How can you memorize this : plasmodium falciuparum and its life cycle

Homework and Study Help
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Hi everyone,

First of all i would like to warn you about my english may become incomphrensif and many orthograpy mistake may occur, i’m not a english native speaker, and some french may come up at certain point XD.

I’m a biology student and tired of my old method of study : like everybody else i learn by repeating the information and memorize it just like that. It’s so boring and slow, at the end i’m just depressed and frustuate at myself.

Therefor i seeking a new method !

I’am totally new to this, and i’m absolutely not here to find out how to memorize a book ou ramdom numbers, i’m here juste because i juste want to do better at my subjet which is biology. I’m tried to think and imaginate somthing to help memorize my notes, but i really don’t know how to start.

exemple : plasmodium falciparum, is a protozoan parasite that infect human through the bite of a femel anopheles mousquito. it’s responsible for malaria. when a femel mousquito bite human, plasmodium in infective stage called sporozoites released frome the salivary glands is transmitted into human’s blood. some sporozoites arrive at liver and enter liver cell (hepatocytes), there they transformes into a trophozoite, and they multiplie their nucleus and transformed into schizont …
How can we memorize these terms and cycles within a momery palace. I tried to that there’s a giant mousquito released the parasite (skinny carton caracter) though his niddle and they race a deadly journey and only a few could arrive the liver chamber where they get fat and begin to cloning themself … I just don’t know how to link the right terms into the right places and i don’t konw how to memorize them correctly (spelling).

Would you please help me ?

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I’m a Vietnamese medical student and I learn this in my own native language, but maybe i can help you. So, you want to remember the following keywords:
(plasmodium falci.) since the name is too familiar, i wont tell u how to remember it.
anopheles - the word ano sounds like a japanese girl pointing at something ( google “anou” for more explaination)
Bite or Blood : imagine like a Bat is biting at the girl’s neck.
Sporo-zoites : imagine like a mushroom (sporo equals mushroom - i dunno if i’m right) is growing out of the infected bite .
Salivary glands and arrive at liver : the mushroom is looking very hurgry so it ducks down try to eat the girl’s liver
tropho : sounds like tropical, so i’m going to imagine like a coconut tree, the mushroom trying to take a bite at the liver but a coconut tree gets in its way.

hint: you dont want to use images that are directly relative to what you are trying to learn or understand, because the main point of locus is to use what 's already familiar to you.

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thank you for your anwser ! your story is so vivid and funny XD

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Salut Zoirnt, ce qu’il veut dire il me semble, c’est que pour l’apprendre tu peux démarrer l’histoire à différents points (le début, le milieu, la fin etc…) et faire le tour complet pour revenir de ton point de départ. Cela te permet de vérifier que tous tes enchaînements et associations fonctionnent correctement.

Si tu souhaites t’améliorer avec d’autres en français, il existe des groupes ou ressources francophones !

à + !

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It’s okay to post here in French too. There are many French speakers that pass through the forums. :slight_smile:

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So funny your story…specially because my mother tongue is Spanish as well…and anopheles, you know wich word i can link with it, and as you did, i associated sporozoites with spermatozoids, i just imagen then in a race and getting in the liver, I can feel the smell of it( this is one of our dishes with green onion and coriander at the top) inside the win ( frofeo) and the go out crazy ( squizofrenia) just feel the noisy

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Whoops, I think I didn’t address that last sentence right. I meant DDT for the mosquito, not you! Sorry if this caused any misunderstanding.

If you are not aware, over the last decades, DDT was used intensively to eradicate them (mosquitoes kill more people a year than any other animal, by indirectly being vectors of disease), but was discontinued due to later being found that it bio-accumulates in soil and tissue.

:mosquito: Our most promising option for eradication lies on something known as genetic drive, with genetically-engineered mosquitoes breeding in the wild population and spreading an infertile mutation. I would go so far as to argue that we’d be better off losing them entirely (though we probably will not and could release some harmless strains into the wild, for example) than losing millions of lives due to them, even at the expense of ecological damage.

And although not medicine, biotechnology is indeed related to it. We can save lives in other ways, such as improved crops, as well. Please, forgive any inconvenience due to my ambiguous phrasing.

(Now, if wiling, we could share some more as well. It pains me, but memory techniques are not as easy to apply to a particular biological branch, though I have devised my methods.) As of now, I think I have identified the two single most important factors for “agnostic” (content-independent, that is) memorization, which are:

  1. Encoding
  2. Spatial correlation

The first principle being that, in order to remember something, you should transform it into something you can more readily remember, such as a (mnemonic) image. To that I call “significant” (because it “signifies” the original concept, which you want to remember).

The other plays with the ability of our brain to spatially localize ourselves. This orientation sense is why the method of loci works, spatial memory. Of which, (not) coincidentally, the hippocampus is responsible for, together with an important role in memory formation and acquisition.

A third principle could maybe that 3. Information is almost always more useful when stored orderly, or, “Order is almost always useful”. Whenever you create order, you leverage effort for memory, because you can rely on it instead of memory, thereby deducing, instead of remembering, something. This one is not strictly memory-related, but I believe it is important for studying, and learning in general. An example being being aware of the semantic proximity of related concepts, or studying them together. By having the information in some, you don’t need to explicitly declare it in each of them, every time.

Now, my system (if I can call it such) is imperfect, and a work in progress. What I can state as being even more important, though, is the creativity with which you approach the problem of trying to memorize some new information.

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Here’s how I’d memorize it as somebody who has no idea what any of those words mean.

plasmodium falciparum

A1. I want to have my “palace” in mind as soon as I hear this word. What I’m going to imagine is Indian Prime Minister MODI harvesting PLASMA with his hands while humming “um” like a Hindu nationalist turned Buddhist monk. On his left shoulder I see two falcons tied together (falci), and on his right shoulder I see a pair. This is sufficient for encoding plasmodium falciparum, because the Latin endings are easy to “fill in the blanks”. The way I read my images is whole to part, left to right, and top to down.

A2. the PM is harvesting all of this plasma energy so as to inflict a greivous wound on a robotic prototype of zoro crawling with worms (parasites). Hence, it’plasmodium falciparum is a protozoan parasite.

A3. We look at prototype zoro’s mouth and he has vampiric teeth (bite) and a large mosquito monster pops out, something out of the Code Lyoko TV series.

A4. The way I’ve been attempting my memories is to organize them in a story left to right as in a tapestry. So the third “part” of the tapestry" will be the mosquito. We see the masquito has beautiful feminine eyes and is indeed a female (femel). I have no idea what anopheles means, so in the next part of my tapestry I see the mosquito celebrating a quincineria on Christmas. She is celebrated a new year (ano in Spanish), and everyone keeps singing FELECE NAVIDAD. So shee is an anopheles. Good enough.

A5. At this point I review the story. Modi harvesting plasma like a super saiyan, with two falcons on his left shoulder and a pear on his right. Let’s make the pair more noteworthy and say it’s leeking all over his beautiful White gown. He launches an attack on robot zoro, who opens his mouth to release a killer mosquito. But the mosquito has somewhere to buy and doesn’t have time for his ■■■■, so she celebrates her weird Spanish Christmas birthday. She just kind of flies away and does that.

B1. This is a good chunk I think, so now I’m going to create a new story for the next chunk. There’s a bottle of tonic water next to Modi. Can you smell it? Can you taste it? That’s right next to him, on a table. Maybe modi has been having some gin and tonics, I don’t know, but there’s the tonic water, and it’s a medicinal bottle of tonic water. This symbolizes malaria.

B2. On the ground next to modi I see a smaller female mosquito, sucking the blood from a small Indian child. Next to this boy I see my from Zoe, on her left is mold spores, and maybe she is telling the boy "it’s 'aight, it’s ‘ight’. This is a sketchy image, but she represents spor (spore) zo (zoe) ite (aight).

Next to the boy I see that his liver is out of his body. I would probably create now a new chunk for everything related to what happens in the liver. Perhaps the mere sight of the “liver” next to the boy would, perhaps a liver imprisoned (cell) would show me a new story that makes sense of: (hepatocytes) (perhaps someone with a HEPA filter mask walking to a job site (to cyte), where he sees a trophy (troph) next to zoe (trophozoite). etc etc etc.

Essentially, you want ONE image to cue to when you hear the name plasmodium falciparum. This is Modi with plasma. In order to recall that “plasma” comes first I’d see the plasma eminating from his right hand stretching out (my left when looking at him). In this glance you’d see that female mosquito sucking the boy next to Zoe and the liver, all this below Modi; you’d see and you’d see the proto zoro opening his mouth to his right. I’d imagine all this taking place in a “grid”, and then I’d see a grid to the right which is a mosquito at a Mexican party, and a grid below which is the Hepa filter construction worker story. Everything is then kind of CHUNKED so that there isn’t too much to take it. You have the chunk of protozoro that takes you to the chunk of the mosquito, and the chunk of the liver that takes you to the construction worker liver story.

I’d then take a break and, coming back, I’d revise this scene so that it adequately reflects the relationships. For instance, are the “teeth” clear that it’s from a bite? Does that even need to be in the story or is it obvious? And are my chunks good enough? Should I spatialize them in some way? Can I add the Plasmodium Falciparum story into a preexisting memory palace? Am I not emphasizing the tonic water enough? Etc etc etc.