Existing mnemonic techniques take their retrieval cues from external things — places, or images you prepare in advance. That makes them expensive to set up, slow to master (months), and leaves no real alternative for people who can’t use
visual imagery well.
The principle behind what I’ve been building is simple. Instead of memorizing the answer, you deliberately get it wrong once, close to the correct answer, and memorize only the difference between your wrong answer and the truth. Later, “what
did I say again?” is what brings the answer back. Every six items you review in reverse order, and you use the last digit of the digit sum to check whether any item has gone missing.
For example, when memorizing 010-4829-3671, if you get it wrong once as “3651,” then later “I said 51, didn’t I” produces 71.
There’s nothing to prepare. No images, no locations, no app — only speech and finger contact, so people who struggle with visual imagery follow the same procedure. You can use it after 30 minutes on day one.
This is still just me testing it on my own, so the advantages above are theoretical. I’ll practice for a week with numbers, names, and procedures, record accuracy, time taken, and the number of omissions, and then post a follow-up.
This is one of three mnemonic techniques I’ve been building. I’m going to test this method first, and then try the others in the same way so I can compare the results.
It’s the testing principle: studies have shown that if you get tested you retain the material better. Even if you didn’t know at all and just took a guess randomly to give an answer, you’ll retain the material better when you’re corrected than if you were simply told the answer.
That being said, you’re most probably not going to take the same guess everytime long term. So it’s ok for short term info, but it certainly wouldn’t feel secure using it for long term learning.
I see it in myself while I’m drilling PAO. For the numbers I don’t know the keyword of well yet my brain is inventing a compatible new one (which I sometimes validate if it’s better then the one I have)… But depending on what I’m busy with, my brain sometimes makes a new suggestion even if it was (semi) consistent with another keyword before.
So it’s great to experiment and if you’re doing it out of curiosity, that’s great.
But if you’re doing it because you don’t want to make the effort of learning a consistent system (no need to go crazy here, not all systems are as long to learn as a full blown 3 digits PAO), you may be wasting more time than you imagine you would by investing in learning a tried and true system.
This is interesting- I find that this sort of thing is, for me, guaranteed to make it even harder to remember. I’m glad it works for you! No shade. But I know for myself, that if I compare the differences between two similar things I simply won’t remember either correctly.
For example, I hope I never meet a red, black, and yellow snake because I’ll never know if black-on-yellow is a friendly fellow or a deadly fellow. Or was it red-on-yellow?