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Teaching Things People Will Remember: Mnemonics

Harry WitchelBrighton and Sussex Medical School

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Outline

• Learning with Flash movies Strengths Weaknesses

• Learning New Vocabulary Words Drip feed new words to avoid overload

• Mnemonics Principles for “one-shot” learning

• Story Telling and Narratives

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Flash and Teaching

Flash provides memorable and interesting experiences that go beyond classroom teaching or text books.

Novelty • motivation for paying attention• Possibly more memorable

Explaining movements Explaining Sounds Interactivity

• Much more engaging, eg quizzes

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Teaching with Flash

The end-user will NOT memorise your movie verbatim

The end-user will often forget your image as soon as it disappears from the screen.

Instead, the end-user will make “meaning” from what you show them.

The end-user will then remember this meaning as the “gist” of your message.

• E.g. “it was fun movie about coagulation factor enzymes, with lots of balls bouncing off one another and changing colours”

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Teaching with Flash

Flash gives the end-user many methods and motivations for learning information

If you associate the “flashy bits” of your Flash movie with pauses or transitions, all the user will remember is that your movie was “cool”

They will not remember the information you were trying to teach them

You need to closely associate the surprising or funny bits of your movie that they are going to remember with the information you are trying to convey

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Learning New Vocabulary

New vocabulary words should be presented one at a time, and they should be defined immediately and briefly.

A new vocabulary word should be treated like a Region of Interest (RoI) such that the end-user’s eye focuses on it.

Complicated charts with many vocabulary words have to be broken down, simplified, or re-emphasized one word at a time.

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Vocabulary Words as Regions of Interest

From a student project in 2012 by Cem Dennis-Stubbs

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Complex Pathway of Glycolysis:Only One Step is Taught, Using an RoI

From a student project in 2011 by Louise Ting and Alex Gibbons

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Mnemonics

There are (broadly speaking) four ways to get people to remember a piece of information:

Repetition • most reliable

Associate with strong emotions • Very unreliable and unpredictable• Eg “where were you when World Trade Center was

attacked?” Create a previous need for that information

• I.e. when a person fails at a task repeatedly, and then you give them information that will allow them to succeed

Mnemonics

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Mnemonics

Definition: Mental techniques for aiding the memorization of specific information

Eg people memorizing the order of a deck of cards.• In 2002 a British man (Dominic O’Brien) set a world record

by memorizing a random sequence of 2808 playing cards (54 packs) after looking at each card only once

• Not necessarily the most useful skill unless you are gambling in Las Vegas

Usually mnemonics is hard workThe principles of mnemonics can be used to make

memorizing some pieces of information much easier

E.g. a typical initial treatment to myocardial infarction is MONA: morphine, oxygen, nitrates and aspirin

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Principles of Mnemonics

Grouping information (eg sets of 3)Associating with the familiarPlacesPeople and narrativesTaboo, secrets, death, sexHumourVivid sensations

Not just sight Include sounds, feelings, smells, etc

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Information Structuring

A single word or acronym

Groups of 3 or 4 work best

Avoid groupings of more than 7 Hard to get into short term memory Unless you have a mnemonic for your mnemonic

• E.g. a rhyme or an acronymOn Old Olympus’s Towering TopA Finn And German Viewed Some HopsMnemonic for Cranial Nerves: Olfactory Optic Oculomotor

Trochlear Trigeminal Abducens Facial Auditory Glosspharyngeal Vagus SpinalAccessory Hypoglossal

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Mnemonics List

HumourSexDeathViolenceMovementColoursSoundsSmellsFeelings

FacesPlacesTastesStrong emotionsFamily membersAnimalsMoneyRhymingEtc.

Add any of these to an image or memory to make it more vivid and easier to remember.

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Further info on Mnemonics

Books by Tony Buzan Dominic O’Brien

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Mnemonics in Flash

“All little balls look the same”Most colour changes are hard to remember

People cannot remember what it used to be Patterns can have more meaning

• Eg solid to barber pole stripey

Shape changes can be more powerful Taking a bite out of a shape (or completing a shape

with a bite out of it) is memorable• Because what it used to be is related to and meaningful in

context of what it now is

Changes in scale are very powerful

Use them to teach the most important info

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Characters and anthropomorphising

We remember people and storiesYou can give molecules human-like

characteristics Especially “wanting”, but also strong (or

humorous) emotions

Narrative structures are memorableThere are three elements to a story:

A want or need A process to satisfy the want The result of the process

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Anthropomorphising an Enzyme

The enzyme PFK-1 is a happy character about to phosphorylate Fructose-6-Phosphate (cheerleader)From a student project in 2011 by Louise Ting and Alex Gibbons

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All patient cases ARE narratives

The patient needs to get better.You (the doctor) want to find a diagnosis or

a treatment.

Narrative structures A want or need

• to heal the disease A process to satisfy the want

• To successfully diagnose, OR to administer treatment

The result of the process • Recovery OR death (either one makes a good story)

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Places are memorable

Especially the detailsCould be a cityCould be their kitchen

It helps if the place is vividly recalledA place the person knows wellA place the person imagines vividly