Tag: memory palace

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Remembering Where You Read It

More than ten years ago, I read the Herman Melville novel Moby-Dick, which is a hefty 500 pages. At the time, I volunteered every week at a hospital radio station and I used the bus journey to tackle much of my reading. Over time, I began to associate the route with the narrative of the story, even though the two were very different.

I recalled this recently as I read the Richard Osman novel The Thursday Murder Club on a bus, and I realised I have a few of these associations.

Breakfast at Tiffany’s is a book I’ll always associate with a bar where I currently hold a writing group, while A Room With a View reminds me of another bar not far away. Catch-22 is a particularly memorable case, as the association covers both the physical place, namely the school library, and the backdrop of the emerging War on Terror.

This phenomenon isn’t restricted to novels either. On a poetry front, I reviewed a Michael Pederson book in a park, and finished a Lorraine Mariner collection by candlelight one Christmas Eve.

In some cases, it must be stated that the reading locations were more memorable than the books, but I won’t single out any of them – at least not today.

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The Acronym and the Mnemonic

Sometimes I think I know English grammar inside and out. Other times, I stumble upon an aide memoire I’ve never heard of.

I was writing a story where I kept typing ‘Thamos’ in error instead of ‘Thomas’. Out of interest, I looked up ‘Thamos’ as I was sure there was someone with that name. There was: it was an 18th-century play called Thamos, King of Egypt.

However, the top search result defined it as an acronym for remembering conjuctive adverbs, namely ‘Therefore’, ‘However’, ‘Also’, ‘Meanwhile’, and ‘Otherwise’. The last letter of ‘THAMOs’ is in lowercase and seems intended simply to create a word.

I’ve no idea whether the folks at NoRedInk invented this acronym, but it was news to me. They also go on to give two others: ‘FANBOYS’ is for coordinating conjunctions while ‘SWABIs’ is for subordinating conjunctions.

This started me thinking about acronyms and mnemonics as a memory aid. I’m somewhat ambivalent about them. If carefully crafted, they do their intended jobs.

One that sticks out from high school Chemistry is ‘OILRIG’, meaning ‘Oxidisation is loss, reduction is gain.’ This works well because the initial letters always spell out a sentence with the words in the correct order.

But supposing you wanted to remember something in a non-linear order. Before Pluto was reclassified, you could recite the names of the bodies in our solar system with ‘My Very Easy Method Just Speeds Up Naming Planets’.

This is great if you wish to name them all, but supposing you wanted to check the order of Uranus and Neptune, it would take a few seconds to find your place, even starting from the beginning.

Another weakness with this type of mnemonic is that you still need to remember the word that each initial letter stands for.

There are better methods. A classic one is the the method of loci – sometimes called a memory palace – using spatial awareness for easier recall. Here’s an academic description by the US National Library of Medicine.

This system is used extensively by Tony Buzan in his educational books. I read one of his publications when I was younger, and it’s a robust method that allows recall of items in any order, but I never persisted with it.

At present, I have no practical use for acronyms like ‘THAMOs’, ‘SWABIs’, or ‘FANBOYS’. However, I am amazed I’ve reached degree-level English without ever encourtering them, and I’m sure they’ll be of use to someone.