Mnemonic
Commonly encountered mnemonics are often used for lists and in auditory form such as short poems, acronyms, initialisms or memorable phrases.
The general name of mnemonics, or memoria technica, was the name applied to devices for aiding the memory, to enable the mind to reproduce a relatively unfamiliar idea, and especially a series of dissociated ideas, by connecting it, or them, in some artificial whole, the parts of which are mutually suggestive.
[5] Mnemonic devices were much cultivated by Greek sophists and philosophers and are frequently referred to by Plato and Aristotle.
[6] In later times, the poet Simonides was credited for development of these techniques, perhaps for no reason other than that the power of his memory was famous.
The most usual method was to choose a large house, of which the apartments, walls, windows, statues, furniture, etc., were each associated with certain names, phrases, events or ideas, by means of symbolic pictures.
The first important modification of the method of the Romans was that invented by the German poet Conrad Celtes, who, in his Epitoma in utramque Ciceronis rhetoricam cum arte memorativa nova (1492), used letters of the alphabet for associations, rather than places.
About the end of the 16th century, Lambert Schenkel (Gazophylacium, 1610), who taught mnemonics in France, Italy and Germany, similarly surprised people with his memory.
He was denounced as a sorcerer by the University of Louvain, but in 1593 he published his tractate De memoria at Douai with the sanction of that celebrated theological faculty.
published Mnemonica; sive ars reminiscendi,[8] containing a clear statement of the principles of topical or local mnemonics.
Giordano Bruno included a memoria technica in his treatise De umbris idearum, as part of his study of the ars generalis of Llull.
[5] In 1648 Stanislaus Mink von Wennsshein revealed what he called the "most fertile secret" in mnemonics—using consonants for figures, thus expressing numbers by words (vowels being added as required), in order to create associations more readily remembered.
The philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz adopted an alphabet very similar to that of Wennsshein for his scheme of a form of writing common to all languages.
[5]Wennsshein's method is comparable to a Hebrew system by which letters also stand for numerals, and therefore words for dates.
The most commonly used mnemonics are those for lists, numerical sequences, foreign-language acquisition, and medical treatment for patients with memory deficits.
For example, the first 15 digits of the mathematical constant pi (3.14159265358979) can be encoded as "Now I need a drink, alcoholic of course, after the heavy lectures involving quantum mechanics"; "Now", having 3 letters, represents the first number, 3.
"[23] The linguist Michel Thomas taught students to remember that estar is the Spanish word for to be by using the phrase "to be a star".
[24] Another Spanish example is by using the mnemonic "Vin Diesel Has Ten Weapons" to teach irregular command verbs in the you (tú) form.
The use of mnemonics has been proven to help students better learn foreign languages, and this holds true for Spanish verbs.
For French verbs which use être as an auxiliary verb for compound tenses: DR and MRS VANDERTRAMPP: descendre, rester, monter, revenir, sortir, venir, arriver, naître, devenir, entrer, rentrer, tomber, retourner, aller, mourir, partir, passer.
Masculine countries in French (le): "Neither can a breeze make a sane Japanese chilly in the USA."
[disputed – discuss] Mnemonics can be used in aiding patients with memory deficits that could be caused by head injuries, strokes, epilepsy, multiple sclerosis and other neurological conditions.
In a study conducted by Doornhein and De Haan, the patients were treated with six different memory strategies including the mnemonics technique.
Delayed recall of a word list was assessed prior to, and immediately following mnemonic training, and at the 5-year follow-up.
Individuals who self-reported using the mnemonic exhibited the highest performance overall, with scores significantly higher than at pre-training.
[29] In humans, the process of aging particularly affects the medial temporal lobe and hippocampus, in which the episodic memory is synthesized.
[30] Moreover, different research was done previously with the same notion, which presented with similar results to that of Reagh et al. in a verbal mnemonics discrimination task.
It can be adapted to similar equations e.g. F = ma , v = fλ , E = mcΔT , V = π r 2 h and τ = rF sin θ / - for more examples, see this SVG cheat sheet on Wikimedia Commons . When a variable with an exponent or in a function is covered, the corresponding inverse is applied to the remainder, i.e. r = √ V / π h and θ = arcsin τ / rF .
