How To Learn Memorize Of Ancient Greek Words

By Carolina Kuepper-Tetzel

Have you ever seen clips of people competing in so-chosen memory competitions and asked yourself: How practice they do this? How are they able to memorize a whole bunch of random facts or numbers in a brusk amount of time? Sentry the video beneath to get an thought of the retentiveness capacities of these super-memorizers. In this video, y'all volition come across Simon Reinhard from Germany who looked at deck of 52 playing cards for 20.44 seconds (!) and, after, was able to sort the cards of another playing deck in the same gild. Thus, Simon had memorized the order of 52 playing cards in 20.44 seconds! This is the current world record for this task.

Another instance of a super-memorizer is the current Memory World Champion Alex Mullen from the U.s.. If I gave you lot a sheet of paper with thousands of numbers and y'all had i hour to memorize as many of them in the correct order as possible, how many numbers would you exist able to remember when I take that sheet of paper away from you when the time is up? Well, at the World Retention Championship 2015 in People's republic of china, Alex was able to remember 3029 digits (!) in their correct order. This is impressive (hither is a listing of all official memory world records) and raises at least three questions: First, how do they accomplish this? 2nd, can I learn this? Third, can this be used for educational purposes?

The two main factors to increase one's retentiveness capacity are: the right technique and time to practice. The right techniques to achieve such memorization abilities are called mnemonic devices. Mnemonic comes from the Greek word mnemon meaning "to think" and in Greek mythology, Mnemosyne was the goddess of memory. Mnemonic devices are techniques that were developed by the ancient Greeks thousands of years agone to assistance them memorize lengthy speeches. The Romans afterward adopted these techniques from the Greeks and actually had so-chosen memory slaves "graeculi" (little Greeks) whose purpose information technology was to memorize stuff – this is probably the first record of an external retentiveness hard drive. Successful mnemonic devices follow three main principles:

they ask you to systematically organize the material
they require you lot to elaborate on the material, and
they involve mental imagery.

Let me explicate these principles using the most commonly used mnemonic device past retention athletes every bit an example: The method of loci or memory palace. Let's say you are asked to memorize a list of random words, e.g., bowl, book, tiger, car,…. In a first step yous imagine a location that you are very familiar with. This could be your house or flat, but also – if yous commute a lot – information technology could exist your way to piece of work/school. The important point is that you demand to be familiar with this location, know it by eye. Let's pretend for now that you decided to utilise your apartment for your memory palace. Okay, next y'all mentally walk through your flat starting past the entrance and going a specific road, eastward.g., it could exist a route y'all accept when y'all get dwelling house later school: Y'all open up the door, take off your shoes and place them on a mat, hang you coat on the hanger, proceed to the living room and sit on your sofa. Now, while you lot walk through your apartment y'all place the words from the listing that y'all need to memorize every bit images in specific locations in your apartment. While y'all do this, you can be creative and come up with quite bizarre and interactive images which will help you retrieve the information later. So, let's practice this: You see the door to your apartment and think that information technology would be a expert idea to finally replace the door handle with a bowl. So you take off the handle and attach the bowl to the door, then you become inside and have off your shoes and place them on a large stack of books (this manner y'all tin achieve them better and don't demand to curve over). Then you hang your coat on the hanger and notice that a tiger is hanging there. The tiger greets you and you continue to the living room where you decide to place a huge automobile on your sofa and sit in it. Later, when yous need to call back the list of words you mentally walk through your memory palace and retrieve the words from the locations you placed them in: bowl, book, tiger, automobile. The retentivity palace systematically organizes the material you need to memorize, allows you to elaborate on your material by enriching information technology with meaningful or not-meaningful, bizarre content, and uses mental imagery. One big advantage of this technique is that if you happen to forget what you have placed in a specific spot yous tin can skip to the next spot and retrieve that image. In an experiment, Roediger (1) tested different strategies against each other and institute that indeed the method of loci was the most successful i for recalling random words in lodge.

Image from Pixabay.com — Paradigm from Pixabay.com

When you lot ask retention athletes how they accomplish to memorize and so much info in a brusque period of fourth dimension they will all tell you that they use some kind of memory palace technique that they have refined over the years and over hours of practice, i.due east., the second major cistron of increasing one's memory capacity. In fact, K. Anders Ericsson (2) argues that hours of practice using these mnemonic devices efficiently is all it takes to become a super-memorizer. In his view "exceptional memorizers [are] made, not born". He reviews piece of work from neuroscience that show that differences in brain activation patterns in memory athletes compared to not-memory athletes are due to the techniques that retentivity athletes employ (three). While information technology seems intriguing to believe that with plenty practice and the right technique you can become the side by side Memory Globe Champion, it is important to signal out that innate factors do definitely play a part, too. People will differ regarding the number of hours of deliberate exercise they demand for mastering a chore and anybody will reach a personal plateau. Thus, individual differences come clearly into play. However, it is safe to say that mnemonic devices and practice will noticeable increment your retention capacity.

Since nigh of us are not interested in learning random facts or numbers to compete in World Retentiveness Championships, the question is whether adopting such mnemonic devices and practicing them could aid students in school? The respond is: Yes, if you need to memorize unproblematic facts. Mnemonic devices volition not help yous to obtain a deeper agreement of the textile or to grasp conceptual noesis of an thought and how it relates to other ideas. However, memorizing a listing of words, cities, lakes, vocabulary, body parts, names can exist boosted by using mnemonic devices. Although there are voices that argue that it is not necessary to teach students facts considering they can look them up on Google, I think that remembering such facts is a crucial footstep for building knowledge and enables students to attach new information to prior cognition which is key to learning and to obtaining a deep agreement of a topic in the future. If you are interested in learning more about how to use mnemonic devices in your studying: Alex Mullen, the electric current World Memory Champion, has created a wonderful website with plenty of resource on this topic. Thus, at that place is nil left to say except for: Good luck and have fun building your retentivity palace!

References

(1) Roediger, H. Fifty. (1980). The effectiveness of iv mnemonics in ordering think. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Learning and Memory, half-dozen, 558-567.

(2) Ericsson, Thousand. A. (2003). Infrequent memorizers: fabricated, not born. Trends in Cognitive Science, 7, 233-235.

(3) Maguire, E. A., Valentine, E. R., Wildling, J. M., & Kapur, Due north. (2003). Routes to remembering: The brains behind superior memory. Nature Neuroscience, six, 90-95.