Learning how to learn in a world full of toxic learning methods

I can only remember one episode in my school days where a teacher showed me how to actually learn things (and this wasn’t her goal):

Sometimes during high school, we watched a film in psychology class about a freaky guy who memorized some thousand digits of the number Pi. To my surprise, he didn’t claim to be overly intelligent, but rather explained that he memorized the digits by converting the numbers into a sex & crime story.

I had no idea about mnemotechnics at that time, but soon after class, I started to experiment with some mnemonic techniques I had developed on my own.

What are Mnemonics?

Mnemonics are mainly about visualizing abstract information. This works because our mind is a visual machine: It doesn’t work well with abstract or non-personal information like numbers, but it is pretty good at remembering pictures and stories.

As a consequence, converting numbers into relatable pictures makes them a lot easier to remember. And the more humorous, absurd, or sexual the images become, the easier it is to decipher the abstract information later.

But mnemonics don’t just work with numbers: They’re also useful for all kinds of information that doesn’t trigger images in your head.