Mnemonics and memory
Well, it is a type of memory aid, and often takes the form of a memorable sentence or even poem where each word represents something in a list.
As a classic example, there is Richard Of York Gave Battle In Vain, which most UK schoolchildren learn - a sentence where the first letter is that of each colour of the rainbow.
The idea is that the mnemonic is much easy to remember than a dry or meaningless fact, statistic, or list of something. Therefore by recalling the mnemonic, we can then reconstruct the item that is hard to remember from that, and thus remember it by proxy.
So above we remember the first letters - ROYGBIV, and from there it is straightforward for our brains to make the final move to the list of colours red orange yellow green blue indigo violet with the 'memory jog' provided by the first letters obtained from the mnemonic.
The Greeks were so interested in memory that they even had a goddess associated with it, and it from here, Mnemosyne, that the strange word we use today for this sort of memory device is derived. They realised that the memory can be trained to make really impressive feats. This fact about memory techniques was forgotten for millenia, leading to people having to learn by rote, and therefore often ineffectively, for huge periods of time since.
So why do these mnemonics work? There seems to be just as much information to remember in the form of a sentence than the list itself? Well it seems that the often illogical nature or arbitrary nature of the sentences makes them easier to learn. Also, the information is often held in little chunks in mnemonics, making them easier to remember.
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