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"gatekeeper to learning", part of being in a fully
resourceful state.
The right brain wavelength
One of the main steps to achieve this is to get
everyone working on the "right wavelength." And here probably the most
ironic contradiction occurs: to learn faster you slow down the brain. One of your
brain's "wavelengths" is obviously most efficient for deep-sleep. Another is
more efficient for inspiration. And another, the one you're most conscious of: the wide
awake alertness of daily living. But many studies now reveal that a fourth brainwave is
the most efficient "frequency" for easy, effective learning: what some call the
alpha state.16
Bring on the music
Dozens of research projects have found that music is a very efficient dial to
tune into that alpha frequency.17
The use of music
for learning is certainly not new," Californian accelerated-learning innovator
Charles Schmid told us not long before his death. "We learned our alphabet to music -
ABCD - EFG - HIJK - LMNOP. But in the last 25 years we've expanded our music knowledge
tremendously. We've found out that in a special kind of relaxation, which music can
induce, our brain is most open and receptive to incoming information. That type of
relaxation is not getting ready to fall asleep. It's a state of relaxed
alertness - what we sometimes call relaxed awareness."18
Much of our
recent knowledge in this field has been built on the pioneering research started in the
1950s by Bulgarian psychiatrist and educator Georgi Lozanov. Lozanov set out to determine
why some people have super-memories.
After years of research, he concluded that we each have an "optimum
learning state". This occurs, he says, "where heartbeat, breath-rate and
brain-waves are smoothly synchronized and the body is relaxed but the mind concentrated
and ready to receive new information."19
In putting that
research into practice, Lozanov achieved some amazing results, particularly in
foreign-language learning. By the early 1960s Berlitz, then the world's largest
language-training school, promised students could learn 200 words after several days'
training - a total of 30 hours.
But Lozanov's research reported Bulgarian students reported 1,200
Contents Page Preface
Introduction
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