Friday, 6 February 2009

Learning Styles


We all learn differently or at least have a preferred way of learning. You will have learnt most of your learning skills at school and will have used those skills for most of your life. The brain 'learns' by creating new connections between neurons which define the thing we have learnt. These connections are stored in different parts of the brain depending on what has been learnt. For example things to do with movement, such as learning to play a sport or instrument would be stored in the motor area of the brain because that is where the motor neurons (where movement processing takes place) are located. Auditory learning such as listening to speech or music is stored in the auditory part of the brain, and visual learning such as reading or watching TV takes place in the visual part of the brain. All pretty simple. 

We are able to use all three of these quite well and every brain is able to perform as well as any other. Learning experts tell us that we have a preferred learning style of which we are Visual, Auditory, or Kinaesthetic learners. To find out which one you are, you can do a mini test where you are asked what you would prefer to do when learning a certain topic. For example if you were learning a new science topic would you a) watch a TV program about it b) do a practical experiment or c) listen to your teacher explaining it. You can try test here.

The idea of this is that if you know your preferred way of learning then you can use it to perform better when learning something new. If you find reading a text book really boring then try some kinaesthetic learning. Make it enjoyable! Learning shouldn't be a chore or just 'something to get through'. We learn all through our lives even if it’s just learning how to play a computer game! If you want to learn and want to do well then you are much more likely to achieve what you want. If you’re bored when revising then you will 'switch off' and not take in any information at all. Don’t force yourself to learn because you will just get annoyed and stressed about your progress. Instead motivate yourself either by setting yourself a personal target or by splitting the workload into chunks and deciding do get a number of chunks done in a certain time. 

Whatever your learning style trying out different methods of learning will benefit as you will find more motivation to learn. It’s more likely that the content your learning isn't boring, it’s the way that you’re learning it that is!

Wednesday, 4 February 2009

Brain Gym

An interesting technique which is taught by learning experts is Brain Gym. This involves doing certain exercises to get both sides of the brain working together. The result of doing this is meant to give better concentration in learning and therefore better results in tests. Personally I’ve not used brain gym that much since I didn't see much benefit, but if you prefer practical or kinaesthetic learning then you might find it helps your performance.  

The following videos tell you about what brain gym involves. If you’re interested in learning more about it there are many videos on YouTube telling about it and some exercises you can do.



This method is largely based on the 'belief' side of learning. The exercises probably don't have much scientific relevance (maybe a bit like photoreading, you believe it works because your conditioning yourself not to see an failure, not that it’s a bad thing for brain gym) but it can wake you up and help you feel in the mood. 

Monday, 2 February 2009

Revision - Maximising Recall


How about another way to help your revision. In the last post I said that you can forget what happens in lessons because you haven’t created an interesting image for your mind to remember. When I say 'image' I don't mean a perfect photographic image in your head. You remember things by association, so by creating extra links to things you have learnt your brain can easily find that piece of data again. 

If you have a single neuron or an idea on its own then it is impossible for you to access it because it is not linked to anything else. If however you create a few links then you will be able remember that piece of information. If you create even more links then it will almost be impossible for you to forget it! Something which enables this process is repetition. Repetition allows you to create more links which you haven’t thought of before and also strengthens existing links. In other words you will be able to recall information much more easily. The times at which you should review what you have learnt are as follows:

  1. Review what you have learnt immediately after you've learnt it.
  2. Review it again 24 hours later
  3. Then a week later
  4. One month later
  5. Three months later

By reviewing your story or notes then you will be able to recall the information you learnt much more easily and won't have to spend hours reviewing everything before an exam. It might seem more effort reviewing it in this pattern, but it is much less compared to the amount of stress you could go through revising everything before an exam. Teachers try to replicate some of this with homework. You’re practising what you have learnt after you have learnt it first time. The problem is that after that some of the information is lost because you haven’t reviewed it for weeks. 

This is another major point. You already know most of what you’re revising. To save time and avoid 'relearning' a topic you should think about what you already know about a topic. If you have a revision guide for the subject your revising look in the contents for all the topics you’re covering. If you don't have this then looked it up on the internet or look in your exercise book. Then on a piece of paper jot down what you know about the first topic without looking in the revision guide. This should take no more than five minutes to get the main ideas down. Once you have made a list turn to the page in your revision guide and see if you missed anything. If you did read over that topic (most likely you’re going to say 'oh yeah! I forgot about that!'). 

Doing this could save you a lot of time and effort over your revision, and help you to remember all the facts after you have completed the exam. Remember even though you have done the exam it doesn't mean you can forget everything you've learnt!

Revision

Why do most people find revision boring? Is it because of the fact that it relates to work or effort? Or is it the word itself, maybe 'rev' links to 'reverse' or 'revisit'. Maybe it’s because the word homework sounds bad because we associate home with a pleasant place to relax and work being something we wouldn't like to do. This is perhaps a stereotype which people become aware of when they go through education. It’s only until you get to choosing options and deciding on your career that the words revision and homework become more meaningful. 

How do you or how would you go about revising? Imagine you have just bought some science revision guides because of constant pressure from teachers or parents to get revising. How would you start? Most people would open it to the first page and begin reading it. While there is nothing wrong with this it can be very boring and not the most efficient way of going about it. 

Revision guides are good because they list all of the topics that are in the syllabus and also give you all of the information you require for the exam. Teachers say that you should start revising a month or maybe more before the exam. This is not a good claim because you are likely to forget the information you read on day one and will have to rush over it nearer the exam. A lot of pupils start to revise a few days before (or even a few minutes before!) the exam. This is also not a great idea because you might not cover all the information but may also forget most of it due to cramming everything into your head. 

The whole point of revision is to 'go over' the information that you already know. During class time you take in a lot of the information first time. Of course not everything that is mentioned but you will have gained a lot first time. The next day you will probably have forgotten some of the information as it makes its way into your long term memory. Soon after many weeks and months you will remember very little if any of it at all. The only way you will remember it is if you go over it in your mind. You will remember previous events that could have happened years ago 'as if they were yesterday'. This is because you had many thoughts attached to that event and you thought about it a lot during and after it. I doubt many of us would think of the chemistry lesson that day unless something exciting happened. 

It makes sense then that to recall information clearly after an event is to attach something that we can emotionally attach with. Whether it is hate, excitement, happiness, love anything! The weird thing is that these things don't have to actually have happened. So if you were studying about hydrogen in chemistry that day it would be fairly unlikely that you blew a big hole out of the school field when testing hydrogen. But if the image is striking enough it will make a more permanent connection in your mind. Adding more connections to your central image can allow you to remember everything you need to know about the topic you are studying. Maybe one day you go to the tennis courts to find a massive bacterium sitting there. It then divides every few minutes before the whole tennis court is stuffed full of bacteria! Maybe a virus comes out of the sky like an Apollo Lander and sits on to the cells. Before you know it a large white blood cell comes rolling along to engulf them all up!

This method of 'story making' is a very good way to create a mental movie or memory of something which you would find laborious to go over. If you can do this well you should be able to get lost in your virtual world creating vast images which will stick in your memory. You will find the pages of your revision guide fly through your hands as you memorise all of the information. The real revision is when you go back through your story in your mind which can be done at any time, on the bus, in the car when you’re bored? If you create strong images in your mind then they will stick. If you struggle to remember then your images probably weren’t strong enough. Try to make things unusual and interesting to your mind. Enlarging the image in your mind can also help. Explore with your mind and see how much you can remember. Happy revision! 

Friday, 2 January 2009

Photoreading - Why It Doesn't Work


Well you've heard enough of me bragging about my experience with the photoreading system, so here are some pointers on why it doesn't work.

Before you photoread you give yourself affirmations which are said to 'help the text go into your inner mind'. Examples of these are 'As I photoread my concentration is absolute' and 'All that I photoread will go into my inner mind  ... etc'. Before you say these you go into a state of relaxed alertness where saying these 'affirmations' makes you believe the system works and that you are getting results. It's a hypnotic suggestion! This means that you will only notice and remember the successful parts of your reading, e.g. when you don't remember where the word is on the page, you are told not to worry and you completely forget about it. Belief is another complicated thing which I won't go into on this post.

The creator of the system, Paul Scheele did some EEG (a scan which measure brain signals) scans on people who were photoreading and compared them to scans from people who were reading normally. Unsurprisingly normal readers had much more brain activity to photoreaders. This is because you are relaxed and calm during photoreading which turns off brain activity. Basically when reading normally many through processes are at work, which provides better comprehension and memory of what you have read. 

If you have tried photoreading you will know that you can't really connect with a book the same way you do with normal reading. During normal reading you imagination thrives giving you an image in your head or affecting emotions. This creates neural connections in your mind and allows you to recall that book when you start to think about it. With photoreading these neural connections (if they are even created) in you inner mind don't have these links. This means to benefit at all you have to go back to the book to do some normal reading to obtain any comprehension. This makes photoreading a complete waste of time which if you are unlucky enough to have been caught up in the system you will have spent more time on a book learning much less. I remember when I first photoread a book I had spent 20 minutes photoreading and had learnt about two things from the book. What a waste of time.

Photoreading - A Scam

When I first found out about photoreading I believed that the system would solve all of my reading problems. I was informed that this revolutionary system would allow you to read at 25,000 wpm (words per minute) and allow you to recall the information easily. I was particularly interested in using this as a revision tool since it would only take moments to go through content and recall it during a test! I'm afraid to say that this system isn't all that it sounds which I'll explain later. 

The system works as follows:
  • Preview - looking at the blurb of a book, table of contents, and index to find out what the book is about.
  • Photoread - using a method to flash each page in front of your eyes while not trying to read or remember what you see.
  • Activate - get the information that you need from your inner mind.
  • Rapid Read - go back through the book and get any additional information you require.
This process seemed fairly straightforward and looked a genuine approach for reading books. I learnt the system using the personal learning course and when using it I felt that it really worked and that I felt the benefits! The problem was that even thought I felt I was drastically improving my reading, the results were rubbish. To be honest the system is just a long way to look something up in a book. When you have finished photoreading you think of what you want to find out and then go slowly through each page letting you subconscious mind lead you to the answer. 

One of the exercises in the course is photoreading a dictionary. After that you think of a word and image where it is placed on the page. I did a tally of the words I got right and wrong. Even though about 80% were wrong I was told that I had achieved something and that really my wrong answers was all part of the process. I put up with this for a while but eventually I had to convince myself that it was all bollocks. I saw a video of Derren Brown doing this dictionary trick but in his book 'Tricks of the Mind' he dismisses photoreading as 'horseshit'. A report done for NASA (http://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/20000011599_2000009345.pdf) concluded that the system provided no advantage over normal reading and in some of their tests the photoreaders had a significant lack of comprehension compared to normal readers. 

So why does photoreading not work? More in the next post.

Tuesday, 30 December 2008

Mindless Ideas

You may have heard from someone that we only use 1% or 10% (or whatever it is this month) of our brain. This is a completely wild suggestion since we use different parts of the brain for different things. No studies seem to confirm this either which for people who believe this statistic may help you change you mind about the many things you will hear. Countless websites say they will give you photographic or eidetic memory and will try to convince you to part with money on an e-book with the 'proven' techniques inside. There is no clear definition of what photographic memory might mean or what you can do with it. People who claim to see a perfectly reproduced image in their mind tend to loose that image after a while. Others who were able to remember the image after a while actually used mnemonic techniques to remember parts of the image without needing to 'see' it in their mind. 

It is possible to suggest that we are all born with some sort of visual memory, otherwise we wouldn't remember what things look like. Perhaps we don't use this section of our mind in a way which would allow us to use it more effectively? The moral here is be aware about what you read on these subjects, the memory techniques that really work will be freely available on the Internet and the same ones used by modern memory experts.