Memorization

It is a mental process undertaken in order to store in memory for later recall visual, auditory, or tactical information.

Memory is a fundamental capacity that plays a special role in social, emotional, and cognitive functioning.

Spaced repetition[citation needed] is a principle of committing information into long-term memory by means of increasing time intervals between subsequent review of the previously learned material.

This technique is combined with active recall by spaced repetition software such as SuperMemo, Anki or Mnemosyne.

Mnemonics are often verbal, such as a very short poem or a special word used to help a person remember something, particularly lists, but they may be visual, kinesthetic or auditory.

Mnemonics rely on associations between easy-to-remember constructs which can be related back to the data that is to be remembered.

This is based on the principle that the human mind much more easily remembers spatial, personal, surprising, sexual or humorous or otherwise meaningful information than arbitrary sequences.

For example, if one wished to remember the list (dog, envelope, thirteen, yarn, window), one could create a link system, such as a story about a "dog stuck in an envelope, mailed to an unlucky black cat playing with yarn by the window".

This group of principles was usually associated with training in Rhetoric or Logic from the time of Ancient Greece, but variants of the art were employed in other contexts, particularly the religious and the magical.

Although maintenance rehearsal (a method of learning through repetition, similar to rote learning) can be useful for memorizing information for a short period of time, studies have shown that elaborative rehearsal, which is a means of relating new material with old information in order to obtain a deeper understanding of the content, is a more efficient means of improving memory.