Alex around the World

This week’s word I have selected is mnemonic or mnemonic techniques. Read my related post or what Wikipedia says about it:

Mnemonics are often verbal, something such as a very short poem or a special word used to help a person remember something. They are often used to remember lists. Mnemonics rely not only on repetition to remember facts, but also on associations between easy-to-remember constructs and lists of data, based on the principle that the human mind much more easily remembers data attached to spatial, personal or otherwise meaningful information than that occurring in meaningless sequences. The sequences must make sense though. If a random mnemonic is made up, it is not necessarily a memory aid.

How many times are you asked for a login name and password in a day? How many Personal Identification Numbers (PIN), door codes, digicodes, IDs do you have? How many of these do you remember each and every time?As far as I’m concerned, I havePersonal Identification Number (PIN) for:

• my mobile;
• my e-banking account;
• my 2 bank cards;
• my 2 credit cards;

Logins and passwords for:

• my WordPress blog;
• my Windows 2000 account at the office;
• my laptop at the office;
• my private e-mail account;
• my professional e-mail account;
• my professional FTP account;
• my personal FTP account;
• my numerous website accounts (Flickr, Amazon, LastFM, Listal, Remember the Milk, Technorati, Feedburner, eSnips, etc.);
• quite as much discussion forums, game accounts, etc.

Not to mention all these Medical insurance numbers, private and professional telephone numbers, addresses, names, and so on.Luckily enough, most of the applications (Mozilla, IExplorer, E-mail clients, FTP clients, etc.) have a “save password” functionality, which helps a lot to remember the login information. But what about the others? Can you imagine writing down all your passwords on a sheet of paper and check it every time you have to enter a PIN code on your cell phone or retrieving cash at an ATM? Not a good idea.The only option left is to learn these random sets of numbers by heart, either by developing your artificial memory through the use of mnemonic our memory aids or by visualizing them on a keypad, keyboard or any other support.Read more about the word of the week: mnemonic techniques.