Teaching Things People Will Remember: Mnemonics

1. Teaching Things People Will Remember: Mnemonics Harry Witchel Brighton and Sussex Medical School

2. 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

3. 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

4. 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”

5. 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

6. 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.

7. Vocabulary Words as Regions of Interest From a student project in 2012 by Cem Dennis-Stubbs

8. Complex Pathway of Glycolysis:Only One Step is Taught, Using an RoI From a student project in 2011 by Louise Ting and Alex Gibbons

9. 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

10. 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 work • The 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

11. Principles of Mnemonics • Grouping information (eg sets of 3) • Associating with the familiar • Places • People and narratives • Taboo, secrets, death, sex • Humour • Vivid sensations • Not just sight • Include sounds, feelings, smells, etc

12. 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 acronym On Old Olympus’s Towering Top A Finn And German Viewed Some Hops Mnemonic for Cranial Nerves: Olfactory Optic Oculomotor Trochlear Trigeminal Abducens Facial Auditory Glosspharyngeal Vagus SpinalAccessory Hypoglossal

13. Humour Sex Death Violence Movement Colours Sounds Smells Feelings Faces Places Tastes Strong emotions Family members Animals Money Rhyming Etc. Mnemonics List Add any of these to an image or memory to make it more vivid and easier to remember.

14. Further info on Mnemonics • Books by • Tony Buzan • Dominic O’Brien

15. 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

16. Characters and anthropomorphising • We remember people and stories • You can give molecules human-like characteristics • Especially “wanting”, but also strong (or humorous) emotions • Narrative structures are memorable There are three elements to a story: • A want or need • A process to satisfy the want • The result of the process

17. 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

18. 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)

19. Places are memorable • Especially the details • Could be a city • Could be their kitchen It helps if the place is vividly recalled A place the person knows well A place the person imagines vividly