Construct Vivid Imagery
Constructing vivid imagery - off the top of your head, can you guess why this helps your learning? Here is a simple example. When you think about your past year, what do you remember, boring things or exciting things? Undoubtedly you remember the exciting things because they made an impact on you. That is something we can replicate in our everyday quest for learning and better memory.
A large body of research indicates that visual cues help us better retrieve and remember information. The research on visual learning make sense when you consider that our brain is mainly an image processor, not a word processor. In fact, the part of the brain used to process words is quite small in comparison to the part that processes visual images - roughly thirty percent of the brain is devoted to visual imagery alone.
Words are abstract and rather difficult for the brain to retain, whereas visuals are concrete and, as such, more easily remembered.
To illustrate, think about having to learn a set of new vocabulary words each week. Now, think back to the first kiss you had or your high school prom date. Most probably, you had to put forth great effort to remember the vocabulary words. In contrast, when you were actually having your first kiss or your prom date, I bet you weren't trying to commit them to memory. Yet, you can quickly and effortlessly visualize these experiences (now, even years later). You can thank your brain's amazing visual processor for your ability to easily remember life experiences. Your brain memorized these events for you automatically and without you even realizing what it was doing.
There are countless studies that have confirmed the power of visual imagery in learning. For instance, one study asked students to remember many groups of three words each, such as dog, bike, and street. Students who tried to remember the words by repeating them over and over again did poorly on recall. In comparison, students who made the effort to make visual associations with the three words, such as imagining a dog riding a bike down the street, had significantly better recall.
The effective use of visuals can decrease learning time, improve comprehension, enhance retrieval, and increase retention. If our brain is wired for vision, and we typically remember vivid, bright, and intense information, then we should combine the two. Mentally constructing vivid imagery helps us remember.
For instance, take a list of eight objects you want to memorize: rabbit, coffee, blanket, hair, cactus, running, mountain, and tea.
This would seem to be incredibly difficult to memorize because everything is unrelated. However, you can give yourself a better chance by creating a vivid and striking mental image for each item. It doesn't have to be a literal representation of the word, or even related to it.
For instance, what images can you create for rabbit? You could use a mental image of a normal, cute rabbit, but that's not likely to be distinctive in your memory. You could conjure up an image of what the word rabbit makes you think of, a symbol, what the word sounds like to you, or how the word is written. The more outrageous and unusual, the better for you to memorize, because we tend to easily forget normal things.
When you put this same amount of thought into the eight items of that list, you will be able to memorize them more effectively. It's not just taking advantage of how your brain works; it's the attention and time to choosing an appropriate mental image. Recall how we discussed the power of doodling, as it related to both activating our visual processing neurons as well as simply putting more time and effort into the exercise of drawing something. It's not about the doodle or imagery itself, it's about the attention you pay and the time you spend.
You can use this with lists, information, and even difficult-to-grasp concepts. When you can get into the habit of not taking information at face value and constructing vivid imagery to make it stand out in your mind, you'll remember things far better. Just say no to learning by osmosis!
Constructing vivid imagery can actually take another form. A quick question - what do you remember better, a boring movie or an exciting movie? Of course, you remember the exciting movie better because of the impact it made on you, and in a word, it was memorable.
So let's start with an illustration of this for you to immediately feel the difference a vivid story can make.
First things first, try to memorize the same words in this order: rabbit, coffee, blanket, hair, cactus, running, mountain, tea.
Now, take a sheet of paper and write down the words you remember in the exact order they were listed. See how many you can remember.
Most people can remember between three to four words. If you got more than that, that's great. As you can see, relying on just your natural memory isn't the best idea. If you can get fifty percent of the items on the list, that's considered good. But that's not a good baseline for learning!
Now we come to the point of this technique, which is to create a story that involves all those items. When you can create meaningful connections between items instead of trying to memorize dry facts, you stand a better chance. A story ends up being one large piece of information rather than eight distinct pieces; this is similar to what happens when you attempt to connect old and new information from earlier in this book.
By creating a story for those words, you'll be able to memorize all of them in the correct order far more easily. What kind of story might you construct with the list we have? As with the previous method, the more unusual and outrageous, the better and more memorable it will be. Vivid things tend to stick, so you need to engage and find a way to make things stand out to you.
As a reminder: rabbit, coffee, blanket, hair, cactus, running, mountain, tea.
It could start with a rabbit who went to jail for selling drugs hidden with coffee. He has now tried to attack his cellmates in jail by making weapons with his blanket and hair tied together. However, one day, he found a cactus while running outside in the prison yard. By trading this cactus for three kilograms of tea, he was able to escape to the mountains above the jail and was never seen again.
One item is a brain trigger that helps you remember the next item. It's similar to hearing a song and each verse brings you to remember the next verse and you can remember all the words to a song.
The main principles of this technique are to make each item distinctive (imagination) and link it to the next one (association). The crazier you can make the story, the better. The more distinctive, the more it will stick in your mind. When you make up your story, visualize it in your head with as much color and movement as possible. Practice the story two or three times. Then, test yourself to see how many you can remember. Like I've said before, these techniques to improve memory are so effective because they're a reflection of how memory works.
The main idea is to create meaning from meaningless and unrelated facts or information, which of course, makes it easier to remember.
