Turn that song stuck in your head into a powerful tool to help you remember what you learn! This hack works especially well if you have a list of things to memorize.
It's common for people to hear a particularly catchy tune and hum it in their head for hours, or sometimes days. While this phenomenon can be annoying, it can also be used as a great tool for memorizing information. Making up a song or poem about a topic can be an extremely effective way to remember dates, lists of items, events and stories, and many other things.
This hack works in three ways to stick information in your mind. First, hanging information on a melody or rhyme scheme that you already know helps piggyback new information on information that you've already acquired. Second, remembering the rhythm of a tune or one or two rhyming lines can help bootstrap your memory; bringing one to mind will often bring up the rest of the associated information. Third, the active process of fitting the information into the tune causes you to concentrate on the information and turn it over in your mind, which also helps it to stick there.
There are a few different types of learning songs, and some may work better than others, depending on your own mental makeup or the information you're trying to memorize.
A parody is a song written using an existing song's tune, often satirizing or making fun of something. The parody might or might not play on the theme of the original song, but the new words often follow a rhyme or phonetic scheme similar to the original lyrics. They are also generally written based on a popular song rather than a folk or traditional tune. Matching the information you're trying to memorize to a song you already know, by theme or some other association, can further help you to remember the information.
If you need to learn a story, such as an event in history, putting the story to music with a story song will help you remember it. This hack has been used by people around the world for thousands of years, of course. Story songs are often similar to parodies, but may be more freewheeling and nonsatirical, and will probably use an original tune or traditional/folk tune.
List songs simply put a series of information to music or rhythm. They can be tricky to learn, depending on your list, but they can also be incredibly effective. List songs may take some time to memorize, but you won't soon forget them, and they are often faster to write than the other types. The keys to writing and learning a list song are rhyme and repetition.
To write a parody, begin with a topic you want to remember. Next, choose a popular song you know well and remember easily, or one that sounds like a word in your topic. This is best if you can transform the original lyrics into lyrics about your topic by changing only a few choice words. For example, if you're writing a song about baboons, pick an original song about a balloon, saloon, or something else that rhymes. How about "Up, up, and away, with my beautiful baboon"? Making humorous or absurd mental images makes things easier to remember, and when you're writing something funny, writing is a lot more fun. Often, once you start, the lyrics fall into place and you're laughing as you think of the next line. Continue working your information or story into the song until you get everything in, adding more verses if necessary.
Writing a story song to an original tune takes a certain kind of talent that the average person may or may not feel comfortable with. It's perfectly OK to use a traditional song here; it's also fine if your original melody isn't award-worthy, as long as you can remember it. If you choose a folk tune, you can either use the original lyrics as a base, as you would with a parody, or write your own from scratch. If you are using an original tune, you will have no base lyrics to work from, but coming up with your own lyrics can be half the fun. It can also make the memory stronger if you take time to craft all of the lyrics. Take the time to make it rhyme, too; rhyme and meter (meter is the rhythm of the words, as in poetry) are important to any song and will certainly help embed it into your mind. (Compare Lewis Carroll's couplets [Hack #9], which use a similar principle.)
List songs are often the easiest to compose. First, write out a list of information you'd like to memorize. This will give you a ready list when you need to pick the right word to rhyme or fit the meter. Next, find a tune that has either verses or repetitive sections you can repeat enough times to include your entire list. Start to sing the tune for your chosen song, and instead of the words, sing the list. You will probably have to add connecting words here and there and maybe at the end of lines to help the rhyme. If you can make the words on your list fit into the rhyme, however, it's more powerful. Making the list alphabetical can help you remember what comes next in the song. This works especially well if you have at least one word on your list for most letters of the alphabet (if not every one), such as the names of the states. You can also group information by geography (if you're memorizing countries in Africa, for example) or any other way that makes sense; this will aid your memory, too.
In all cases, physically writing or typing your work will help stick the information in your mind. Also, the more familiar your framework song or poem is, the easier it will be to remember its new words.
Parodies are particularly effective for remembering a group of related information or a story. The following parody, written by teenage girls, is not a mnemonic, but it's a good example of how to write a parody. "Negligee" is the story of a woman who buys an unfortunate piece of lingerie. It uses the tune to the Beatles' "Yesterday."
If you were a child with access to a television in the '70s or '80s, you are probably familiar with Schoolhouse Rock. The producers of these animated shorts, which were shown between cartoons on network TV Saturday morning programming, knew well the teaching power of story songs. These songs, with accompanying animation, taught science, math, history, and English language skills to original catchy tunes, from "Conjunction Junction" to "My Hero Zero" to "The Preamble" (which set the preamble of the United States Constitution to music). Many other children's TV shows have also used this technique, notably Sesame Street; its efficacy is well documented.
The contemporary band They Might Be Giants have recorded many story songs that teach topics including mammals, James K. Polk (the 11th president of the United States), and the sun. Their most recent contribution is an album to help kids learn the alphabet, called Here Come the ABCs. There are songs about the letters themselves, such as "E Eats Everything," and songs about the alphabet in general, such as "Alphabet of Nations" and "Who Put the Alphabet in Alphabetical Order?"
The following example was recorded by They Might Be Giants and released as a single. Both of the core members of this band learned this song as kids from an album put out by Singing Science Records and remembered it all through their lives. When they discovered they both knew it, they wanted to record and perform it. It was an underground hit. These are the first few lines from "Why Does the Sun Shine?":
| The Sun is a mass of incandescent gas, |
| A gigantic nuclear furnace! |
| Where hydrogen is made into helium |
| At a temperature of millions of degrees. |
List songs have been recorded by many artists over the years, but all serve a similar purpose: to remember a long list that would otherwise be nearly impossible. List songs exist for memorizing the names of all the countries on Earth, the states of the U.S. and their capitals, and even the chemical elements. In "The Elements," comedian and MIT professor Tom Lehrer cheerily lists every name on the periodic table of elements to the tune of "I Am the Very Model of a Modern Major-General" from Gilbert and Sullivan's The Pirates of Penzance. Much like memorizing the digits of π, memorizing "The Elements" is a geek rite of passage.
Probably inspired by this, I wrote a song as a freshman in high school to teach my science class about the alkaline and alkali earth metals from the periodic table. Using little facts I found during my research, I wove them into the lyrics, sung to the tune of "Yankee Doodle." That was more than 15 years ago, and I can still remember it:
| Strontium turns the flame bright red |
| So does rubidium |
| Potassium turns the flame bright blue |
| And cesium does too! |
| Calcium is bright orange |
| Barium is green |
| Sodium is very bright and so it can be seen. |
| Radium is radioactive— |
| It gives you weird diseases. |
| Calcium is found in milk |
| And most of all hard cheeses... |
Unofficial Singing Science Records home page; http://www.acme.com/jef/science_songs.
Ask MetaFilter thread on catchy educational songs; http://ask.metafilter.com/mefi/18731.
Meredith Hale
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