Mnemonic Quotes & Sayings

To my mind this is what shamanic training must really be, is mnemonic training. If you want to bring the stuff back you have to train yourself to bring it back. — Terence McKenna

We're an information economy. They teach you that in school. What they don't tell you is that it's impossible to move, to live, to operate at any level without leaving traces, bits, seemingly meaningless fragments of personal information. Fragments that can be retrieved, amplified ... — William Gibson

If you wish to forget anything on the spot, make a note that this thing is to be remembered. — Edgar Allan Poe

That can cause an electrolyte disturbance: hypercalcemia. Stones, bones, moans, groans, thrones, and psychiatric overtones. That's the mnemonic, Natasha said, and repeated psychiatric overtones to herself. p.307 — Anthony Marra

The almost-35-year-old Terry Schmidt had very nearly nothing left anymore of the delusion that he differed from the great herd of the common run of men, not even in his despair at not making a difference or in the great hunger to have an impact that in his late twenties he'd clung to as evidence that even though he was emerging as sort of a failure the grand ambitions against which he judged himself a failure were somehow exceptional and superior to the common run's - not anymore, since now even the phrase Make A Difference had become a platitude so familiar that it was used as the mnemonic tag in low-budget Ad Council PSAs for Big Brothers/Big Sisters and the United Way, which used Make a Difference in a Child's Life and Making a Difference in Your Community respectively, with B.B./B.S. even acquiring the telephonic equivalent of DIF-FER-ENCE to serve as their Volunteer Hotline number in the metro area. — David Foster Wallace

Because of our forgetfulness, God has created the physical world to be mnemonic, to help us daily remember that we are not alone, that we are not at the center, that life is not primarily about us, and that there is a grander story than the little stories of our individual lives. Physical things are meant to remind us of the grandeur and glory of the One who created all those things, set them in motion, and keeps them together by the awesome power of his will. — Paul David Tripp

The word constructionism is a mnemonic for two aspects of the theory of science education underlying this project. From constructivist theories of psychology we take a view of learning as a reconstruction rather than as a transmission of knowledge. Then we extend the idea of manipulative materials to the idea that learning is most effective when part of an activity the learner experiences as constructing a meaningful product. — Seymour Papert

Rhyme is a mnemonic device, an aid to the memory. And some poems are themselves mnemonics, that is to say, the whole purpose of the poem is to enable us to remember some information. — James Fenton

FMr. Oswald places the telescope on the desk in front of us. "This," he says proudly, "Is a Broadhurst. It was the most powerful telescope for backyard veiwing in its day."
Which was when?" Lizzy asks.
The nineteen thirties," he replies. "Isn't it a beauty? On a clear night, you could see the whole entire solar system with this one."
Unable to stop myself, I blurt out, "My very energetic mother just served us nine pizzas."
Lizzy gawks at me like I have two heads. "He's lost it; he's finally lost it. I knew this day would come."
Mr. Ozwald chuckles. "Jeremy has just given us a mnemonic device for remembering the order of the planets. — Wendy Mass

Before the invention of photography, significant moments in the flow of our lives would be like rocks placed in a stream: impediments that demonstrated but didn't diminish the volume of the flow and around which accrued the debris of memory, rich in sight, smell, taste, and sound. No snapshot can do what the attractive mnemonic impediment can: when we outsource that work to the camera, our ability to remember is diminished and what memories we have are impoverished. — Sally Mann

Here's a mnemonic device that might be useful. LEO the lion says GER LEO: you Lose Electrons in Oxidation GER: you Gain Electrons in Reduction — Princeton Review

Murder investigations start with the victim, because usually in the first instance that's all you've got. The study of the victim is called victimology because everything sounds better with an 'ology' tacked on the end. To make sure you make a proper fist of this, the police have developed the world's most useless mnemonic - 5 x W H & H - otherwise known as Who? What? Where? When? Why? and How? Next time you watch a real murder investigation on the TV, and you see a group of serious-looking detectives standing around talking, remember that what they're actually doing is trying to work out what sodding order the mnemonic is supposed to go in. Once they've sorted that out, the exhausted officers will retire to the nearest watering hole for a drink and a bit of a breather. — Ben Aaronovitch

Poe's drunkenness was a mnemonic device, a deliberate method of work, drastic and fatal, no doubt, but suited to his passionate nature. Poe taught himself to drink, just as a careful man of letters makes a deliberate practice of filling his notebooks with notes. — Charles Baudelaire

I never forget," Myrnin said in a choked whisper. "Certainly not with your nails in my throat. They're quite an excellent mnemonic device. — Rachel Caine

A curiosity: my name, Rem, will someday come to mean a line of text in a language spoken only by machines. Specifically, it will mean a line that the machines can safely ignore
one that's only there as a mnemonic, a placeholder, for the people who give the machines their orders. A REM line might say something like "this bit is a self-contained sub loop" or "Steve Perlman in Marketing is a shit." The program as a whole rolls on past and around the REM lines, ignores them completely as it takes its shape, moves through its pre-ordained sequences, unfolds its wonders. My mother named me well. — Louise Carey

With the industrial proliferation of visual and audiovisual prostheses and unrestrained use of instantaneous-transmission equipment from earliest childhood onwards, we now routinely see the encoding of increasingly elaborate mental images together with a steady decline in retention rates and recall. In other words we are looking at the rapid collapse of mnemonic consolidation. This collapse seems only natural, if one remembers a contrario that seeing, and its spatio-temporal organization, precede gesture and speech and their coordination in knowing, recognizing, making known (as images of our thoughts), our thoughts themselves and cognitive functions, which are never ever passive. — Paul Virilio

As with most fine things, chocolate has its season. There is a simple memory aid that you can use to determine whether it is the correct time to order chocolate dishes: any month whose name contains the letter A, E, or U is the proper time for chocolate. — Sandra Boynton

Poetry was invented as an mnemonic device to enable people to remember their prayers. — Peter Davison

Useful mnemonic for remembering the geologic periods of the last half-billion years is: Camels Often Sit Down Carefully, Perhaps Their Joints Creak (Cambrian-Ordovician-Silurian-Devonian-Carboniferous-Permian-Triassic-Jurassic-Cretaceous). The mnemonic unfortunately runs out before the most recent periods: the Paleogene, the Neogene, and the current Quaternary. — Elizabeth Kolbert

Emotion is the best mnemonic device. — Alice Fulton

The low E is at the top, the second string is A, then it's D, G, B, and the last one is high E." A mnemonic device he once heard came to mind and, plucking the strings, he said, "Eddie Ate Dynamite ... Good Bye Eddie,. — Rachel Harris

The earthly father is a God-given mnemonic device to remind us of the glory of the heavenly Father. The shepherd is a mnemonic device to remind us of God's care for his own. The snow is meant to remind us of the Lord's purity and holiness. The storm is a mnemonic device to remind us of God's power and wrath. The daily rising sun is a mnemonic device to remind us of God's faithfulness. We're literally surrounded by gracious reminders of the presence, power, authority, and character of God because he designed created things to function mnemonically. He knows how quickly and easily we forget and how vital it is for us to remember, so he embedded reminders everywhere we look in his creation. — Paul David Tripp

Poetry is one of the oldest of all art forms, and one of its powers for shamans and tribal leaders was the mnemonic. — Felix Dennis

There is a strong link between synesthesia and photographic memory (technically called eidetic memory) or at least heightened memory (hypermnesis). Many synesthetes used their synesthesia as a mnemonic aid. — Richard E. Cytowic

The genres of the fantastic and the grotesque are far more interesting to me than most mnemonic fiction. — Ellen Datlow