The AABBA teens?

Question: How can you make remember a word easily?

The Answer is what the rest of the post is all about.

In my 14'eens or 15'eens, I joined a program named "Max Excel". It was an improve-everything-about-you-but-your-looks program. They promised (and it did work, I should say, for some people) to improve your memory to Guinness levels, improve your handwriting enough that you wouldn't need to learn hypnotism, teach you to study well, breath correctly (yeah, correctly), relieve yourselves of tension, activate any side of your brain at will, etc.

I should say, they worked pretty well for me too. But just like any park opened in chennai looks like a "petrified forest museum" after a few weeks of its inaguration due to immaintenance, I've lost the super memory thing.

I will concentrate more on the memory thing in this post. I can promise you the rest of the techniques in future posts.

The way to have guinness standard memory is really simple:

1. Create folders or drawers in your mind. This step is somewhat of a one time mugging up of a seqeuence of 100 to 200 names for neophytes and some thousands for the insane...er... experts.
For the names, we were asked to write down and memorize 200 friends' and relatives' names in the decreasing order of love and affection.

For example:
1 = Neo
2 = Morpheus
3 = Trinity
4 = Oracle
.
.
.
.
199 = Vivek srikumar
200 = Sriram krishnan

2. After you are able to name any relative's name given their index number, you have created a near-permanant (I can't remember the list now. Needs maintenance, as I told ya already.) Folder structure or named drawers in your brain.

3. How is this used in storing and retreiving data, fast?....or retreiving at all?

The crux of the technique is that, human beings tend to remember things that have a strong sense of emotion to it. In "Max Excel", they chose humor as the strong emotion. To remember a word, you take the first data to be memorized and invent a funny story involving that data and the relative/friend in that slot.

Say, you wanna memorize the periodic table, eh? (No, I am not Canadian.)
For example, you wanna remember that Hydrogen's position in the periodic table is number one. So you invent a funny story involving the element "Hydrogen" and "Neo".
Like,
"Neo takes the red pill and starts floating toward the ceiling, and morpheus shouts at him, "Haha, gotcha! That was hydrogen in that , fool!""

Ok, I am not good at making up funny stuff, but you get the idea.

4. Now comes the retreiving part. This is the inverse of the memorizing part. You see either the number "1" or the name "Hydrogen", you will remember the strongly humorous scene playing back in your mind, and then you'd get the answer automatically.

How do you manage multiple sessions? That is, you wanna memorize the periodic table and the India EPCO standards (or those Environmental laws, for us Fourth year under-grads). What then?

You can manage multiple sessions, alright, but it will require you to actively carefully conjure up stories involving also the context. (periodic table=chemistry related funnies, EPco sections=Law and ethic related jokes, etc...).


All that flashbacks aside, now for the thing that invoked the flashbacks: OEDILF
which stands for the,
Omnificient English Dictionary In Limericks Form.

This is a novel dictionary which describes and explains english language words in a limerick form. It is totally , unbelievably, astonshingly, technically, ingeniously, superfluously funny way to remember a word. You've got to see it to appreciate that.

Believe me, you would be craving to cry out your own AABBA after reading through the site. Seriously.

What's a "Limerick"? How's a limerick different from a freakin poem? AND WHAT"S AN "AABBA"?

I come prepared for that query. Let me try to explain "Limerick" via a limerick...

AABBA is how a Limerick goes,
If not then it's some other prose.
There are two line pairs
That produce different airs,
While the fifth line, like the first pair echoes.

That should clear it up.
BTW, Limericks are supposed to be very funny so that you may remember the theme word in a flash, accomapnied by a funny feeling (Hmm...that could be misundersood.).


Here's my few other experiments with Truth and Fun:

Next time a pirate asks you to walk the plank
You don't have to look blank.
Walk in the direction away from the pointed sword
And jump feet first, praying to the Lord
That you don't sink like a tank.


The little penguin called Tux ,
Can be had for zero bucks.
As many distros does it come,
And not a single virus is welcome
In any flavour of Linux.


To be very frank,
Your site needs more Page Rank.
To get more, you need
More sites pointing to your home-stead,
With big pointers giving you more rank.


Yes, you can add your own Limerick to the OEDILF site. But as of this writing, they are archiving words that start with "A" only. It will take some time before they move onto higher alphabets.
That's because, the review panel is composed of slow, pathetic humans and so far, humans are not able to convince machines of the fact that there is such a thing called "humour".

I am a great fan of IRC quotes databases and visit the king of all online quotes database, Bash.org, but still I think the OEDILF is much funnier than the quotes.

And that's saying something.


PS: You don't get 5 points for guessing the theme of any of the above Limericks.

PPS: And oh, the Limericks are Trade Marked, Patented, Copyrighted et al by me. So don't plagiarize these without reference to me and my this site. [I am hoping to improve my Page Rank :) ]