Mnemonics: Peter of Ravenna, Number Ciphers and Vin Diesel Verbs

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

In 15th century Italy, Peter of Ravenna recalled legal codes and texts so precisely that people accused him of necromancy. The episode explains his feat as mnemonics, tools that force elaborative encoding by tying fragile new information to something already meaningful. The word comes from the Greek mnemonikos, linked to Mnemosyne, goddess of memory, and classical thinkers separated natural memory from trained artificial memory. Later systems prescribed an imaginary town of districts, each with ten houses of ten rooms divided into 100 numbered spaces, so a date like 1436 could be stored in a specific house, room and square. In 1648 Stanislaus Mink von Wennsshein published what he called his most fertile secret: replacing digits with consonants so numbers became pronounceable words.

In the 1730s English priest Richard Grey extended the cipher to history and geography, turning the date of the biblical flood, 2348 BC, into the word Deletok and stringing such words into hexameter verse. The hosts argue that the cognitive load grew heavier than the facts, and later systems, such as Gregor von Feinaigle's in Paris and England, were rejected. What survives are acronyms like HOMES for the Great Lakes, acrostics, jingles and image mnemonics, plus Ghil'ad Zuckermann's link words, such as picturing a raccoon in your tent and shouting oh hell to remember the Hebrew ohel. Survey data show only about 20% of medical students regularly use mnemonic acronyms.

• Spanish students remember irregular commands with the phrase Vin Diesel has ten weapons.
• Piphilology encodes pi in word lengths, as in now I need a drink.
• The distance, speed and time triangle lets students cover a letter to see the formula.
• In a five-year study of adults over 60, those who kept using mnemonics showed higher delayed word recall.
• George Miller's magical number seven, plus or minus two, is bypassed by chunking five lakes into one word.