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An Effective Tool to Help You Memorize Text
By Richard Nantel | August 28, 2008
My eighty year-old mother-in-law, Alice, can recite the lyrics to Gilbert and Sullivan light operas. She can also recite a large number of famous poems, including Shakespearean soliloquies. She likely has these skills because the memorization of long textual passages was a big part of her elementary schooling.
When I was in elementary school in the 1960s, some type of reform had occurred and students were no longer asked to memorize long texts. The focus instead was on having students understand the meaning of a text rather than remembering the actual text.
Perhaps this educational reform is why my mother-in-law has a great verbal memory and I find it difficult to memorize the lyrics of songs. When I hear a tune on the radio I’ve heard many times, anyone within earshot hears me sing the first word or two of each verse and then a long trail of la la la la la las.
Dr. Norman Doidge, author of a fabulous book I read a while back titled The Brain that Changes Itself, wrote that he too had poor verbal memory. To address this weakness, he decided to memorize poems. At first, it was very difficult and he found himself glancing at a printout of the poem constantly. But as his brain adapted to the task, each subsequent poem became easier to memorize.
As I wrote yesterday, to improve my brain’s verbal memory skills and to relieve my family from my humming and singing of la la las di di dis, I plan to memorize the lyrics to one song per week. In looking for tips on memorization, I discovered an effective yet simple memorization tool on the Web last night.
Simply paste the text you want to memorize into a field at the bottom of the page linked to above, press the convert button, and the script will strip out all but the first letter of each word of the text you want to memorize. Read a few lines of the original text a couple of times then recite these lines by looking at the converted text containing only the first letter of each word.
You’ll be amazed at how easy it is to recite the text by reading the first letter of each word. Do this a few times, close your eyes, and voila. Your text is memorized. In no time, I had the lyrics to Sarah McLachlan’s “Angel” memorized. The lyrics are still with me this morning. (Next stop, some Leonard Cohen.)
Technology is freeing us from the need to memorize. Things we used to memorize can now be saved to a drive and forgotten. My mother-in-law believes, however, that the verbal memory skills she and her siblings had to develop as children have been instrumental in keeping Alzheimer’s disease from touching anyone in her family. If she’s correct, we should think twice about outsourcing our brain’s natural ability to digital storage technology.
Topics: Academic, Aging, Brain plasticity, Learning |
August 28th, 2008 at 11:57 am
They’re being all coy about how to write the code for the tool over on the other side (including one wag who is selling a version for $10) so I posted a version on my own site - http://www.downes.ca/memorization.htm - it’s simple Javascript that nobody could possibly own.
August 28th, 2008 at 12:13 pm
Wow! Many thanks Stephen.
August 29th, 2008 at 8:07 am
@Richard - I’m glad you found the tool useful. Honestly I’m not sure if it is better to use a tool like this or go through the process by hand with a pencil and a paper. I do know it made a world of difference in how fast I was able to memorize Scripture back when I was doing a lot of it in school.
@Stephen - Not sure what you mean by “they’re being all coy about how to write the code”. I pretty much told someone exactly how to do it in the comments and anyone can look at the source to see how I did it.
The guy who is selling it for $10 thought people might be interested in some additional features and the ability to run it as an independent program asked me if I’d mind him taking my idea and creating a program from it. I told him to go for it as I knew at least a few people were looking for something just like that.
August 29th, 2008 at 8:11 am
Mark:
Thanks for visiting. I’ll try the pencil/paper method as well to see which works better.
Thanks for having provided this excellent resource.
August 29th, 2008 at 8:20 am
@Mark, who writes, “Not sure what you mean by ‘they’re being all coy about how to write the
code’.”
What I mean is, you’re being coy about how to write the code.
As in this ridiculous response to a request for a desktop version:
“Ah but you see the whole point of writing the tool was to get people like you to come back to the website.”
That’s what I mean by coy.
And then you distract with some suggestion about using word when you could simply have pointed a link to the html page and said “save this to your desktop, it will work fine.”
September 5th, 2008 at 4:06 pm
I AM HAVING A HARD TIME REMEMBERING & WHEN IT COMES TIME TO TEST I THINK I HAVE ACED THE TEST TO FIND I HAVE GOTTEN AN D INSTEAD THE MEMORY I THOUGHT I HAD REALLY WAS’NT