Visualising Knowledge Before Memorising it as Flashcards

As I said in the 'Try To Remember' article, it is hard to revise knowledge if the knowledge is not already easy to visualise or play with the knowledge. It is hard to use flashcards if you see a prompt such as a foreign word and are meant o remember its meaning in your language; but you have never had a mental exercise of bridging the foreign word and its meaning together.

Poetry is an example of a way to make concepts cluster together even though you are not familiar with them yet.

If the poem is expected to rhyme then saying part of the verse is a prompt for you to try to finish off the rest of the verse and arriving at its rhyming word. Another example would be a visual scene where features are visualised in a scene together - even better if they interact in some way.

The poem or the visual scene need not follow normal rules as long as they are memorable. The visual scene can be surreal. The poem can make no connection with real life; but your mind is being exercised in holding the knowledge and strngthening the ability to 'pull out' from your memory store the items that need to be learned.

After that, flashcards have a better chance of working because the foreign word is not a stranger any more; and so it's easier to associate its meaning to it.

Another aspect of this approach is that you have to do some mental work actively; and that creates good memory associations. In contrast, if you read pages of facts, why would your brain decide to memorise the facts? The more the minf engages with the information, the more it has the ability to work with the information and to place it within an organised mental structure.

A Demonstration of The Power of Poems

In the article about people representing numbers 00 to 99, there is the idea that for each two digit numer, there is a matching syllable. Eg. 00 is matched with BO.

Flashcards were presented as a way to learn that a particular syllable corresponds with a particular double digit number. But what if you had mentally played with the information first before attempting flashcards? According to my theory, the information would be anchored better in your mind to allow the flashcard memorisation to work better.

So here are poetry verses which each state a syllable and then use a rhyme to state the number that the syllable represents:

Note: The 01 verse has the phrase "Bubble Blow" because the '0 to 9' article has "B" as a letter that means 0; so two 'B'w ords signify 00.

Note: The 01 verse has the phrase "Birthday July" because the '0 to 9' article has "B" as a letter that means 0; and "J" as a letter that means 1. [Watch out though for a word beginning "SH" or "CH" and don't treat them as "S" or "C" because you will conclude the wrong digit association.]

So now, when I have time to kill, I can think of a syllable and try to remember its verse; and thus get stronger at relating the syllable to the number. It is not as useful as having flashcard ability to think of a syllable and recall the number (or vice versa); but it is mental exercise that helps the flashcard exercise to happen more effectively.

As a benefit, you also have a numbered list of scenes that could be used to imagine 'Loci memory places' for 100 items in sequence. A lot like the BLOKES system of places where you can memorise items in sequential order. This image shows you some scenes which I made that match some of the numbers:

And here is a slideshow video of the 100 scenes:

Eg. The bubble blow image at the start is the 00 (BO) image: B O: Bubble Blow. Zero pop; see them float.

• 00
• 01
• 02
• 03
• 04
• 05
• 06
• 07
• 08
• 09
• 10
• 11
• 12
• 13
• 14
• 15
• 16
• 17
• 18
• 19
• 20
• 21
• 22
• 23
• 24
• 25
• 26
• 27
• 28
• 29
• 30
• 31
• 32
• 33
• 34
• 35
• 36
• 37
• 38
• 39
• 40
• 41
• 42
• 43
• 44
• 45
• 46
• 47
• 48
• 49
• 50
• 51
• 52
• 53
• 54
• 55
• 56
• 57
• 58
• 59
• 60
• 61
• 62
• 63
• 64
• 65
• 66
• 67
• 68
• 69
• 70
• 71
• 72
• 73
• 74
• 75
• 76
• 77
• 78
• 79
• 80
• 81
• 82
• 83
• 84
• 85
• 86
• 87
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• 89
• 90
• 91
• 92
• 93
• 94
• 95
• 96
• 97
• 98
• 99