- Mnemonics are a way of artificially adding meaning to asemantic information.
- Similar to semantic learning, mnemonics help you to remember new information by associating it to concepts stored in your prior knowledge.
- The difference between learning with mnemonics and semantic learning is that in semantic learning, the associations made between new information and prior knowledge are meaningful and highly applicable, whereas in learning with mnemonics, they are meaningless and ad-hoc.
"People have known for centuries that memory for meaningless items can be greatly improved by strategies that involve somehow adding meaning artificially to an item which otherwise has little intrinsic meaningful content, and it can be even more helpful if it adds a strong visual image to the item. Various techniques have been devised for this purpose, and they are known as mnemonics." - An Introduction to Applied Cognitive Psychology ^MnemonicsAddArtificialMeaning
- Sometimes you are in a situation where you need to learn something that doesn't have intrinsic meaning.
- An example would be your car's registration plate number or your phone number.
- Mnemonics are a good technique to use in these situations because they can add artificial layers of meaning to the information making it much easier to remember.
"When semantic learning is not possible, we can employ mnemonic techniques that can later form pseudo-semantic frameworks based on pattern recognition." - Piotr Wozniak in Semantic Framework ^MnemonicsFormPseudoSemanticFrameworks
- Can mnemonics can be used to "bootstrap" semantic learning?