Mnemonics - what are they and can they
improve your memory?

Mnemonics (pronounced "ne-mon’-ics") is the art of assisting the memory by using a system of artificial aids - rhymes, rules, phrases, diagrams, acronyms and other devices. All to help in the recall of names, dates, numbers, facts, speeches, words or any other basic information that can sometimes be difficult to recall.

You can also think of mnemonics as ways, "tricks" or methods to help you recall information. Mnemonics are simple and they help you remember by associating new information to information that you already know. The basic principle of mnemonics is to use the best functions of your brain to memorize information.

When there is something to remember you can put mnemonics to use. By doing it you are memorizing information better, faster. You are also strengthening your memory by using mnemonics and increasing your confidence in your memory.

Strengthen your memory with mnemonics

Everyone can use mnemonics to strengthen memory in various situations. When someone names you 5 words that you are expected to remember, you can make a new word from the first letters of the 5 words. Now each time you think about the new word you made, you will remember the 5 words.

Using mnemonics is useful each time you read, see or hear something that you want to remember. What you are doing with mnemonics is associating new information to something that you already know or something that is easier to remember.

Today everyone has to remember much more information than 20 years ago so it’s important to strengthen your memory with any means possible. Mnemonics are a good and simple way how to strengthen your memory.

Can you master the art of using mnemonics and strengthen your memory? Yes! You can even do much more than that. By using mnemonics you can remember basic information much faster and better than without them.

Remember complicated information quickly

Mnemonics are powerful memory tools but it’s hard to find good information about how to use them. Most information that can be found is biased and instead of educating you about mnemonics, it rather confuses you.

This page doesn’t overcomplicate things and doesn’t make using mnemonics look harder than it is. Mnemonics are after all tools to help you remember not to confuse you. Here you will learn how mnemonics can be used to remember words and numbers and you’ll also learn how to expand your knowledge about mnemonics even further.

You can be really good at applying mnemonics to remember information that you need to remember every day. You just need to practice using them. By practicing you can soon find yourself memorizing complicated information without even noticing that you’re using mnemonics.

Memory experts use mnemonics when performing memory stunts since they need a memory tool that allows them to effectively remember new information instantly. What they do is associate new information to information that they already know or convert new information to something that is easier to remember.

How to remember words with mnemonics

When someone names you many words that you are expected to remember you can use mnemonics to strengthen your memory. What you could do is forming a new word from the first letters of the original words. Now when you think of the new word you formed you instantly get reminded about the five words you needed to remember.

Students use this technique by picturing homes on a great lake to help themselves remember that the five Great Lakes are Huron, Ontario, Michigan, Erie, and Superior. Others picture a quartet being stabbed (stab gives you the initial letters of soprano, tenor, alto and bass).

How to remember numbers with mnemonics

We use numbers every day and they are very important but they are also one of the hardest things that we have to remember. Using mnemonics you help your memory to remember numbers.

Here you will learn how to memorize first 15 digits for number Pi - which is the ratio between a circle’s circumference and its diameter. You will remember it with mnemonic called "word-length mnemonic" in which the number of letters in each word corresponds to a digit.

The first 15 digits of Pi are 3.14159265358979. You can easily memorize this number by memorizing the text in quotes:

"How I like a drink, alcoholic of course,
after the heavy lectures involving quantum mechanics."

Another good mnemonic technique to help you remember numbers is substituting each digit of number with a one of 3 letters that are written on the phone digit buttons.

Discover the truth about mnemonics

While mnemonics are good to remember basic information there are many limitations with them and they are not effective for more complicated memory tasks. They can also sometimes be pretty cumbersome to use and you can’t apply them to many memory tasks.

There are much better and advanced memory techniques than mnemonics that you can use to remember complicated information much better and faster.

By using mnemonics it would not be easy to remember a list of 100 words but using other memory techniques it can be done in less than 5 - 10 minutes. One gentleman, Hiroyuki Goto, recited over 42,000 digits of Pi from his memory in 1995. It took him 9 hours and he did that by using some of the more advanced memory techniques.

Easy ways to improve memory quickly

Good memory brings you many benefits. Improving your memory is one of the best things you can do because by improving your memory you can do better in just about anything. Good memory lets you cut your study time, be a fast learner, be organized, be more effective and much more.

Today we are overwhelmed with information that we need to remember. Being able to effectively remember important pieces of information - like names, numbers, facts, figures, directions, quotations, daily tasks, and other vital information saves you time and gives you many other advantages.

There are many ways to improve your memory and many books have been written on how to do this. People have been trying to find ways to improve memory for centuries and they have succeeded. Here you will learn about effective ways to improve your memory.

What you should do to improve memory

Best way to improving your memory when trying to memorize new information is to connect it to information that you already know. Each time when you learn something new, associate it to what you already know by picturing the association in your mind.

Use your imagination and picture things that you are learning. Involve emotions in these pictures since the most powerful memories are those that include emotions. Try to involve positive emotions and avoid negative ones since mind excludes negative emotions over time.

Always motivate yourself to learn new information. When you are motivated you pay attention and concentrate, your mind gets sharper and more adaptable to new information. All these things help you memorize new information much better.

Repeat and rehearse new information frequently. Rephrase it in your own words and always be sure that you understand everything properly. What you can’t learn the first time, you can be learn the second time or third time.

What else would help you to improve memory

Learn information with a clear mind. It is harder to learn something when you are tired, stressed, anxious or angry. Reduce distractions as much as possible. If there are things around that distract you from learning try to remove them or learn elsewhere.

Having some spacing between learning sessions is a good idea because this way you reinforce memory traces. You don’t have to learn all information at once when you can learn everything much better by taking breaks between learning sessions.

Plan ahead and allow adequate time to re-learn new information. Set alarms and timers as reminders

How to improve your memory even more

What you learned were simple memory tips on how to improve your memory but there are more effective ways, too. You can learn new information much better and faster than you are doing it now. You can do that by using memory techniques.

Memory techniques are very effective tools for learning new information. They let your mind learn new information in a more structured and systematic way. Every memory stunt is performed using them and you can apply them to virtually every memory task. Since they are simple and easy to learn everybody can learn them.

You can apply memory techniques to memorizing numbers, words, lists of items, foreign languages, daily tasks, speeches, quotes, and much more. You can apply them to any memory task. Even the advanced tasks like learning locations on maps, shapes and music. Whenever there is a memory task you can make it simpler with them.

Memorize things instantly with memory tricks

Would you like to learn the memory tricks that memory experts use? The same same memory tricks that they use to astonish public on TV shows. If you do then you have come to the right place because right here some of the their closely guarded memory secrets are revealed.

By applying memory tricks you can memorize information that seems impossible to memorize the old traditional way. It could be a list of 40 completely unrelated words in sequence, a number with 30 digits. Or even names and faces of 100 people you have seen only once.

Memory tricks can come to good use when you are studying and learning new information that is complicated and hard to remember. It could be foreign language, definition of terms, historical dates or a hard subject which you have to learn. Using memory tricks you can learn this information many times faster and better that you would with the traditional methods.

You can also use memory tricks to impress your friends with your memory, be very organized by remembering all the things you have to do and when you have to do them and also you can use tricks of memory for entertainment like performing stunts with cards or stunts similar to what memory experts perform on stage.

Secrets of memory experts exposed

Can you really master these memory tricks or you should better leave them to experts? Yes you can and it’s easier than you think. This page will give short analysis of what a memory expert does to perform various memory tricks.

It may surprise you but memory expert Harry Lorayne once admitted that he though had the worst memory in the world. Things changed when he memorized the phone book of New York entirely by using memory tricks.

There is one truth about your mind that memory experts understand but other people don’t. They understand that:

"It’s very hard for your mind to memorize complicated and meaningless information like a page of a phone book. What you need to do is "convert" this information to something that your mind would remember naturally."

When your mind has remembered something that can be remembered naturally, you can translate this information back to the complicated information that your mind couldn’t remember.

How to memorize a list of words

With traditional methods remembering a list of 30 unrelated words in sequence would be quite difficult to say the least. There is actually no method how you could do that. You could try to repeat this list countless of times. You could write it down on paper and watch at it for a really long time, trying to remember the sequence of items.

But why would you do that when with memory tricks memorizing such list is a child’s play. What you would do is associate every word with the previous word in the list. Thinking of the first word in the list would make you think of the second word. Thinking of the second word would make you think of the third word and so on.

This is how a memory experts remember long lists of unrelated words. A rule that you must follow when associating these words to one another is to make these associations unnatural, spectacular or ridiculous. You need to do it because your mind is much better at remembering unusual things than vague, meaningless everyday things.

How to remember numbers

For example, it would also be very hard to remember a 16 digit number. By using traditional methods you could repeat this number countless of times. You could write it on a paper and stick it in front of you to help your memory to remember it. You could use it for a long time until you finally remember it.

Forget about it! With memory tricks you can memorize this number in less than 2 minutes and remember it for a year without repeating it even once. What you would do is convert this number to words and link these words in a list.

Converting numbers to words may sound a little strange to you but it is actually very simple. There is a special phonetic alphabet, consisting of just ten pairs of digits and sounds. 3 digits usually form 1 word with this alphabet. When you have a number with 16 digits, you form many words from it and then associate these words in a list like you learned before.

This is the method how memory experts remember long digit numbers. They know that mind can much better remember natural things like words not numbers that are meaningless. That is why they convert long digit numbers to words. When they have associated these words in a list, they remember them very good. Each time they need the number they simply convert these words back to a long digit numbers.

When you practice this memory trick you can even remember a 16 digit number in less than a minute. You can learn this memory trick and the phonetic alphabet consisting of 10 pairs of digits and sounds from the Memory Success course. You’ll learn about his course at the bottom of this page.

How to remember names of people

When you get introduced to a person with a really long and complicated name like Antesiewicz Kolodny how on earth would you remember it? With traditional methods you would repeat this name many times in the conversation with this person, you would write it down as soon as possible, you would constantly repeat it until you remember it.

Why punish yourself by trying remember this name with traditional methods when you can remember it instantly by using a memory trick? What you would do is substitute the name to simple words that you already know and then link these words in a list.

When you hear the word "Antesiewicz" you could think of words "anti-savage" and when you hear word "Kolodny" you could picture a "colored knee". Now you would picture a person who is the opposite of savage "Antesiewicz" with a colored knee "Kolodny" in your mind.

Now when you will think about the ridiculous association that you made in your mind you will instantly remember the name Antesiewicz Kolodny.

Does photographic memory exist?

Are there really people with photographic memory literally "taking pictures" of information or is photographic memory a myth?

Wouldn’t it be nice if you had a photographic memory? All it would require to memorize something would be just taking a glance at it. Memory like that would surely be a real advantage.

Today and in the past people have showed extraordinary memory performance. If you’ve ever looked at the Guinness Book of World Records, you know that some people are capable of what seem to be astounding feats of memory.

What can be done with memory?

There are chess masters, for example, who are able to glance quickly at pieces on a chess board and then flawlessly reconstruct the positions on a new board. Some can also typically play blindfolded chess against several opponents at the same time, easily memorizing many chessboard configurations.

Others are able to read through a page in a book and then recite the page from memory, or memorize hundreds of names and numbers from a telephone directory.

Impressive as these feats are, scientists attribute them to specialized ways of thinking about the information, not to any kind of enhanced visual memory.

Is photographic memory a myth?

Early experiments on photographic memory were intriguing, but could not be replicated. Scientists who study memory phenomena generally believe that photographic memory does not exist and is only a myth.

While one cannot completely discount the possibility of a photographic memory, since there have been some very rare individuals with truly extraordinary powers of memory. Those examples of outstanding memory that have been studied have all turned out to be due to the use of powerful memory techniques.

The memory stunts are performed using truly effective memory techniques, and anyone who wants to put in the requisite time and energy can develop a powerful memory.

What can you do to develop powerful memory?

It is possible to develop a powerful memory and you can do it by using memory techniques. Since they are very simple everyone can learn them. The memory technique that helps you memorize any length list of words in sequence takes less than 10 minutes to learn.

With memory techniques it is possible to memorize things that would seem impossible to memorize without them. Almost every memory stunt is performed by using them. Harry Lorayne memorized phone book of New York and performed every other memory stunt in his career solely by using memory techniques.

Memory techniques can be applied to any memory task. They can be applied to memorizing numbers, words, names and faces of people, foreign languages, speeches and any other information. They let your mind memorize information much better and faster by doing it in a more structured and systematic way.