Rhyme and rhythm help make information more memorable. Here’s a few ideas that may help you use them more effectively.
Rhythm and rhyme are of course quite separate things, and are processed in different regions of the brain.
However, they do share some commonalities in why and how they benefit memory. Rhyme and rhythm impose pattern.
For that reason, rhyme and rhythm are particularly valuable when information is not inherently meaningful.
Remember that organization is the key to memory. If information cannot be meaningfully organized, it must be organized by other means.
Imposing a pattern, by using, for example, rhyme and/or rhythm, is one of those means.
Patterns are remembered because they are orderly. An important aspect of order is that it is predictable.
When we can anticipate the next part of a sequence or pattern, we encode that information better, probably because our attention has been focused on structurally important points.
There is another aspect to patterns, and to rhyme and rhythm in particular.
They help recall by limiting the possible solutions. In the same way that being told the name you want to remember starts with “B” helps your search your memory, so knowing that the next word rhymes with “time” will help your search.
Of course, knowing the sound ending of a word helps far more than simply knowing the initial letter, and when this is in the context of a verse, you are usually also constrained by meaning, reducing the possibilities immensely.
Rhythm isn’t quite so helpful, yet it too helps constrain the possibilities by specifying the number of syllables you are searching for.
It’s clear from this that for rhyme in particular, it’s most effective if the rhyming words are significant words.
For example, “In fourteen hundred and ninety two, Columbus sailed the ocean blue” is pretty good, because “two” is a significant word, and “blue” is sufficiently strongly associated with the ocean (another significant word, since it suggests why we remember him).
On the other hand, this verse for remembering England’s kings and queens is not particularly good:
“Willie, Willie, Harry, Steve,
Harry, Dick, John, Harry Three,
Edward One, Two, Three, Dick Two,
Henry Four, Five, Six, then who?
Edward Four, Five, Dick the Bad,
Harrys twain and Ned, the lad.
Mary, Lizzie, James the Vain,
Charlie, Charlie, James again.
William and Mary, Anne o’Gloria,
Four Georges, William and Victoria.
Edward Seven, Georgie Five,
Edward, George and Liz (alive)”
The fact that it’s in verse, providing rhyme and rhythm as mnemonic aids, is obviously helpful, but its effectiveness is lessened by the fact that the rhyming words are forced, with little significance to them.
Rhythm has another function, one it doesn’t share with rhyme. Rhythm groups information.
Grouping is of course another fundamental means of making something easy to remember.
We can only hold a very limited number of bits of information in our mind at one time, so grouping is necessary for this alone.
But in addition, grouping information into a meaningful cluster, or at least one where all bits are closely related, is what organization is all about.
Studies indicate that groups of three are most effective. The gap between such groups can be quite tiny, provided it is discernible by the listener.
The way we customarily group phone numbers is a reflection of that.
If you can’t group the information entirely in threes, twos are apparently better than fours (i.e., a 7 figure number would be broken into 3-2-2: 982 34 67).
Having said that, meaningfulness might override this preference; if a four-digit number had meaning in itself, say a famous date, it’d be best grouping it that way rather than breaking it into smaller chunks and losing the meaning.
