Thinkalink - Making the Forgettable Unforgettable?
Thinkalink's founder speaks from personal experience. The father of three six year-olds, he has used the learning techniques that he has designed to supplement his triplets' schooling, although he is the first to admit that the genesis of the idea was his participation in pub quizzes, rather than fatherhood. Determined to bolster his own performance in the quiz at his local pub, in Wimbledon, Salmon devised a unique way of committing the capital cities of all 50 US states to memory. "Juneau," was how one example began, "that contrary to popular belief Anchorage is not the capital of Alaska?" It was rudimentary, but effective.
Buoyed by the success of these mnemonics, and encouraged by his friends (and fellow pub-quizzers) to extend the application to areas other than geography in general and US cities in particular, Salmon began to assemble a vast range of aides-mémoire based on similar basic techniques. Some are wonderfully simple but ingenious rhymes, such as Thinkalink's pithy conceit for remembering the identity of Ronald Reagan's would-be assassin: "Hinckley (John) shot wrinkly Ron". Others are equally quick to capitalise on similar phonetic coincidences, with the mechanism for remembering the capital of Moldova entirely in debt to Kenneth Wolstenholme's unforgettable commentary in 1966: "They think it's Moldova; it Chisinau..."
Coincidences of that kind are, however, few and far between. For the vast majority of its mnemonics, Thinkalink has needed to dig much more deeply to find appropriate links, with no hard and fast rules being applied to the technique throughout. Inevitably, for example, numbers play an anchor role in a number of these links, albeit in a variety of ways. "There are four words in its name" is a simple way of remembering that the United States of America is the fourth largest country in the world. More elaborate is the use of numbers to signify letters of the alphabet, in which A represents 1, B stands for 2, and so on, which is the technique used by Thinkalink for remembering - inter alia - that Methuselah lived to be 969 years old "Cor, his breath must have been a bit IFI !!! (letters 9, 6 & 9 of the alphabet)''
Pivotal to Thinkalink, however, is often the sound of a word or expression rather than its meaning - even if that means taking some liberties with pronunciation. As an example, take the aide-mémoire for linking the battle of Balaclava with the Crimean war, which depends on a Cockney-accented view of history: "'allo, 'allo, 'allo,' says PC Griswald, picking up a balaclava. 'Looks like there's been a crime 'ere." Links in a similar vein exploit a range of other accents: "I've just ordered some food from a Japanese restaurant: 'tok-e-home, sir?' 'Nah, eat here, thanks" is the link for remembering that Narita is the name of the international airport at Tokyo.
