Once you've used a mnemonic device to remember something, can you remember it in the future without the mnemonic device, or are they always associated?

I use the granny vs. square knot doggerel all the time. “Right over left, left over right,” if you don’t want the knot to loosen. (Or if you prefer, “Left over right, right over left.”)

When I stake tomatoes with old panty-hose that I want to re-use, it is “Rght over left, right over left.”

And there is the sailing knot (bowline) where the rabbit goes up the hole, around the tree and down the hole.

For me, it depends on a couple of factors. 1. How strongly the mnemonic is tied to the subject in my head, and 2. Whether I need to be remembering it.

For an example of 1, I learned the Preamble to the Constitution of the United States when I was a kid by watching a Schoolhouse Rock cartoon that set it to music. To this day, I can’t think of it without thinking of it as a song. :-)

For 2, and most of the time, I only think of it when I need it. For example, I don’t think of “Righty-Tighty, Lefty-Loosey” every single time I work a screw or use a cap… but if I momentarily blank on which way something would need to go, then the mnemonic will kick in, and I’ll think “Oh yeah, righty-tighty, lefty-loosey!”

I have to do that with remembering peoples names.

Had a friend named Stephanie. Could not remember her name for anything.
H.R. Pufnstuf, puff n stuff., stuffany. Stephanie!

I had to think of H.R. Pufnstuf to remember her name.

@derekfnord: I don’t do that with every cap… just ones I don’t use often. A jar or a bottle, say, it doesn’t pop into my head because jars and bottles always turned the same way, and I knew that since I was a little kid. It’s other twist-on things that could potentially go the opposite way. Ever try twisting a cap off and finding out you were tightening it instead to the point where it wouldn’t budge? lol

My
Very
Educated
Mother
Just
Served
Us
Nine
Pies.

We’ll have to create a new mnemonic, people; Pluto no longer counts. I remembered the planets to recall this mnemonic!

I do a cheer from high school whenever I need to spell psychology or something of that nature.
P-S-Y-C-H-E-D psyched is what we gotta be! Get psyched! All right, we gotta get psyched! (clap, clap, clap) =)

I only use mnemonic devices to memorize lists of words of concepts that I’ll need for a test and probably in the future. Its nature is to help the information lodge itself into your brain. For the first while, you use the device as a crutch, but after you use it a lot the information and the mnemonic separate into different entities. I still use ROY G BIV though.

I was going to say “no,” until I realized that when I am sorting things alphabetically, I pretty much hum the alphabet song to myself. Even when I don’t hum it, I still use the rhythm to say the letters. I am pretty confident that I know the alphabet at this point, but the tune to “Twinkle, twinkle, little star” always seems to come to my mind when I am filing things alphabetically.

@aprilsimnel –
My
Very
Educated
Mother
Just
Served
Us
Nachos!!!

While I can do it in my head if I put in the effort, to this very day the east way for me to remember the standard metric system is King Henry Died By Drinking Chocolate Milk (kilo-hecto-deco-base-deci-centi-milli) which I learned in sixth grade. I use it quite often in my accoustics class

I sometimes have to sing the alphabet to remember the order! Isn’t that pathetic?

I’ve known how to spell separate for awhile, but one time my 10th grade English teacher mentioned how it was a word her kids had difficulty with so she taught them a device to remember it: A man named Sep’s wife saw a rat in the middle of the night. Terrified, she screamed “SEP! A RAT! E!”

Now whenever I go to write the word, it’s the first thing I think of.

I use Gwen Stefani’s “Hollaback Girl” to remember how to spell bananas. <- I just used it again!

I also use the “I before e except after c” a lot.

I’m sure there are many more

@IBERnineD: I before e except after c… like.. from Peanuts? :D

@poofandmook is it from Peanuts?

@IBERnineD: That’s what I was asking. If you’re singing the little song Charlie Brown sings to himself while studying for the spelling bee. lol

@poofandmook I have no idea lol I didn’t watch it!

@IBERnineD @poofandmook I learned that rule in school; definitely predates Peanuts usage.

@janbb isn’t there a second part? something to do with neighbor and weigh?

I just learned it as “I before e except after c;” maybe other schools were more advanced. :-)

Or when sounding like “a” as in “neighbor” and “weight.”

Never mind. @gailcalled beat me! :D

@ccrow, well done! I like nachos!

@gailcalled Yes! That would be it! I also remember my dad saying “i before e except after c
unless you’re being weird”

There is also “veil.”

And vein. So I guess it’s really “I before e except after c and except when it isn’t”?

I can’t stretch “veil” to sound like an “a:, but I can with “vein.”

If I were to write veil the way I think it should be spelled, I would say “vail”.. I recognize it as an “a” sound but a sort of awkward one, I suppose.

Whenever I want to recall the capitals of Norway, Sweden and Finland (yeah, that situation arises constantly…) I still use “OSH”, the first letter in each capital of the three countries going left to right. Oslo, Stockholm, Helsinki. I came up with that in 7th grade (23 years ago) and still rely on it to this day.

And if you throw in Denmark, you could use “COSH.”

I love mnemonics, and I think that kids should be taught these methods early. They need to learn HOW to learn, before they learn. It’s a much more efficient process.
I use them all the time now to learn new Spanish vocabulary words, Scrabble word lists and more. Now they stick in my mind instead of having to be relearned again and again.
The best illustration of the power of mnemonics, for me, is this. I graduated high school 24 years ago, and was a very smart kid so I didn’t have to put forth a lot of effort. Most of the time I wasn’t even listening during my classes. But I do remember one thing from my 10th grade Social Studies class, and one thing only. The teacher was showing us some slides of different ancient pyramids, and we had to learn the names of each of the different types. Well, one slide showed a broken-down, blocky-looking pyramid, with a big hole in the side of it where the looters had dug in. The teacher said, “I look at this picture of the meidum pyramid, with the big hole in the side, and I imagine I’m being sucked in to it. And that’s MY DOOM”.
Silly? Sure. But I still remember what a meidum pyramid is, twenty-seven years later.