Find The Rhythm

Ever had a tune stuck in your memory all day? Irritating perhaps, but rhythm, rhyme and melody are often overlooked as memory boosters.

People have known for thousands of years that rhythm and melody are natural memory boosters. Epic Poems and songs were encoded using this method. If you think it's amazing that information the length of a whole book could be memorized in verse think about your own ability to remember song lyrics.

Here's an idea for you...

Try remembering one poem per week. Each evening, before you go to bed, repeat the poem several times. Start by learning the first verse, then the second, and so on. Then, each week, test yourself on the whole poem from the previous week. Remember that the rhythm and rhyme within most poems will be a natural aid.

Equally, the advertising industry knows the power of rhythm and melody to put information into our memories. Music has a natural structure to it which, even if we aren't musically trained, makes it easy for us to remember. You can make information easier to remember by injecting some musical qualities into it. 

"In memory everything seems to happen to music."

Tennessee Williams

You could even turn information into a full length poem or song, if you wanted. It helps if the rhyme paints a vivid image. Also, with any of the rhymes you make up to help remember information, repetition is important. 

If you wanted to get really creative, and you had the time, you could devise alternative lyrics to a song you already know. Your new lyrics would encode the information you were trying to memorize, while fitting into the structure of the original tune.