Here’s the thing about human nature:
Think about things you know. Think about the things that live in your head, that got encoded into your memory without being learned.
My parents will get on YouTube and look at compilations of Top 80’s Songs and sing verses of every last one. They quote SNL skits that aired 20 years ago.
People in my generation quote Vines the same way. We know jingles from infomercials we haven’t seen in over a decade. It’s been months and I still find the words humming in my head, Turtleneck and blazer, on point like a laser…
I can sing songs I never intentionally listened to. It’s going down, I’m yelling Timber tumbles through my head without me knowing where it’s from. As an adult, I looked up “apologize” on youtube because of a vivid memory of being in the dentist’s chair as a child and hearing, It’s too late to apologize, it’s too late… I have always instinctively known that Boots with the fur follows Apple bottom jeans.
I can’t hear “What do you want” without the overwhelming urge to say “I want to sing and dance!” because of a Ray Stevens song. I can’t hear “What does the fox say?” without feeling something. I dare not say “Dumb ways to die” in front of my siblings.
Did you ever sit down and intentionally memorize the lyrics to Bohemian Rhapsody? Were you ever a fan of Owl City or do you just know that “You would not believe your eyes” is followed by “If ten million fireflies?”
Why do mnemonics work on us? How often do you say to yourself, “Thirty days hath September” or sing the ABC’s to yourself quietly? My dad told me, “If red touches black, he’s a friend of Jack, but if red touches yellow, he can kill a fellow” and I remember it. I can count by threes without thinking about it because of a video I had in elementary school. I can sing the alphabet in Greek and in Spanish because I listened to alphabet songs for them. I still know Be, am, is, are, was, being, have, has, had, could, would, should, may, might, must, shall, can, will, do, did, does, having are almost all English “helping verbs” because of a video I watched in high school. The only reason I know anacondas are found in Ecuador is because of a CollegeHumor parody of Nicki Minaj’s song Anaconda.
Study advice tells you to make up rhymes to memorize information. Commercials have jingles and slogans and rhythmic phrases because we automatically memorize them. It’s batshit that “make a mnemonic” is standard advice for students. How is that not harder than just remembering?
You know what follows “Hey diddle diddle,” but why? You can probably name most, if not all, of Santa’s reindeer. You know what Superman can leap in a single bound whether or not you’ve ever given a shit about Superman. You know “Ring around the rosie” is followed by “Pocket full of posies.”
I posted about this a while back, but you know that song about murdering Barney that you or your siblings used to sing? That song has been sung for over 30 years. Across multiple continents. There’s a tree of variants based on the same basic theme, There’s even multiple versions in Spanish based on the Spanish Barney theme song.
Where I can’t remember poems, there are little indents in my memory where their syllables should be. But I have multiple poems memorized that I never memorized on purpose.
You have definitely heard about how The Iliad is an epic poem. Before writing, everything was passed down orally. Everything. “How on earth did they do it?” people wonder, and bitch about how technology has ruined our memories, which is hilarious, because how they did it is obvious.
We are WIRED to memorize. If something rhymes or is rhythmic, our brains are terrifyingly good at making that shit last FOREVER. We can’t make it stop. “Damn it, I can’t get this song out of my head!” we will say. I have had this happen to me after hearing a song literally once.
Rhythm, rhyme, meter, the basic components of poetic structure, are VERY fundamental to how our memory works. Somehow. “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles” is in trochaic meter. If it was “Teenage Mutant Samurai Turtles” it wouldn’t stick around the way it did. But if you sing it, it sticks around.
Do you know anyone that never gets songs stuck in their head, that can’t remember jingles and poems and theme songs? Is there anyone you can think of that just…doesn’t have that lightbulb light up when you sing half of something they should remember? Dyslexia, aphantasia, prosopagnosia, disabilities where faculties we think of as “things brains do” are missing are pretty common, but are there humans that can’t do this?
It would be noticeably disabling. Imagine trying to memorize your ABC’s if you can’t sing them, even in your head.
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