Any tips? Just started carbohydrates and I've just been writing them out over and over/ reciting them to myself. It works eventually but it's very time consuming and I'm concerned about retention.Thanks!
memorizing pathways
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Colored dry erase markers. They. are. AWESOME. Great investment. Color coding things as I draw them on a big whiteboard helps a lot.
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Think about connecting them. Usually people will use some sort of strange mnemonic - someone that posts regularly on here has the urea cycle as his sig but as "Ordinarily Careless Crappers Are Also Frivolous About Urination." Coming up with your own imo works better than pulling other people's. The more memorable the image the better. It works for everything and you remember it exactly how you list it. When I didn't feel like writing down my grocery list, I just connected them this way:
Example: Milk, lettuce, bananas, tomatoes, oranges.
Picture in your mind the following, taking time to really have the image in your head.
Say it's currently raining, now I'll think of it raining huge droplets of milk instead of water. Then as they hit the ground, it sprouts into heads of lettuce. The lettuce grows and when it opens, in the very center of it is a banana, which gets out of the lettuce and starts walking down the street. It sees a bright red tomato lying on the curb and whacks it like a baseball. The tomato then hits a car knocking out one of its wheels which are made of oranges.
It's basically a linking system, each piece helps you remember the next. There's no limit to the number of things you can link and you can go forwards or backwards with it. The more memorable/strange you make the image the longer lasting it'll be. I find this to be much less boring than doing what you're doing.
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Do you have an example? I've heard of this technique used to help people memorize a list of random words. But I've rarely been able to use it to remember a pathway. I can easily picture a head of lettuce, but not so much enzymes. Without getting into the details of the chemical reactions which would take longer and is often way beyond what is needed to know for tests, I wouldn't know how to visualize the chemicals playing out a story like that.
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Imagine the enzymes they way you think they'd look if you were to draw them as a cartoon caracter. Chemical pathways can be turned into a story, albeit you have to use a lot of imagination! Turn the substrates, enzymes and what have you into cartoons and let them interact. Draw them if you have to.
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It really can be applied to anything, numbers/etc. I used this to study for my MCAT actually and did really well. And what coffeebeans said. Btw, if you did what I said to do yesterday with my little story/grocery list you should be able to recall that story and therefore the list of items without looking at my previous post. If you can list all the items then you did the visualization/linking right. And it's just a stupid grocery list of random items you never really cared about. There were 5 things on that list, which could have easily been 5 enzymes/substrates in a cycle you needed to remember.
I'll bite. Let's take the urea example again and I'm doing this off the top of my head, so you can imagine with a little more time it would be a better way to visualize it:
1 L-ornithine
2 carbamoyl phosphate
3 L-citrulline
4 argininosuccinate
5 fumarate
6 L-arginine
7 urea
(taken off wiki so don't shoot me 😛 if it's wrong). You must visualize each of these things before going onto the next (as in close your eyes and picture each part for say 5-10 seconds or so) or it won't link:
Let's say a very ornery old man (with a scowl on his face) jumps into his [car when BAM, all of a sudden there's the Greek fates] sitting on top. There's citrus lining his seat. ["Arrrgh this sucks,"] he says, slamming his hands on the wheel in frustration. His face turns red as steam puffs out of his ears. Fuming mad, the steam keeps pouring out until a walrus pops out with it and says "arg" nine times. Then a lightbulb goes off in his head as he realizes what he can do with it. "Ureka!" he cries, and dances a happy jig outside his car as he makes lemonade.
Now let's go over the list again
1 L-ornithine (the ornery old man that I pictured with a scowl on his face)
2 carbamoyl phosphate (the car that BAM the fates popped up)
3 L-citrulline (citrus lining the car)
4 argininosuccinate (arg this sucks he said)
5 fumarate (fuming mad with steam rising from his ears)
6 L-arginine (the walrus that pops out of the steam saying ARG nine times)
7 urea (ureka! he's got it, doing a happy jig)
Like I said, the stranger/more memorable the image the better. Why a walrus? 😛 Someone asked me what they sound like and I was thinking of that weird arg/honking sound they make, hence why it came into the story. It works better when you come up with your own. The bolded parts are linked to the substrates you need to remember. It took me 10 minutes or so to come up with this, but now (for better or worse) I have the urea cycle in my head and won't need to write it down for the next hour over and over.
When you do this, write down your own little stories, and you can quickly glance back at them if you forget, and the links should all come back to you, rather than having to do what some people do and rememorize the pathway from scratch by writing it over and over and..over. Props to you guys that can do that, I get bored out of my mind, so I had to figure out a way to memorize things fast and without having to repeat it if I forgot it, hence the linking system came up when I looked around.
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What is said above is good and works. I do something a bit different.
What I try to do is understand the material deeply, making sense out of each step and the names, what happens next, etc. By understanding the logic of the reaction you can then understand it forward OR backward (a higher level of thinking). Then to create another pathway to the same memory, a simple mnemonic just like what is described above.
A creative connection that connects all the steps
1 L-ornithine
2 carbamoyl phosphate
3 L-citrulline
4 argininosuccinate
5 fumarate
6 L-arginine
7 urea
Maybe, "LOoking 4 Carbs Citrus sucks fumes" - Lar-rea.
I made this up real quick, but as you can see, it is easy to memorize. Picture a guy named Lar-rea writing you a note that he signed, saying, "Looking 4 Carbs Citrus Sucks Fumes" - Lar-rea
It links all your ideas if you know them: LOoking - L-ornithine, 4 is a throw away, carbs - carbamoyl phosphate, citrus - L-citrulline, sucks - argininosuccinate, fumes - fumarate, Lar - L-arginine, rea - urea.
The mnemonic is a single picture and easy to remember but it is really a backdoor to your real memory which is built on deeply understanding the material.
What I try to do is understand the material deeply, making sense out of each step and the names, what happens next, etc. By understanding the logic of the reaction you can then understand it forward OR backward (a higher level of thinking). Then to create another pathway to the same memory, a simple mnemonic just like what is described above.
A creative connection that connects all the steps
1 L-ornithine
2 carbamoyl phosphate
3 L-citrulline
4 argininosuccinate
5 fumarate
6 L-arginine
7 urea
Maybe, "LOoking 4 Carbs Citrus sucks fumes" - Lar-rea.
I made this up real quick, but as you can see, it is easy to memorize. Picture a guy named Lar-rea writing you a note that he signed, saying, "Looking 4 Carbs Citrus Sucks Fumes" - Lar-rea
It links all your ideas if you know them: LOoking - L-ornithine, 4 is a throw away, carbs - carbamoyl phosphate, citrus - L-citrulline, sucks - argininosuccinate, fumes - fumarate, Lar - L-arginine, rea - urea.
The mnemonic is a single picture and easy to remember but it is really a backdoor to your real memory which is built on deeply understanding the material.
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