27 Jan, 2010
How to Remember Arbitrary Information for Computer Nerds Part I
Posted by: Jerry In: learning
I hate remembering random facts. I remember back in my school days, I had a lot of trouble with them. It turns out that there are a few memory tricks that you can use to remember these arbitrary information. I will talk about two of them, and how they are related to data structures in computer science.
I will start by talking about linking. Linking is used to remember a sequence of words or facts. Here is how linking can be used:
Linking method has 3 steps:
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1. Create your sequence: this is where you look at the sequence of words that you want to remember.
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2. Symbolize each object in the list: this is where you form the mental image of the objects in step 1.
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3. Create your link: this is where you link two adjacent objects together with an exaggerated or ridiculous image. The more ridiculous the image, the better. We tend to remember our emotions, and ridiculous images set off emotions.
If you are familiar with computer science, you can think of linking as the process of forming a linked list. For the uninitiated, linked list is a data structure used in computer science to store data.
Here are the analogous steps for forming a linked list:
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1. You have a collection of objects (random words) to be stored in a linked list
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2. You store an image in each node
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3. You set up a pointer pointing to the next node (by forming an ridiculous image).
Interestingly, our brains store information similar to how computers do. In the next part, I will talk about another method – Pegging, and how it is related to hash table.