PRONOUNCE EIDETIC FREE

Which is what I call “ping!” I suppose – and isn’t it a much better way to remember this than “memory of loci”? And so we went ahead and “ping!ed” the list of India’s states and Union Territories. If you’re looking for recommendations, memory of loci would be my pick to get you started.

PRONOUNCE EIDETIC FREE

And feel free to go down any rabbit hole that seems particularly interesting – ’tis Friday, after all. There’s much, much more that’s going on here, and far more than I can hope to condense into a single blogpost, but you might want to learn about more about, say, spaced repetition, eidetic memories and above all, memory of loci – just to get you started. And the more you play this game, the better you get at it. I’m simply explaining what works for me inside my head. I’m not for a moment suggesting that you remember the ASEAN countries this way (or indeed, even remember them at all). And that stands for Brunei, Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, Cambodia, Myanmar, Laos and Vietnam. The word “ASEAN” I’ve learnt to associate with BIMP-ST-CMLV (I pronounce this as BIMP-ESS-TEE-CEE-EM-ELL-VEE). Again, an example from my own experience. I get pings about different kinds of spices, about my trips to Kerala, about Mark Wiens (a YouTuber who loves eating spicy food), about the Carolina Reaper – it goes on and on.īut as it turns out, you can train your brain to associate certain pings with certain things, and help you remember things better. I “get” pings about “Spice Kitchen”, one of my favorite restaurants in Pune.

To give you just one of literally millions of possible examples, here’s what the word “spice” brings up in my head. And I now think of the art of memorizing stuff as “ping!” – as neurons and synapses going, well, “ping!” in my head when I think of a particular topic. Much later, I learnt about neurons, synapses and plasticity ( see here for a reasonably simple explanation), and the how and why of my little trick made much more sense.

And the more I did it, the better I got at memorizing things. These stories were completely nonsensical, almost utterly random associations, but they seemed to help. I would tell myself little stories about these factoids to help me better remember them. It helped me win all the quiz contests when I was in school (except for the last one, in my 10th standard, a fact which still upsets me – but let’s not go there), and it helped me mug up dreary old facts while “studying” in school.

Remembering random things used to be a weird little hobby of mine when I was in school. And even after four or five rounds of the game over the last two days or so, she was having trouble remembering all of them successfully. A very simple, but also a very fun way to spend a part of the last chunk of her Diwali holidays.īut as with all young kids, remembering all of them is a little tricky. We pull these chits out, one at a time, from a small pouch, and we have to name the capital of whichever state or union territory we’ve picked. What is the geography game, you ask? Oh, a very simple thing: we have created chits of paper on which we have written down the names of India’s states and union territories. Shouldn’t take me too long, I thought to myself as I went through my to-do list yesterday evening, and I kept some time aside today morning to do just that.īut just as I was about to settle down and thump said post out, my daughter came and asked me if we could “play the geography game”. I hadn’t scheduled a post for today, but I was fairly relaxed about it, since I knew both the topic that I wanted to write about and what the entire post would look like.

Pronounce eidetic