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What was your most embarrassing moment?

You are away from home, stuck in an emergency, your smartphone has died due to low charge, and you cannot remember your wife’s mobile number! I was stuck in such a situation once! Another time was when our senior colleague Dr Deepak Haldipur Ji, could recite my mobile number like a song, And I could not remember his number!

The advent of smartphones and many apps have eliminated the need to memorize a lot. Therefore, smartphone dependency is one of humanity’s most rapidly adopted habits.

I have several friends who could remember many mobile numbers and dates of birth or anniversaries. And, I used to wonder how they do it. That is when I searched for ways to improve my memory skills. When I referred to some books on improving memory skills, I was surprised to find that I had already used many of those techniques.

What’s a lady between two majors? Or, as undergrad medical students, how did we remember the cranial nerves? The Mnemonics! I had learnt so many mnemonics to learn anatomy. But, in the end, I needed a mnemonic to remember the mnemonics!

Mnemonics are mental models or memory devices that can help us recall ample information. While Gerald R. Miller showed that mnemonics increase recall, Tony Buzan popularized them. Miller’s research study showed that students who regularly used mnemonics had better scores, as much as 77%. The mnemonics are more valuable, especially with lists like characteristics, steps, stages, parts, phases, etc.

Mnemonics make sense because they rely on our special senses such as vision, hearing, smell, etc. The 9 different basic types of mnemonics used are based on music, rhyme, picture, name, expression/word, spelling, model, organization, and connection. We can create even more types of mnemonics. The types depend on the extent of our imagination. As a visual person with love for art and craft, I love using images, models and connections.

Picture mnemonic or models are handy when we are studying radiology as non-radiologists. For example, we all know ice-cream cone appearance to identify the ossicles on HRCT Temporal bone. So is signet ring appearance for a lateral semicircular canal. However, our imagination need not be limited to the already existing ones. We can create our own mnemonics that help us recall. Don’t worry about being accepted by others. What we use today and teach others can spread through word of mouth and get cited by our colleagues tomorrow. If not as scientific publications, as an urban legend! Here are some examples of mnemonics I used to study and teach HRCT Temporal bone. I recently listened to a lecture on Temporal bone radiology by a colleague not known to me, and he had used these mnemonics in his presentations. That’s how (urban) legends grow!

Traffic Police sign to locate and identify different semicircular canals on Coronal views of HRCT Temporal Bone.

Learn some pictorial mnemonics as you master the essential Radiology of the neck required for an Otorhinolaryngologist at our new course. Join us on 16 January 2022 at 4.00 pm – IST for this webinar.