Video: Learn facial muscles in 5 minutes with this fun mnemonic

In today’s video, I’m going to show you how I created a mnemonic for all 18 facial expression muscles and how you can do the exact same thing with any information you want and I’m going to show you how to do it in less than five minutes. Let’s go.

So this is actually a follow-up to another video we made on mnemonics that details the process much more in depth. Our goal today is really just to show you how to do this and how to do it very quickly. So, what we’re going to do is go through this step-by-step process that we outlined in the other video. So if you want to check that out, it’s going to be linked somewhere over here. I kind of forget where the info card is.

So the first step is going to come at zero surprise to anyone and that is you have to figure out what information you want to make a mnemonic on in the first place. And so, I’ve decided to make a mnemonic today on the facial expression muscles. There are 18 of them. The names are kind of challenging, so this is not the easiest thing to create a mnemonic on so it’s intentionally challenging.

The second step is you then want to analyze the information. You want to look for themes, patterns, similarities that they may have. And so for me as I was looking over this, I was like, you know, well, what do they all do? They’re there to express emotion. We, as a human species, are a very emotive species and that’s exactly what these muscles do, so I feel like emotion needs to be part of this mnemonic.

The third step is then, okay, you choose the type of mnemonic. Is it a pun? Is it a word play? Is it a memory palace? Today, I’ve decided to choose an acrostic. An acrostic is like an acronym but much larger. An acronym creates a single word while an acrostic creates a really long phrase. And I feel like that makes sense given there are 18 muscles here.

Then we get creative. And so the next thing I’m doing, by the way, this is also probably part of getting, you know, analyzing the information, I’m looking for certain things that are going to stand out. And for me, the Z’s stood out immediately because Z is a challenging letter to make an acronym and an acrostic for. And so I started thinking like maybe I could do zoo or zookeeper. Maybe I could do zebras because that fits with the zoo, and so that worked for the Z.

And then the other letter that stood out to me - and I will admit I did this ahead of time, I didn’t just… I’m not doing this right here right now - the F. And when I saw the F, I started to think about friendly. Friendly to me is what jumped out, and I’ve done this a lot. I’ve done this exact process in front of my students probably hundreds of times over the years and that’s not an exaggeration. So I’ve gotten a little good at this, and Fs tend to stand out to me for whatever reason. And so friendly, zookeeper, and zebra is exactly what I wanted to work with.

And so from there, I decided to do ChatGPT. And if you watched the previous video, I talked about how you don’t want to be overreliant upon this, but at the same time, you know, use the technology because it’s there. And so what I’m using is ChatGPT-4o which is free. This is 100 percent free. You can do this right now for yourself and not have to pay anyone.

And what I did is I fed it the whole step process that we’re discussing right now and the fact that I wanted it to focus on emotion, I fed it the muscles that I wanted it to generate, or generate the mnemonic on, and I gave it friendly, zookeeper, and zebras. That’s all I did. And then I asked it to generate something. And so, again, it’s kind of walking through the steps that I had it provide, or I provided it rather.

And this is where it’s interesting is because what it came up with was Friendly Zookeepers Bring Lions And Zebras, Providing New Amusement, Cheerful Monkeys Dance Happily Over Pretty Rivers.

I think this is pretty good because it’s really kind of playing into the emotion, right. You have happy. You have dancing. You have amusement, cheerful - all of it’s working. But here’s where I get really excited. Because if you go to the next step, which is visualize and associate, what it did - and I’m going to let you pause this and kind of go through this so we can kind of like stick to our timeline here - but you’re going to see like… oh, it tells you. Oh - A friendly, surprised zookeeper raising their eyebrows, right, because that frontalis lifts the eyebrows, right? Nasalis - Flaring nostrils at new scents, right?

I think this is awesome what artificial intelligence is able to do and this is just helping to bring it all together and just create a really powerful mnemonic.

And then after that, of course, you’re going to practice and refine. This is where you practice this mnemonic like crazy. So, what I encourage you to do with this process is, you know, get creative, choose… go through this process yourself but also use AI if it makes sense for you given that it’s free. I promise this is going to be really impactful in your studies and it’s such a simple and easy thing to do at this point in time.

Mnemonics are just one tool in the tool belt of a successful anatomy student, and if you’re looking to fill out the rest of the slots in your tool belt, I strongly encourage you to check out the rest of what Kenhub has to offer. With videos covering over 600 topics in less than 30 minutes each, six types of spaced repetition-inspired quizzes, a huge library of easy-to-read articles, and a complete HD color atlas, it’s your one-stop shop for all things anatomy learning.

Thanks for watching, everybody, and go get creative.