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words a day and remembering 96.1 percent of them.20
Many others
have built on his research. According to Schmid: "We now know that most people can
achieve that ideal learning state fairly easily - and quickly. Deep breathing is one of
the first keys. Music is the second - specific music with a certain beat that helps slow
you down: anywhere from 50 to 70 beats a minute."
The most
common music to achieve that state comes from the baroque school of composers, in the 17th
and early 18th centuries: the Italian Arcangelo Corelli, the Venician Antonio Vivaldi, the
French Francois Coupertin and the Germans, Johann Sebastian Bach and George Frideric
Handel.
Lozanov
found baroque music harmonizes the body and brain. In particular, it unlocks the emotional
key to a super memory: the brain's limbic system. This system not only processes emotions,
it is the link between the conscious and subconscious brain.
As Terry Wyler
Webb and Douglas Webb put it brilliantly in Accelerated Learning With Music: A
Trainer's Manual: "Music is the inter-state highway to the memory system."21
Vivaldi's Four
Seasons is one of the best-known pieces of baroque music used to start the journey
along that highway. It makes it easy to shut out other thoughts and visualize the seasons.
Handel's Water Music is also deeply soothing. And for teachers trained in new
learning techniques, Johann Pachelbel's Canon in D is a favorite to relieve
tension.
Most of those
teachers also use specially-prepared tapes to start each learning session - with soothing
word-pictures to match the music and encourage relaxation. Tapes can be either self-made,
if you're competent in music, or bought. Their key first use in education is to put
students into a relaxed, receptive state so they can focus on learning.
Break down the learning barriers
Lozanov says there are three main barriers to
learning: the critical-logical barrier ("School isn't easy, so how can
learning be fun and easy?"); the intuitive-emotional barrier ("I'm dumb,
so I won't be able to do that"); and the critical-moral barrier
("Studying is hard work - so I'd better keep my head down"). Understand where a
student "is coming from" and you gain better rapport. Step into his world and
you break resistance quickly, smoothly.
Contents Page Preface
Introduction
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