Chapter 4 - A do-it-yourself guide

Home | TLR Contents | Search | Discussion | Events | Own the Book | UNLIMITED Learning Preview | Contact us

A do-it-yourself guide	175

say, the planets in order from earth - the hot sun shining so strongly it breaks a thermometer, and all the Mercury spills out; this runs outside where a beautiful woman, Venus, is standing on the Earth; it keeps running over the earth into the next-door neighbor's red-earth garden; a warlike neighbor, Mars, appears and starts hurling abuse. But just then a smiling giant appears, Jupiter - the biggest planet - and on his superman-type chest he has the word SUN emblazoned, for Saturn , Uranus and Neptune, and running alongside him is a happy dog, Pluto.
  It can be rhyming and visual: like memorizing numbers with rhyming pictorial words, and linking them up with the items to be memorized: so that one becomes sun; two, shoe; three, tree; four, door; five, hive; six, sticks; seven, heaven; eight, gate; nine, mine; and ten, hen. To remember ten items, such as on a shopping list, link each one visually with the numbered sequence - so that if your first three items are butter, cheese and milk, you visualize butter being melted with the sun (one), cheese in a shoe (two), and milk being poured over a tree (three).
  It can use the initial letter principle: as marketing people remember the key elements of advertising by AIDA: attract Attention, arouse Interest, create Desire and urge Action.
  But whichever association method you use, try to make it outlandish, funny and preferably emotional - because the "filter" in the brain that transfers information to your long-term memory is very closely linked with the brain's emotional centre. And link your associations with as many senses as you can: sight, sound, smell, touch and taste.

18. Have fun, play games
 
  Ask a friend what images flash to mind when you mention education or study. Now see how they tally with Tony Buzan's experience. He says: "In my 30 years of investigating people's associations with the word 'study,' ten major words or concepts have emerged. They are: boring, exams, homework, waste of time, punishment, irrelevant, detention, 'yuck,' hate and fear."5
  But ask a four-year-old fresh out of a good preschool center and she'll talk about the fun she had. So nearly all progressive educators now stress the need to recapture the fun-filled joy of early learning. And humor itself is a great way to learn. So try to link humor with study. Think up games to play to reinforce the key points with someone who's studying the same subject - even Trivial Pursuit-type quizzes can be great aids.

First	Prev	Top	Next	Last

Contents Page   Preface    Introduction