Will You Teach Me Any Techniques?

People have invented hundreds of techniques, some good, others bad, and still others simply bogus. If you do the things we mentioned so far in this book, you will not need most of those techniques -- unless you plan to compete in a memory marathon. For those who look for professional success this much training is sufficient. Along with that, they can try mnemonics.

Mnemonics is a technique of memorizing things with the help of strings of words or letters or symbols. This is not exactly memory-enrichment but rather a technique to remember a set of connected information which is not easy to remember.

By connected information we mean information that belongs to one category, say the colours in rainbow or the spectrum of white light. The number and order of colours from violet to red is always the same, but it is not easy to memorize violet, indigo, blue, green, yellow, orange, and red. However, it is easy to remember a single word VIBGYOR. Each letter in this word corresponds to a colour in the spectrum and memorizing a single word helps one to remember 7 different words.

In electronics, the value of resistance is written in terms of coloured rings on resistors (shown in the above picture). It is impossible to remember the order of colours as: Black, Brown, Red, Orange, Green, Blue, Violet, Grey, White. So electronics students remember it with the help of the sentence, BB Roy Of Great Britain has a Very Good Wife, which even a child can memorise easily.

There is no fixed rule for the development of mnemonics. Rather, it is a tool of convenience and a person should be able to develop his own system with some effort. A good grip over vocabulary (which is a positive side result of memory training) will help each person to coin such words or phrases easily.