Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Never Eat Shredded Wheat: Weird Ways to Remember Things
    Never Eat Shredded Wheat: Weird Ways to Remember Things
    Never Eat Shredded Wheat: Weird Ways to Remember Things
    Ebook171 pages1 hour

    Never Eat Shredded Wheat: Weird Ways to Remember Things

    By James M. Russell

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    Our memories are mysterious things. One moment we might remember a lengthy poem or the exact street address of a restaurant from our childhood. But the next moment we can struggle to recall where we've put our keys down or the name of the person we have just been introduced to. The human mind is not terribly good at remembering abstract data - but we can do it much more successfully if we create associations with more relatable bits of information, such as familiar people, places, colours, poems or jokes.

    The mnemonics that many of us learned as children are simply a shortcut to help locate information within your memory. For instance, rather than remember that the clockwise order of the points of the compass is North, East, South, West, we remember the mnemonic 'Never Eat Shredded Wheat', and the combination of humour and a visual reference provides an instant cue for our brains.

    This book is a cornucopia of mnemonics. Amusing as well as informative, it includes well-known examples that you might remember from school, some of which have been in use for centuries, as well as more recent ones and alternatives to the traditional versions. Ranging across history, science, language, numbers, business, art and much, much more, the mnemonics included here provide quick easy access to a vast amount of fascinating and useful information. In addition, there are sections on working out your own methods and systems to augment the existing mnemonics with your own aides-mémoire, which can help you with everyday tasks such as avoiding common misspellings, or remembering names, faces and numbers.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMichael O'Mara
    Release dateOct 18, 2018
    ISBN9781782439912
    Never Eat Shredded Wheat: Weird Ways to Remember Things
    Author

    James M. Russell

    JAMES M. RUSSELL has a philosophy degree from the University of Cambridge, a post-graduate qualification in critical theory, and has taught at the Open University in the UK. He currently works as director of a media-related business. He is the author of A Brief Guide to Philosophical Classics and A Brief Guide to Spiritual Classics. He lives in north London with his wife, daughter and two cats.

    Read more from James M. Russell

    Related to Never Eat Shredded Wheat

    Related ebooks

    Teaching Methods & Materials For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      How to Remember Everything

      Jun 27, 2019

      How to Remember Everything
      3 min read

    • Article

      Follow These Memory Tips To The Letter!

      Dec 14, 2021

      HRE’S AN EXPERIMENT.What are the capital cities of Peru, Colombia and Venezuela? Maybe you know one or more of them instantly. But if you don’t, see if this helps: their initial letters are L, B and C. Most people do much better when they know the in

      1 min read

    • Article

      The Memory Remains

      Mar 24, 2021

      As both a neuroscientist and the author of Still Alice, I’ve been talking to audiences around the world about Alzheimer’s and memory for over a decade. Without exception, after every speech, people wait for me in the lobby or corner me in the Ladies

      7 min read

    • Article

      Improve Your Memory!

      Feb 18, 2022

      Improve Your Memory!
      4 min read

    • Article

      Cryptic Classroom #5: Homophones

      Dec 9, 2021

      Cryptic Classroom #5: Homophones
      3 min read

    • Article

      Remember… and Forget THE SCIENCE OF MEMORY

      Sep 1, 2023

      Remember… and Forget THE SCIENCE OF MEMORY
      4 min read

    • Article

      Improve Your Memory

      Mar 16, 2020

      Improve Your Memory
      3 min read

    • Article

      Seeing Sense

      Oct 7, 2021

      Seeing Sense
      6 min read

    • Article

      What Searchable Speech Will Do To You: Will recording every spoken word help or hurt us?

      Sep 3, 2015

      We are going to start recording and automatically transcribing most of what we say. Instead of evaporating into memory, words spoken aloud will calcify as text, into a Record that will be referenced, searched, and mined. It will happen by our standar

      16 min read

    • Article

      Vowel Play

      Dec 7, 2020

      Vowel Play
      2 min read

    • Article

      A Mind Of Own

      Jan 31, 2021

      A Mind Of Own
      4 min read

    • Article

      Ideas To Help Polish Your Writing

      Aug 3, 2023

      For many people, ‘Give me a vowel’ will bring up an instant reference to the TV programme Countdown. In the context of the game show, vowels and consonants were linked to letters of the alphabet, with A-E-I-O-U being vowels and the other 21 letters c

      3 min read

    • Article

      Intermediate Lesson

      Nov 26, 2019

      Intermediate Lesson
      3 min read

    • Article

      Bringing It All Together

      Apr 15, 2024

      Bringing It All Together
      7 min read

    • Article

      Our Brains Tell Stories So We Can Live

      Aug 8, 2019

      We are all storytellers; we make sense out of the world by telling stories. And science is a great source of stories. Not so, you might argue. Science is an objective collection and interpretation of data. I completely agree. At the level of the stud

      8 min read

    • Article

      Delightful Audibles

      Aug 3, 2020

      Delightful Audibles
      3 min read

    • Article

      Paul Heiney

      Dec 20, 2019

      Paul Heiney
      3 min read

    • Article

      Time To connect

      Oct 12, 2020

      Okay, I’ll be honest, this may hurt a little, but I promise you the pain is worth it. Take a deep breath… and move away from your mobile phone. Put it down and walk away. There’s nothing to see here while you’re connecting with your kids. The greates

      3 min read

    • Article

      Cryptic Classroom #6: Containers

      Feb 3, 2022

      Cryptic Classroom #6: Containers
      3 min read

    • Article

      Laugh Tracks

      Aug 16, 2023

      HOW did you spend your Thanksgiving?” It’s a straightforward question, and a straightforward respondent might answer something like, “Oh, the old-fashioned way. I invited everyone in my neighborhood to my house, we had an enormous feast, and then I n

      10 min read

    • Article

      Cleaners At Work

      Dec 29, 2019

      Cleaners At Work
      2 min read

    • Article

      Intro

      Apr 3, 2019

      Intro
      5 min read

    • Article

      Inbox

      Oct 1, 2020

      Inbox
      3 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for Never Eat Shredded Wheat

    0 ratings

    0 ratings0 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

      Book preview

      Never Eat Shredded Wheat - James M. Russell

      Index

      INTRODUCTION

      The Memory Palace

      Why Mnemonics Work

      Our memories are mysterious things. At one moment we might remember a lengthy poem or the exact street address of a restaurant from our childhood. But at the next moment we can struggle to recall where we have put our keys down or the name of the person to whom we have just been introduced.

      Since ancient times, people have looked for ways to improve or augment their memory. The Greek poet Simonides of Ceos is credited with developing the ‘method of loci’, a way of remembering complex lists of information by associating each item in the list with a particular location. This is the idea behind ‘memory palaces’, as featured in the well-known Sherlock TV series and used by many magicians, within which a galaxy of information can be stored by a practised user.

      The point of a memory palace is that it can create an easy way to access a particular memory or piece of information. The human mind is not terribly good at remembering abstract data – however, we can do it much more successfully if we create associations with more relatable bits of information, such as familiar people, places, colours, poems or jokes.

      The mnemonics that many of us learned as children are simply a shortcut to help locate information within your memory. For instance, rather than remember that the clockwise order of the points of the compass is North, East, South, West, we remember the mnemonic ‘Never Eat Shredded Wheat’, and the combination of humour and a visual reference provides an instant cue for our brains.

      Similarly, to remember the months of the year that have particular numbers of days, we can simply remember the rhyme that starts ‘Thirty days hath September …’; to remember the order of the first four geological periods of the Earth, we might remember that ‘Camels Order Silver Devices’ and use that to reconstruct the correct order: Cambrian, Ordovician, Silurian, Devonian; you can use the mnemonic ‘A Comfortable Cave Of Many Marvellous Ornaments’ to help you avoid misspelling ‘accommodate’; while salesmen might inspire themselves with the acronym ABC: ‘Always Be Closing’. In each case it is easier to access information by using the memorable key first, and then using this to unlock the facts and figures we actually require.

      This book is a cornucopia of mnemonics. It includes some well-known examples that you might remember from school, some of which have been in use for centuries, as well as more recent ones and alternatives to the traditional versions.

      Ranging across history, science, language, numbers, business, art and much, much more, the mnemonics included here provide quick and easy access to a vast amount of fascinating and useful information. In addition, there are sections on working out your own methods and systems to augment the existing mnemonics with your own aides-memoire, which can help you with everyday tasks such as avoiding common misspellings or remembering names, faces and numbers.

      Mnemonics can be amusing as well as informative. Hopefully, while you are browsing through the range of memory aids included here, you will be reminded of some of those fascinating facts you learned at school but can’t quite remember, while also picking up a few new pieces of general knowledge and being entertained along the way.

      IN THE FIRST PLACE

      Memory Methods and Systems

      The art of improving your memory is quite easy to explain. You simply need to take a piece of information, whether it be a list, name, number, word or face that you find hard to remember or fear you might forget. Then you associate this piece of information with something else that you find easier to remember. Then, when you need to access the difficult information, you use the easier information as the key for unlocking your memory.

      Of course, that is easily said, but actually putting the idea into practice requires a range of strategies, which will come in useful in different situations. Here’s a quick overview of the main strategies that are used in mnemonics and memory systems, all of which will be used at times in this book.

      KEYWORDS

      One of the simplest methods of remembering things is to use keywords. Imagine that you are learning French and want to remember the word for dragonfly: libellule. You might notice that the word contains the English word ‘libel’, which is easier for you to remember than the French word. Then, in order to create a connection between the two items, you could imagine a talking dragonfly spreading libellous rumours. Or, if you want to remember that the largest moon of Mars is called Phobos, you might imagine someone who is terrified of moons, and who therefore has a phobia.

      CHUNKING AND TRANSLATING

      The human mind is especially bad at remembering long chains of information. For instance, we find it easier to remember the spelling of the short words ‘flu’, ‘ore’ and ‘scent’ than we do ‘fluorescent’, so knowing that the long word can be made up of the shorter words can help us to reconstruct the correct spelling. When it comes to numbers, we can use a similar process of ‘chunking’: for instance, we find it easier to remember the number 36254739958 as a series of shorter chunks 362 5473 9958. Long numbers are still quite difficult to remember, however, so it can be more effective to find ways to ‘translate’ numbers into verbal or visual images. We can, for instance, use the ‘mnemonic major system’, in which you replace each digit of the number with a letter and then turn the number into words (see here and here for examples). Or we can use this letter-counting mnemonic to remember the speed of light:

      We guarantee certainty, clearly referring to this light mnemonic.

      To translate this into a number, you count the number of letters in each word – ‘we’ has 2 letters, ‘guarantee’ has 9 letters, and so on – which gives us the correct speed of 299,792,458 metres per second.

      MUSIC AND RHYME

      Many people find it easier to remember information if it can be reshaped to fit a tune or to form a poem or rhyme. A recent campaign to persuade people to test their smoke alarms used the rhyme ‘Press to test, Monthly is best’ to try and impress on people’s minds the importance of regularly checking the batteries. And generations of children have grown up with the ABC song, in which the alphabet is sung to the tune of ‘Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star’.

      MAKING CONNECTIONS

      It is always easier to remember a piece of information if you can make a visual connection. If, for instance, you meet someone called Dorothy Walker, and immediately bring to mind an image of Dorothy walking down the Yellow Brick Road, you are much more likely to remember her name than if you hadn’t thought of that visual image. And in the dragonfly example above, you will be more likely to remember the libellous dragonfly if you actually picture it flitting around a specific pond with which you are familiar. Visual mnemonics can also be as simple as the example below, which is used in schools to teach the difference between ‘their’ and ‘there’.

      ACROSTICS AND ACRONYMS

      Some of the most common mnemonics are acrostics and acronyms. In both cases, a list of words or a sentence is reduced to its capital letters (or a similarly reduced version). You get a plain acronym when you simply remember the capital letters. For instance, AAA could be used as an acronym for Acrostics And Acronyms.

      Acronyms are widely used for the names

      Enjoying the preview?
      Page 1 of 1