Mnemonic techniques or systems according to Samuel do not replace the basic principles of learning and memory but they make use of them.
Meaningfulness: Through the application of rhymes, patterns and associations, mnemonics techniques and systems makes any material meaningful, even though they are inherently without meaning, they get wide-spelt meaning.
Organization: As mental filing systems, the mnemonics systems and techniques impose meaningful organizations on any material where it is applied.
Association: As a mental filing system, you associate materials that you want to learn with the materials that has been memorised previously.
Visualisation: This is probably the most useful aspect of mnemonic systems and can be used to remember verbal materials
Attention: In order to form pictures and associate them, mnemonic system forces you to concentrate on the material; it is therefore more interesting and fun since it fosters attention.
Memory is either verbal or visual, verbal makes association with words while visual memory uses visual imagery to associate items to be remembered i.e. associating the words lion or goat can either be visual or verbal. For verbal association, we can say, the Goat eats the Lion while if visual we can form a bizarre visual image of a Goat eating a Lion. A verbal mediator sample of memories includes Rhymes. Rhymes can be used to remember the number of days in each of the twelve months of the year or remembering up to 30 decimal places of the value Pi.
