Mnemonic games

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Mnemonic and eidetic memory games

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Herbal

The lamb shish kebab had been marinated in olive oil, wine, and lemon juice, plus rosemary, oregano, thyme, garlic, and marjoram. With it went rice pilaf under a yogurt sauce containing spearmint and dill.

Our Greek salad was seasoned with sweet basil, thyme, oregano, garlic, parsley, and spearmint. And for dessert, honeyed butter cookies were topped by crystallized rose petals.

In this single meal I counted a dozen major herbs whose aromatic trails have wound in and out of human history since early recorded time. Chives, the mildest member of the onion family, still grow wild on the mountainsides of Europe. Because chives stay green most of the year, they have been cultivated for countless centuries in kitchen gardens.

Parsley, a source of iron and vitamins A, C, and E, is a common herb of the Mediterranean area and was well known to the ancient Greeks, who thought it too sacred to eat. Romans did serve it as a garnish and to improve the taste of food. They believed it would keep them sober. Henry VIII thought there was nothing like parsley sauce to accent the flavor of fish.

"Rosemary, that`s for remembrance," wrote Shakespeare in Hamlet, referring to the custom of decorating weddings and funerals with the fragrant sprigs of this evergreen symbol of never fading love.

Herbalists regard rosemary preparations in warmwater baths as invigorating and helpful in easing painful joints. "Smell it oft," went a suggestion in Banckes` Herball, printed in London in 1525, "it shall keep thee youngly."

Basil, whose tangy essence has made it one of the most popular of all-around seasonings, has a controversial history in other respects. A sacred plant in ancient Hindu religion, it was handled warily by European herbalists of the Middle Ages, who feared it as a scorpion breeder.

Some herbs, pungent sage and dill, for example, do not mix well. But the companions of our dinner menu—thyme, parsley, rosemary, and marjoram—are often combined in a bouquet garni that gives a mellow glow to roasting meats, fowl, stocks, stews, and other fare.

Link & Story

In the Link System, positional ordering is achieved by associating the things-to-be-remembered with each other. They are simply chained, starting with the first item, which is associated with the second, the second with the third, etc. The very first item can be associated with the goal or the reason for the list that must be remembered.

A good application of this technique is a short list of things to do. One often thinks of different things to do, at times when it is not possible to write them down on a piece of paper, for example, while jogging, traveling, about to go to sleep, etc. A typical list could be:

Buying cold medicine
Writing a letter to a friend who lives in Australia
Giving the dog a bath
Mending a flat bicycle tire
Making sure there is enough dry wood for the hearth

To apply the Link System, we first pick a single word to represent each task, for example iceberg, kangeroo, dog, bicycle, fire. If you want to start doing them after finishing work, then that would be the starting point of the association, for example, the moment you step into your car. For a possible list of links imagine the following:

A big iceberg sitting inside your car
A kangeroo jumping around on the iceberg, throwing snow balls at you
Your dog, climbing out of the the kangeroo`s pouch
Your dog then proceeding to ride on a little bicycle
The little bicycle growing until it explodes into flames

The link system is very straightforward and can be applied immediately. It is most effective for short lists, in which each word is linked to the next.

Using the story technique, things-to-be-remembered are woven together in a coherent narrative. This has one advantage over simple linking, where if one link is broken, the items on the list after that may be lost completely. In the Story System there is a higher chance that the flow of the story will allow most of the remainder of the list to be retrieved.

Let us take the words used in the to-do list in the Link System example and use them in a story: car, iceberg, kangaroo, dog, bicycle, fire.

My car drove into a big iceberg on the road home. The collision caused a kangaroo to tumble down. When it hopped away, our dog jumped out of its pouch and hit a man on a bicycle, who nearly rode into a big fire meant to melt the freak iceberg.

A disadvantage of this system is that it is often difficult to come up with coherent stories. Its success is thus somewhat dependent on the specific words and their ordering.

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