Music's Place

 Accelerating learning speed while enhancing memory.

Learning is an act most people do reasonably well (emphasis on the reasonably). We are all capable of learning more, with greater speed and ease and just imagine… you can begin now. There are hypnotic techniques that if utilised will more then certainly improve the learning process for you (relax there is no looming sales pitch). First discard the belief that your learning is limited by our IQ (for even IQ is malleable to an extent). Who am I to comment on the topic? Well have been learning for a few years albeit never what the system said I should be learning, nonetheless learning was happening (Oh there was that slight mental a.w.o.l lasting about 5 years or so, but us mere mortals do have a mental break now and then). Will bring up some personal learning endevours in future posts for now it’s not within the scope of this discussion.

So some points that if utilised are guaranteed and proven to improve your current learning state.

1) Make use of all your modalities

What on earth does he mean by this remark I hear you ask. Well put simply we all learn better if we see, feel, hear, touch and do. So it is important to utilise all your sensory systems so next time you are flicking through that textbook have an internal dialogue with self to check whether you are understanding what it is you are reading. Viewing the following points which is a standard set by who knows? We remember about:

• 20% of what we read
• 30% of what we hear
• 40% of what we see
• 50% of what we say
• 60% of what we do
• and 90% of what we see, hear, say and do. (Don’t know about thee but I know which Iwant for me)

 2) Correct learning pose

Again may need further clarification. What do you feel when considering the idea of learning something? Of course for many of us learning may have been imposed on us by an external influence, nontheless, adopting the correct pose will benefit yourself and more importantly the possible pleasure achieved whilst in the learning phase. Ask yourself questions such as what’s in it for me? What will I get out of learning the mating habits of the Brazilian tapir for example? Asking the correct questions will induce a minor trance that will help achieve the correct learning state.

3) Picture it

OK Using images is perhaps the creme-de-la-creme of representational systems to use with respect to learning. You’d probably find that most of your school duxes (no not dunces) were highly visual in their thinking it is afterall the speediest of all thought processings backed further by the following popular quote “a picture is worth a thousand words”. Not necessary to go into excess detail as there are many web resources which help recall using imagery.

4) Classic Tunes

No my utterance here is not classic as in 80′s classic hits (though the 80′s era did produce some fantastic music didn’t it?) but classical music. There have been numerous experiments on the benefits of classical music to enhancing uptake while learning (we’ve all seen the movies with professors studying wile the old Beethoven was strutting his stuff). As the area is well outside my level of expertise I’ll leave it alone. However I’ll mention that while typing this post I put a few classical wonders on the ol’ playlist (listed below) I have not bothered with playing tunes while hacking the computer for years and feel that it helped tonight. Only reason felt it necessary to state the classical music fact is that this whole article was typed within the play of the following classical pieces. Now if I had Moby playing it is more then definite that the whole album would have played before reaching the end. 

• Beethoven: 9th Symphony
• Polchelbal: Canon in D
• Allegri: Misererie
• Bach: Brandenburg No2 Concerto

For people who noticed the post writing has shrunk again. (great observation for starters) The reason being is I am typing directly into the wordpress posting page (it is more efficient after all). Better go and type another review request which I have promised self to relax from for a while. May also update some other areas of this blog before a seasoned professional gets a whiff and attempts to shred…