I was riding home yesterday, Carl was driving, and we were listening to that iTunes Weekly Rewind podcast, which is just a few people talking about music and playing a variety of clips.
There were a few that sounded interesting, and I wanted to remember what they were.
My first instinct was to reach for my iPhone and write myself a note, however, I decided it would make a good experiment.
So there were 3 phrases that I wanted to remember, either band, album, or song names. The phrase would be enough to find out more with a Google search later.
The first phrase I converted into a visual mnemonic.
The second phrase I converted into a mixture of visual mnemonic and text.
The third phrase I left as text.
I forgot to try to remember them when I got home (metaforgetting?).
So today I remembered the experiment, and was trying to remember the three phrases.
The first was easy to remember. I visualized a clothing iron and a glass of wine. This is for a band called “Iron & Wine”.
For the next phrase, I could remember the visual part of the mnemonic, but not the words. I had been visualizing one word, with a line drawn under it, and another word underneath. But I don’t remember the words. It was something like “____ under ____” or “_____ below ____” the second blank mighta been a longish word.
The third phrase I didn’t remember at all.
Clearly, visuals are extremely easy to remember when compared to words.
When a new programmer was hired to our team at work, I came up with a visual mnemonic for his name, and can now recall it easily. I pictured a guy with lots of keyboards and a camera, “John Tesh” and a “Konica”. His name, therefore, is Shantesh Kanekar.
Reminds me of an example Derren Brown gave for how he does a card trick. He said he visualized a room, and in that room are 52 objects, each representing a specific card. When a card had been played, he would visualize putting a bright ribbon tag on that object. In this way, he would be able to remember which cards had been played, and which were still in the deck.
I guess to remember the missing two items from that podcast, I’ll have to download it and listen to it again. I checked for show notes, knowing my memory would be jogged if I saw the missing phrases, but oddly they list the songs for every episode except that one.