practise the size of the list can be expanded.

It’s a great technique because it’s easy – you can even teach it to young children, because they naturally have a great imagination anyway – which makes it perfect if you ever play Kim’s Game.

There are, of course, two minor problems with this system:

1. You need to remember the first item on your list, otherwise you cannot continue your imaginary story to retrieve the remaining items on the list.
2. If you forget one link in the chain, you cannot then access anything further down the list.

But don’t worry – I will address these shortcomings in another technique, after this next system.

The Figure Alphabet

The List Method we just looked at is great for remembering items on a list that are somewhat tangible (e.g. things you need to buy, or even jobs you need to do), but it’s a bit more difficult when the item you need to remember is intangible (e.g. a phone number or historical date).

And that’s where the Figure Alphabet comes in.

This system, first developed over 300 years ago, allows you to remember numerical information by converting digits to consonant sounds, following a predefined set of rules.

There are a few other simple rules you should follow:

1. The vowels (i.e. “a”, “e”, “i”, “o” and “u”) are completely ignored in the phonetic alphabet, as are the letters “h”, “w” and “y”.
2. The system works by converting a number to its consonant sounds, inserting vowels and other “silent” consonants in the appropriate places, to form words. These words are then linked using association techniques to the original object.
3. The system works phonetically (i.e. it is based on sounds and not actual, letter for letter spelling).
4. Silent letters are ignored (e.g. the letter “k” in the word “knee” is silent, and therefore does not count).
5. Double letters in words are usually treated as a single letter (e.g. the word “patter” translates to “914”, not “9114”, since the double letter “t” makes the sound of a single letter “t”). There are exceptions to this, as in, for example, the word “accident”, where the first letter “c” has the sound of a “k” and therefore transposes to the number “7”, whilst the second letter “c” has the sound of an “s” and therefore transposes to the number “0”.
6. The system is most effective when it is highly personalised (i.e. use the mnemonics that are most vivid to you).
7. It doesn’t matter if you are a good speller or not – as long as you always spell (or pronounce) a word in the same way.

At first, I accept that this system seems complicated, but you can learn it in less than an hour – I know, I have taught many people this in the past.

So, how do you use it?

Let’s take a couple of simple examples:

1. If you want to remember the year the RMS Titanic sank, you would take the digits 1912, and convert them to consonant sounds, which would give you D or T, followed by B or P, followed by D or T again, followed by N. You would then insert appropriate vowel sounds (or silent consonants), and you might come up with the two words “deep down”. When you later picture the Titanic sinking deep down, you can easily translate those two words back to their numerical equivalents, which would be 1912.
2. When I was younger (I’m talking about over 40 years ago now), I needed to remember my grandparent’s phone number, which was 42209. (This was in England, where some numbers were still very short.) I converted that to consonant sounds, i.e. R / N / N / C, S or Z / B or P, and added vowels. The silly little phrase I came up with from that was runny nose pie, which I know is gross, but my grandma suffered from atherosclerosis, which had effects similar to Alzheimer’s, so she wasn’t always fully aware of what she was doing. All I needed to do when I needed to call them (this was before the days when you could program numbers into you phone) was imagine my nana baking a runny nose pie, and their phone number, 42209, popped into my head immediately. And the fact I still remember this number and the mnemonic over four decades later shows how effective this technique can be.

Here’s a key point about this method – while a set of numbers may translate to any one of a number of words or phrases, one word or phrase can only ever translate back to one number.

For example, any of the following words can represent the number 17:

• dock
• dog
• dyke
• tag
• toke
• toque
• tug

Which one you use will depend on what you’re trying to remember, and what is most appropriate. Going back to the Titanic example from above, 1912 could also be represented by the words “taupe town”, but it is nowhere near as fitting as “deep down”.

However, whichever word you use from the above list of seven possibilities, they all can only translate back to the number 17.

And this is good news, because it allows flexibility when remembering numbers, but no chance of error when going back the other way.

The Figure Alphabet (of which there are several variations – the one shown above is the version I learned when I was eight) is a very versatile system, and it acquires even more power combined with the next technique.

The Peg Method

One of the best ways to remember something is by associating the new information with something you already know.

And that’s what the Peg Method does – it’s a sort of combination of the Link Method and the Figure Alphabet.

Why do we need it?

Well, as we saw, the Link Method is great for shortish lists where the order is important – because if you forget one of the links in the chain, everything after that point is list too.

The Peg Method allows you to remember things out of order too, and is better for much longer lists.

There are a couple of steps to this system:

1. You need to start by learning a list of “keywords”. These are words you create, using the Figure Alphabet, for each number from 1 – 100, say. For example, the word for 1 might be “tie”, while the word for 100 might be “disease”. It’s important to note that you only need to do this step once – when you have your list of keywords, which can be as short or long as you want, you are done with this step, because these keywords are reusable every time you wish to use the Peg Method.
2. When you need to remember items, you associate an image of that item to its position in the list. So, if the tenth item you had to remember was an orange, you might picture your toes (because “toes” is a good keyword for the number ten) having an orange in place of your toenails. Let’s do another example – if the 25th item was a comb, then a keyword for 25 might be “nail”, so you might imagine that your comb has six-inch nails in place of the teeth you would usually see on a comb.

Later on, you can use these associations in two ways:

1. If you need to know which item is in tenth place on your list, you would recall that your keyword for the number ten is the word “toes”, and then you would remember that each of your toenails has been changed into an orange.
2. If you need to know where on your list the comb was, you would recall that the comb has giant nails in place of the teeth, and “nail” is the keyword for 25.

Yes, it sounds convoluted, but it’s a very flexible system once you learn how to use it correctly. For example, you could use this to remember the order of a shuffled deck of playing cards – the word record is a staggering 13.96 seconds (at the time of writing this). I don’t know whether Zou Lujian used this technique, or something else, but it shows what is possible once you are able to train your memory. (My best time was just under three minutes, by comparison.)

I learned my list of keywords from 1 – 100 when I was in my teens, and I still know them 40+ years later.

Memory Palace

There is one more technique I’m going to talk about, and it dates back to ancient Greek times. It used to be known as the Loci System, but these days it’s more commonly known as the Memory Palace.

A variation of this system was made popular by the eight-time World Memory Champion, Dominic O’Brien, who once memorized 54 decks of cards in sequence (that’s 2,808 cards), viewing each card only once.

So, what is this system?

In essence, it involves learning a predefined sequence of things that are familiar to you (e.g. the rooms in your house, your route to work).

You then associate each item you wish to remember with one of the “rooms” in your memory palace.

In essence, it’s a bit like the Peg Method, but in place of using keywords as your “anchor points”, you use places you are familiar with.

To be honest, this is not a technique I found that helpful to me. Maybe that’s because by the time I heard of this method, I had already been using the Figure Alphabet and Peg Method for years, or maybe it’s to do with how my brain works (or doesn’t work).

But you certainly cannot argue with its effectiveness when you see what the likes of Dominic O’Brien can achieve!

A Few Hints And Tips

1. You will probably need to read the above a few times – the techniques are simple to use but can be difficult to get your head around at first because they are somewhat indirect and there are multiple steps involved.
2. Whatever system you use, remember that it’s highly personal and the precise details do not need to be revealed to anybody else, ever. For example, there is a man I used to work with whose internal phone extension was 4077; the words I came up with for this man’s number were rude and possibly offensive – but nobody had to know the details, and again I still remember it even though I’ve not worked at that company for over 14 years.
3. These methods are often only required as crutches – just like you use a crutch until your broken leg is healed, you only need some mnemonics for a short while, until the information becomes an integrated part of your long-term memory.
4. While it may seem like these are only good for “party tricks”, mnemonics are a serious tool, used by people in all walks of life. For example, medical students use mnemonics to help them remember parts of the body, and other information related to their speciality. One man once memorized all the symbols for all of the companies on the New York Stock Exchange, because he thought (correctly, as it turned out), that it would help land him a job there. When I was in the office, my boss often used to ask did I know somebody’s internal phone number, and without fail, I was able to tell him instantly – because I’d memorized the numbers of the people we both worked with in that building, which did wonders for my reputation (and it didn’t hurt at annual review time either).
5. Be aware that sometimes, forgetting can be difficult using these systems. Some things, you do want to become lifelong knowledge, but do you really need to remember your shopping list after you’ve purchased all the items on it? So, just be careful when going over your list of keywords that you are not recalling details from a previous time. One way around this is to have multiple lists (e.g. of peg words or memory palaces), although this is more work, of course.
6. Don’t worry too much about the details – your natural memory will assist you here, without having to create a highly intricate and specific mental image. For example, during a performance once, I was asked to remember the phrase “hyperbolic paraboloid roof”, but all I chose to associate with my keyword was the word “roof” – because I knew the additional details would come back to me when I recalled the “image” of the roof.

What If You Cannot Create Mental Images?

Now, you will have noticed that the above techniques rely heavily on creating mental images (e.g. of associations between items).

But what if you’re one of the 3% or so of people who simply cannot visualize anything (a condition known as aphantasia, by the way)?

Well, I have that condition – my mind’s eye is as blind as the proverbial bat. Yes, I see vivid images when I dream, but I cannot create a mental image of anything on demand, no matter how familiar I am with that object.

The good news is, this does not prevent me from using mnemonic techniques – as I have been for over 50 years now.

The bad news is, it does make it a little bit harder and, perhaps, slower.

But that shouldn’t stop you from learning and using these techniques – they still have plenty of benefits to offer.

Conclusion

As you may have noticed from this article, mnemonics has been pretty much a lifelong passion of mine – not just because I have been able to use them as, literally, party tricks (and during my time as a magician), but also because they are truly useful.

Once you start using them yourself, and you see how beneficial they can be, you too might become as hooked as I am.

And all of these, even the more complicated ones, can be taught to children too, because you can easily turn them into games (perhaps with prizes too).

Additional Resources

These are suggestions for those who wish to delve deeper into any of the above:

1. Memory Books by Dominic O’Brien
2. Mnemonic Generator
3. The Memory Book