I've been doing this kind of unwittingly recently as I've been doing a lot of self-learning. I noticed that if I tried to simply memorize something by brute force without any association (like dermatomes), it would take me significantly longer to retain the information. However, the things I could group and categorize as similar, it was SO much easier to remember them. Like, the dermatomes of the arm are very vividly sequential, so those were easy to recall because it's simply just recalling a number linked to a location which points to a new number and a new location (almost like a linked list for any fellow developers out there).