The And Memory Improving Memory Recall - 926 Words

Mnemonics and Memory: Improving Memory Recall Angela Sapir Arapahoe Community College: General Psychology 101-103 12/15/2015 Discovering Psychology describes memory as, â€Å"the mental processes that enable [a person] to retain and retrieve information over time.† When information is brought into the brain, it travels from the sensory memory to the short term memory. If this information is deemed important, it is then encoded and stored. In order to retrieve this information (i.e., memory) a person might need to use a mnemonic. Mnemonics refers to a group of strategies used for memory recall. These devices have been used since the times of Ancient Greece. Most already use mnemonics without even knowing it, while others employ†¦show more content†¦By using the first letter of each word and putting them together to create a new word, the amount of information to remember is reduced and is much easier to recall. If a person wanted to remember the order and names of the colors in a rainbow, they would begin by identifying the first letter of every color name. The rainbow colors are red, orang e, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet. Using the first letters to form a name, like Roy G. Biv, can help a person to recall this information when needed. An acrostic is, â€Å"a series of lines from which particular letters (such as the first letters of all lines) from a word or phrase† (â€Å"Memory and Mnemonic Devices,† 2013).This phrase can be funny or have personal meaning to the creator as this would also aid in their ability to recall the information. Musicians use acrostic to remember the location of notes on the staff. For example, the lines on a treble clef staff represent the following notes: E, G, B, D, and F. When a person remembers their acrostic, Every Good Boy Does Fine, each word will aid that person in remembering the piece of information it denotes. The method of loci is one of the oldest mnemonics techniques. Developed before writing, this technique was used by the orators of ancient Greece and Rome when they has to recite long, public speeches (Moà ¨ 2005). To use this method, a person would visualize a place, one that