A new season of Last Call Trivia is here, and that means it’s time to train that brain.
One good way to do that is through mnemonics. What’s that, you ask? Well, technically mnemonics is any learning technique that aids information retention, usually in a form that the brain can remember better than the info’s original makeup. That may sound confusing, but chances are you use mnemonics more often than you think. Remember ROY G. BIV? That’s a mnemonic device used to remember the colors of the rainbow. (Red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet. Doy).
It’s observed that a person’s mind more easily remembers a relatable bit of information more than something abstract or impersonal, so mnemonics can be a valuable tool in the trivia market. And mnemonics can be devised as a word made from the letters of a set of date (HOMES = Huron, Ontario, Michigan, Erie, and Superior for the Great Lakes), a sing-song mnemonic (remember the ABCs song?), or just about any other way you want to create a way to retain knowledge.
Now that you know what a mnemonic device is, let’s try to create a few. We’ll list a few sets of data, you devise a way to remember them with mnemonics.
PLANETS – Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune.
FIRST 10 PERIODIC TABLE ELEMENTS – Hydrogen, Helium, Lithium, Beryllium, Boron, Carbon, Nitrogen, Oxygen, Fluorine, Neon.
BIOLOGY TAXONOMY ORDER – Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Family, Genus, Species.
Now that you have a little practice on the subject you can use mnemonics to dazzle your teammates at Last Call Trivia venues everywhere.
Okay, that’s enough of a workout.