about mnemonic encoding

Some things are easy to remember. Other things are less easy. Mnemonics works by shoehorning target information into the likeness of something easier to remember. Things like numbers and new vocabulary are difficult to remember because they fail to call concrete images to mind. Other things like pictures, rhymes, and where things are located in space are easy to remember. In mnemonics, we use imagery and poetic devices to associate easy to remember things to the target information you haven’t stored in your memory yet.

The conventional wisdom is that memory is opposed to understanding. The conventional wisdom is wrong. Any problem that you aim to solve will necessarily draw from the knowledge you possess. Memory is the foundation for critical thinking. The more knowledge we possess, the greater our ability to critique, combine, and invent new concepts.

Unlike intelligence (which is mostly a genetic trait), expertise is a function of memory- which is something that anyone can control and improve. Intelligence predicts who learns fastest at the start. But at the highest levels, expertise depends almost entirely on accumulated knowledge and practice — not IQ. Our approach surveys the scope of domain-specific forms of expertise, then we employ advanced encoding techniques to insert the structure and detail of their memories into yours.

Most learning is thread through out ability to read. And most learning disabilities are tied to difficulties in reading. Reading is a miracle, but it isn’t natural: humans invented it. Letters and numbers are arbitrary symbols derived from particular cultures: they aren’t found in nature. Our ability to read is hard-won, and our ability to learn through reading is places incurs an enormous cognitive load. By contrast, one glance at a picture is sufficient to remember it, and once remembered, it can be decoded to its corresponding target knowledge. Humans are not serial processors like a CPU; we are parallel processors that encode multiple sensory aspects into singular, retrievable memories. Mnemonic, non-linear learning is faster and more consonant to the architecture of the human brain.

Most learning disabilities are tied to difficulties in reading. Fortunately, reading isn’t the only (or even the best) way to learn. The human brain is constructed to make sense of the world. And because the world is always changing, our brains are constantly projecting memories into our experience to help make sense of it all. This function of the brain is unimpeded by the bottlenecks of reading. Indeed, mnemonic encoding presents one of the best ways to improve our reading skills, by equipping us with the knowledge to guess better at how to sound out words and bind their meanings to those sounds. To that end, mnemonics isn’t just a rapid path to expertise, it also levels the field so that the full spectrum of neurodiversity stands to benefit from the predictive architecture of the brain.

Whether we are looking at information theory or human cognition, the phenomenon of surprise structures our interest (and therefore attention) as well as the strength of the memories we encode. We learn and remember when things are unexpected- our brains rush to fold those unexpected things into our model of the world.

Typical learning experiences, by definition, are saturated in novelty. This saturation robs our brains of surprise because new information is not contextualized against our prior experience. Our curricula breakdown the key concepts of specific domains, and encode them with surprising, mnemonic associations. This approach dramatically reduces cognitive load, sustains our attention (it is actually fun), and enables us to inventory vast sums of discrete facts. Whence encoded in memory, they are enabled for application in conceptual and critical thinking.