“I wish I could keep everything we say today.”
“Oh, I keep it all! I stick it here in my head.”
from Robinson’s New Thing
written and illustrated by Julia Mills
Clarion Books/HarperCollins Publishers, 2025
When I was still working as a Children’s Librarian, one year, our Summer Reading Program emphasized the importance of exercise, the outdoor kind. It was a Summer Olympics year, and we had programs on bicycle safety, line dancing, and how to identify treasures you might find on a hiking trip or at the beach.
We had relay races and dance lessons, and chose books like Play Ball, Amelia Bedelia by Peggy Parish and newly illustrated by Wallace Tripp (HarperCollins, 1996) and Miss Nelson Has a Field Day by James Marshall (Houghton Mifflin, 1985).
I decided to take a different tack and encouraged the kids to not only exercise their bodies, but also to exercise their brains. Reading, I reminded them, is a prime example of a brain exercise. A little more on that in a few minutes.
Last week, I was driving with my 12-year-old grandson when I pointed out a beautiful flowering shrub. I corrected myself when I called it a hydrangea. In reality, it was a hibiscus. When I told him I have a problem remembering which is which, he told me a joke he had made up on the spot. I don’t remember the gist of it, but the punchline was “a biscuit.”
“Oh, I get it,” I told him. “A biscuit is round, and the hibiscus flower is round. They sound alike.” Now that we have a shared visual, we’ll both remember which is which. As a bonus, whenever I see a hibiscus, especially the red one blooming in a pot on my back porch, I’ll think of him! It’s a mnemonic device times two!
Mnemonic devices are powerful memory tools. They work by associating what we want to remember with something we already know. Scientists classify the devices by how they work.
Sometimes I organize my (short) grocery list in alphabetical order, or make up a word with their first letters (acrostics and acronyms). Sometimes I put the items in order according to where they are in the store, as if I were really there (method of loci). I can divide the (longer) list into categories: produce, cans, dairy, for example (chunking) with an alphabetical sub-list of each.
Association doesn’t work as well for me with a grocery list, neither does using a rhyme or making up lyrics to a familiar song. But those are also convenient. Does your new neighbor always smell good? Oh! Her name is Rose. Or my grandson’s biscuit joke that helps me remember the name of a flower (association).
One of my granddaughters can sing Pi’s first 100 digits. My sister’s American history teacher put the presidents in chronological order to the tune of “Rock-a-bye Baby.” Even though “The Presidents” stops at Kennedy, both are examples of songs and rhyme. I can’t do the Pi song, but I haven’t tried to learn it. I can still sing the presidents up to Grover Cleveland, though.
Scientific work is ongoing. It examines how we form, store, and recall our memories. All five of our senses work together to synthesize new information to create them.
While mnemonic devices work as memory aids by connecting what we already know with material we are learning about, they are less effective for helping us understand deeply “the why of a thing.”
We can use HOMES to remember the names of the five great lakes. We can even devise a mnemonic device to remember which one is deepest or which is cleanest, but why these comparisons are important, or how they work together, or even if they do, is beyond the scope of a mnemonic device.
Using mnemonic devices might help counteract the Google effect. Yes, that’s a thing. Simply stated, we tend to not remember an answer or fact or a confirmation that we look up online. Research points to our confidence in being able to “just Google it” again, so our brains don’t need to retain it.
Also known as digital amnesia, the authors of an article in The Decision Lab tell us current research suggests the Google effect is resulting in “decreased attention spans, increased anxiety, lower performance on cognitive tasks, and diminishing social skills.”
On the other side of the Google coin, using technology is the way we humans are moving into the future. That we have found ways to store very complex information and retrieve it is a mark of our intelligence. Also from The Digital Lab’s article, “knowing how and where to access the information is often more important than knowing the small pieces of information themselves.”
It’s becoming a new behavior pattern. If we know the correct questions and know where to find specific answers, we free up space in our working memory and “reduce mental strain on this limited system.”
Circling back to validate my summer reading advice, Jennifer Duffy from National University has written in her graduate school dissertation, “Words—-spoken and written—-are the building blocks by which a child’s mind grows. Reading is not only essential to a child’s verbal and cognitive development, but it also teaches the child to listen, develop new language, and communicate.” She continues, “books open a child’s imagination into discovering his or her world.”
That was evident to me when I heard my grandson’s biscuit joke.
Maybe I'm not getting forgetful after all. Even though I don’t have as much on the tip of my tongue anymore, maybe I’m holding too many factoids in my working memory.
I’m reading The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels by Jon Meacham (Random House, 2018). Even though Meacham published it at the beginning of Trump’s first term, Meacham's words feel extremely current. From the publisher, [h]e assures us, “‘The good news is that we have come through such darkness before’—-as time and again, Lincoln’s better angels have found a way to prevail.” Encouraging and readable.
-—Be curious! (and just Google it when you need to)
“Oh, I keep it all! I stick it here in my head.”
from Robinson’s New Thing
written and illustrated by Julia Mills
Clarion Books/HarperCollins Publishers, 2025
When I was still working as a Children’s Librarian, one year, our Summer Reading Program emphasized the importance of exercise, the outdoor kind. It was a Summer Olympics year, and we had programs on bicycle safety, line dancing, and how to identify treasures you might find on a hiking trip or at the beach.
We had relay races and dance lessons, and chose books like Play Ball, Amelia Bedelia by Peggy Parish and newly illustrated by Wallace Tripp (HarperCollins, 1996) and Miss Nelson Has a Field Day by James Marshall (Houghton Mifflin, 1985).
I decided to take a different tack and encouraged the kids to not only exercise their bodies, but also to exercise their brains. Reading, I reminded them, is a prime example of a brain exercise. A little more on that in a few minutes.
Last week, I was driving with my 12-year-old grandson when I pointed out a beautiful flowering shrub. I corrected myself when I called it a hydrangea. In reality, it was a hibiscus. When I told him I have a problem remembering which is which, he told me a joke he had made up on the spot. I don’t remember the gist of it, but the punchline was “a biscuit.”
“Oh, I get it,” I told him. “A biscuit is round, and the hibiscus flower is round. They sound alike.” Now that we have a shared visual, we’ll both remember which is which. As a bonus, whenever I see a hibiscus, especially the red one blooming in a pot on my back porch, I’ll think of him! It’s a mnemonic device times two!
Mnemonic devices are powerful memory tools. They work by associating what we want to remember with something we already know. Scientists classify the devices by how they work.
Sometimes I organize my (short) grocery list in alphabetical order, or make up a word with their first letters (acrostics and acronyms). Sometimes I put the items in order according to where they are in the store, as if I were really there (method of loci). I can divide the (longer) list into categories: produce, cans, dairy, for example (chunking) with an alphabetical sub-list of each.
Association doesn’t work as well for me with a grocery list, neither does using a rhyme or making up lyrics to a familiar song. But those are also convenient. Does your new neighbor always smell good? Oh! Her name is Rose. Or my grandson’s biscuit joke that helps me remember the name of a flower (association).
One of my granddaughters can sing Pi’s first 100 digits. My sister’s American history teacher put the presidents in chronological order to the tune of “Rock-a-bye Baby.” Even though “The Presidents” stops at Kennedy, both are examples of songs and rhyme. I can’t do the Pi song, but I haven’t tried to learn it. I can still sing the presidents up to Grover Cleveland, though.
Scientific work is ongoing. It examines how we form, store, and recall our memories. All five of our senses work together to synthesize new information to create them.
While mnemonic devices work as memory aids by connecting what we already know with material we are learning about, they are less effective for helping us understand deeply “the why of a thing.”
We can use HOMES to remember the names of the five great lakes. We can even devise a mnemonic device to remember which one is deepest or which is cleanest, but why these comparisons are important, or how they work together, or even if they do, is beyond the scope of a mnemonic device.
Using mnemonic devices might help counteract the Google effect. Yes, that’s a thing. Simply stated, we tend to not remember an answer or fact or a confirmation that we look up online. Research points to our confidence in being able to “just Google it” again, so our brains don’t need to retain it.
Also known as digital amnesia, the authors of an article in The Decision Lab tell us current research suggests the Google effect is resulting in “decreased attention spans, increased anxiety, lower performance on cognitive tasks, and diminishing social skills.”
On the other side of the Google coin, using technology is the way we humans are moving into the future. That we have found ways to store very complex information and retrieve it is a mark of our intelligence. Also from The Digital Lab’s article, “knowing how and where to access the information is often more important than knowing the small pieces of information themselves.”
It’s becoming a new behavior pattern. If we know the correct questions and know where to find specific answers, we free up space in our working memory and “reduce mental strain on this limited system.”
Circling back to validate my summer reading advice, Jennifer Duffy from National University has written in her graduate school dissertation, “Words—-spoken and written—-are the building blocks by which a child’s mind grows. Reading is not only essential to a child’s verbal and cognitive development, but it also teaches the child to listen, develop new language, and communicate.” She continues, “books open a child’s imagination into discovering his or her world.”
That was evident to me when I heard my grandson’s biscuit joke.
Maybe I'm not getting forgetful after all. Even though I don’t have as much on the tip of my tongue anymore, maybe I’m holding too many factoids in my working memory.
I’m reading The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels by Jon Meacham (Random House, 2018). Even though Meacham published it at the beginning of Trump’s first term, Meacham's words feel extremely current. From the publisher, [h]e assures us, “‘The good news is that we have come through such darkness before’—-as time and again, Lincoln’s better angels have found a way to prevail.” Encouraging and readable.
-—Be curious! (and just Google it when you need to)
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