Some unusual memorisation techniques

Studies show babies learn a language faster if they hear things in a sing-song voice. That’s why child development experts suggest singing nursery rhymes is good for their brain development.

These development experts are not entirely wrong about the singing. But aside from the singing, I think there are other equally innovative ways to learn things, other than just repeating them over and over again in your head, or reading texts from a book.

Often you can read the same passage from a book over and over again and still not remember what you read. Those who have a photographic memory can, of course, but they don’t have to repeatedly read it; they just need to have a quick look at the passage and it’s imprinted in their memory. But most of us are not blessed with this gift and so have to find other ways to remember things, and I’m not talking about learning another language. I’m talking about learning educational texts and even trying to remember passages from the Quran.

Firstly, if something is written in rhyming form then it’s easier to remember. Even as a non-Arabic speaker, I do find I can remember some Surahs simply because they were in rhyming verses. Moreover, any non-Muslim will notice how the Quran is recited in a sort of rhythmic way. I’ve found that some Surahs stick in your head because of the rhythmic way they’ve been recited.

Creating weird sentences is also a way to remember things. When I was at university, our chemistry professors taught us ways to remember the order and layout of the elements on the periodic table of elements. They’d recite catchy sentences in which the first letter of each word represented the first letter of the element on the periodic table, in the order in which it appeared. To this day I can still remember the first 4 rows of the elements in their correct order. For example, one that was taught to use was, ‘seven terribly venerable curates met five cows near Chessington Zoo’ which translated to ‘Scandium, Titanium, Vanadium, Chromium, Manganese, Iron, Cobalt, Nickel, Copper and Zinc’. If you’re confused, the ‘five’ refers to ‘Fe’ for Iron.

There are other ways of remembering things that I discovered myself.

I’m an artist and there’s a saying that a picture can tell a thousand words, which is absolutely true. When I was doing my NEBOSH exam I found that I could remember whole sentences by drawing what the sentence was saying. All I had to do was to remember the drawing in the exam and I was able to recall all the safety aspects of various machines in workshops.

Likewise, when I tried to remember the ISO standard for the Lead Auditor exam, which was an open book exam. Rather than wade through texts looking for the clause to support my answer, which was a time waster, all I did was draw a picture for each clause and was able to recall the clauses without having to open the standard.

But sometimes exams require long answers, often in the form of essays comprising 2 or 3 paragraphs. Again for the NEBOSH exam, I got hold of past papers with model answers. Now, everyone knows that exam questions get repeated over the years. So I went through every question and wrote those exact answers to those questions by hand. This was actually extraordinarily helpful. By rewriting the answers by hand I was enabling my brain to remember what I was writing. When questions similar to the ones in those past papers popped up in the exam, I was able to recall parts of what I had written out by hand.

Another useful method I discovered from a fellow student at university was an unusual note-taking technique. Notes taken in class must be neat and have an order but the size of the letters do matter. I discovered that the smaller the size of the letters, and strategically placed on your paper, helps you get that ‘photographic memory’. Sort of.