Semantic Encoding
Semantic means it has personal meaning to you. We are selfish – we tend to remember stuff that matters to us. If I started listing celebrities’ birthdays, you’d remember the birthdays of those who you liked, and those who shared a birthday with someone you care about. We encode material more easily if it has meaning to us. That’s why I sometimes try to ask you to explain how some material relates to you. Ebbinghaus estimated that learning meaningful memories was 10 times easier than encoding memories that were not personally meaningful.
Acoustic Encoding
Our ability to encode acoustically is aided by the "phonological loop" - the echoes of the acoustic sounds that rehearse as we hear and encode the acoustic memory. Sometimes, rhymes ("six times six is thirty-six") help us remember information because of the way that the information sounds.
Visual Encoding
Imagery - how what we encode produces durable, vivid images - is at the heart of our visual encoding. As the book explains on page 263, our memory of an experience is often of a vivid image of its best or worst moment. Visual encoding doesn't have the power of semantic or acoustic encoding, but is nonetheless an impactful means of encoding information - especially if paired with semantic or acoustic encoding.