Next Avenue Logo
Advertisement

How Music Can Boost Your Memory

Need to remember something? Turn it into a song or make it rhyme

By Annie Murphy Paul

This article originally appeared on Annie Murphy Paul's The Brilliant Blog.

The best way to remember facts might be to set them to music. Medical students have long used rhymes and songs to help them master vast quantities of information and we’ve just gotten fresh evidence of how effective this strategy can be.
 
A young British doctor, Tapas Mukherjee of Glenfield Hospital in Leicester, was distressed by a survey showing that 55 percent of nurses and doctors at his hospital were not following guidelines on the management of asthma; 38 percent were not aware the guidelines existed.

Using his cell phone, Mukherjee recorded a video of himself singing immortal lines like "Aim for 94 percent to 98 percent sats now” (that’s a reference to the asthma patient’s blood oxygen level). He posted the video on YouTube and it went viral among hospital staff.
 
Two months later, Glenside conducted another survey, which found that 100 percent of doctors and nurses were now aware of the asthma treatment guidelines and that compliance had increased markedly. Mukherjee reported the results at a meeting of the European Respiratory Society last week.
 
(MORE: 6 Memory Problems That Shouldn't Worry You)
 
An Honored Oral Tradition

Although Mukherjee’s methods are modern, his approach reflects a long tradition of oral storytelling — one that shaped itself over thousands of years to the particular proclivities of the human brain. Oral forms like ballads and epics exist in every culture and originated long before the advent of written language.
 
In preliterate eras, tales had to be appealing to the ear as well as memorable lest they disappear. After all, most messages we hear are forgotten. Even if they are passed along, they’re usually changed beyond recognition, as psychological research into how rumors evolve have shown.
 
“Oral traditions depend on human memory for their preservation," notes cognitive scientist David Rubin in his classic book Memory in Oral Traditions. "If a tradition is to survive, it must be stored in one person’s memory and be passed on to another person who is also capable of storing and retelling it. All this must occur over many generations. ... Oral traditions must, therefore, have developed forms of organization and strategies to decrease the changes that human memory imposes on the more casual transmission of verbal material.”

What are these strategies? Tales that last for many generations tend to describe concrete actions rather than abstract concepts. They use powerful visual images. They are sung or chanted. And they employ patterns of sound: alliteration, assonance, repetition and, most of all, rhyme.
 
(MORE: How to Beat Distraction and Remember Everything)
 
One of Rubin’s own experiments showed that when two words in a ballad are linked by rhyme, contemporary college students remember them better than non-rhyming words. Such universal characteristics of oral narratives are, in effect, mnemonics — memory aids that people developed over time “to make use of the strengths and avoid the weaknesses of human memory,” as Rubin puts it.

Songs and rhymes can be used to remember all kinds of information. A study just published in the journal Memory and Cognition finds that adults learned a new language more effectively when they sang the words instead of spoke them. Even great literature is susceptible to this treatment. Book Tunes, a collaboration between educational entrepreneur Jonathan Sauer and hip-hop artist Andy Bernstein (he performs under the name Abdominal), turns long, wordy books into compact, catchy raps, spoken over an insistent beat.

Advertisement

The duo’s latest offering: a rap version of The Scarlet Letter.  (“Hester’s story is set in the Puritan settlement/that was 17th-century Boston where she’s being led/from the town prison holding her baby daughter Pearl with an A on her chest/for the world to see which we quickly learn stands for adulterer ‘cause turns out/H is married . . .”) Book Tunes’ take on the tale of Hester Prynne is being offered jointly with SparkNotes, the study-aid provider owned by Barnes & Noble, which is said to be interested in raps of other classics, like the plays of William Shakespeare.

Purists aghast at the notion may need to be reminded that many of the world’s greatest works of literature, like The Odyssey and The Iliad, began as oral chants. Humans have been remembering through rhyme and song for ages. How can you update the tradition?

Readers: Have you ever used songs or rhymes to remember? Share your ditties here on NextAvenue or on my blog

Annie Murphy Paul writes about how we think and learn — and how we can do it better. She writes the Brilliant Blog, at www.anniemurphypaul.com, and is the author of the forthcoming book Brilliant: The Science of How We Get Smarter. Read More
Advertisement
Next Avenue LogoMeeting the needs and unleashing the potential of older Americans through media
©2024 Next AvenuePrivacy PolicyTerms of Use
A nonprofit journalism website produced by:
TPT Logo