After reading my previous post (Mind maps #5), my friend and ex-colleague from eFunds, Vishnu wrote me a mail on how he and his friends used to learn by association. Here is a snippet of his email that talks about it.

“I am reminded of my one other friend during college, …….. He was a bit different he never followed the way of remembering things as images or mapping them to it. he used to remeber by sound and its sequence…. he was a bit different from me and my room mate. We used to frame some terms and coin some words to remember points to be written in essay but that guy would simply understand those with sound of the words he read…”

I am sure during our school/college days most of us would have tried one way or the other to remember what we learn. The idea is whether you use images or sound or any other technique, everything is a form of context association. Think about it this way, whatever technique it be, it is ultimately your brain trying to associate one conext to another using one of the cortical skills. This also reminds me of mnemonics. Do you remember the mnemonic “How I wish I could calculate pi easily today”? Count the number of letters in each word in that statement and put a decimal after the first word, and you get the value of pi (3.14159265). Read through the section on mnemonic in the wikipedia, you will find interesting statements that students use to remember lists in various subjects.

PS: You can read my blog series on Mind Maps by clicking here and reading bottom up.