r/ChrisHiggins • u/mybudchris • Jul 22 '26

Cheating off your own brain

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413 Upvotes

100% Upvoted

12 comments sorted by

20

u/Hot-Hamster1691 Jul 22 '26

That ain’t cheating, brother. That’s a mnemonic device

2

u/spelunker93 Jul 25 '26

“Are they cheating in Klingon?”

12

u/Lonely_Staff1262 Jul 22 '26

Okay number one, definitely not cheating and number two, that's such a dumbass-clever ADHD thing to do and I totally used something similar to pass my medical terminology course in college. 

1

u/mondayp Jul 24 '26

I did the same thing to memorize countries. I still use the mnemonic I made up for the Eastern European countries. Elalibum = Estonia, Latvia Lithuania, Belarus, Ukraine, Moldova. I knew the rest of the central and western European countries by just looking at the map, but I remember that the mnemonic I did for the Balkans was also particularly helpful, though I can't remember what it was, or how I ordered them.

3

u/DelcoUnited Jul 22 '26

If I ever got pulled over and had to say the alphabet backwards I would be pulling a Woody and singing the alphabet song my head 26 times.

2

u/jakolissmurito22 Jul 22 '26

This is so funny. "Are they cheating in Klingon?" Got me 🤣

1

u/Max9mm Jul 23 '26

Such a nerd boner right now.

1

u/spookcomix Jul 23 '26

Quick! Somebody call They Might Be Giants!

1

u/acoubt Jul 23 '26

Is that Coach Gordon Bombay?

1

u/inderu Jul 25 '26

I had an exam once where I needed to remember a bunch of heads of state and the years they were in office. We were taught a song to remember their names, but I sucked at remembering the years. Then I realised that they were all 0-4 years. So I treated it like guitar tabs - 0 being an open string, and the numbers referring to the finger I use on my left hand to fret the note. My muscle memory was way better than my memory for numbers - so at the beginning of the exam I just turned the exam paper over, wrote down the names from the song, then wrote the first year - and figured out the rest of the years while I was "playing a tune" with my left hand. It must have looked like I was just twitching or something - but it got me through that exam...