by Win Wenger, Ph.D.
<< Teaching & Learning Techniques Index
Image courtesy of Elan Sun Star
Whether you are a scientist or scholar or practicing professional foraging deeper into some intriguing but seemingly obscure lead and specialty, or whether you are an undergraduate struggling to keep up with course requirements, or somewhere in-between —
Your success in advancing your understanding is all but guaranteed if you take up two simple practices with that study:
| Before lectures, chapters, texts, technical papers and other key readings — practice Predictive Imagery. After lectures, chapters, texts, technical papers and other key readings — practice Freenoting. |
Time Invested
- Predictive Imagery before the learning unit — a minute or so before each major chunk of reading or learning. Return on your investment, per reading — much fuller understanding, much more meaningful learning, in much less time.
- Freenoting after each learning unit — fifteen minutes following each major chunk of reading or learning or conceptualization — or more, because the longer you continue this furious sustained flow-in-a-context, the further and deeper you will extend your understanding in that context. Return on your investment, per reading or unit of learning — not only greater meaningfulness but, through your own interior associations thus drawn out on the topic, access to more useful understandings on the subject than the author or lecturer provided you!
Devour the Subject
One thing that cuts short the careers of too many undergraduates is “going for the minimum in what they need to know.” Studies do take some time and effort, especially if one doesn’t have a really good method for processing all that information. Going for the minimum means sometimes missing even that minimum. Even when you’ve scraped by in that one course, you have too little assimilated in your mind to handle and hold on to further information built thereon, and so you stall out a semester or so later. Not good. Ill-afforded, even before today’s prices and tuitions. Instead —
The more you can devour of a subject, the easier and more powerful your handling of that subject and, more, the more meaningful and enjoyable your understanding becomes, both in that context and generally. Devour in depth, and your time and effort will actually be taxed less than if you were simply trying to scrape by on minimum!
One Pre-Requisite, However
To learn and practice Predictive Imagery to its most effective levels, you may need also to learn and initially practice Image Streaming. (Click through to the other linked articles as you come to them in the text there.) Some people have enjoyed effective Predictive Imagery even without having to learn Image Streaming, but you may want to acquire that skill anyhow, because:
- Image Streaming is the most effective way we know for enabling and teaching the verbal-conscious splinter of your brain to entertain useful inputs from beyond itself. That is key to gaining conscious use of the other 98% of your brain.
- Image Streaming is one of the best practices for integrating the brain and for improving communications throughout the brain.
- Image Streaming, instead of a repetitive exercise, can be as entertaining and as restorative as going to the movies.
- Other programs, and other authors, have found Image Streaming to be so helpful with so many different things that they have incorporated our Image Streaming into their own programs and books. See Citings.
- Image Streaming is also one of the best ways we know of to develop your perceptiveness and powers of observation, and your abilities to deal effectively with the unexpected. Most people are condemned to see only what they expect to see and hear only what they expect to hear, and this is dangerous.
In any regard, whether you are already a scholar, a scientist or practicing professional, or still a student, Image Streaming is one of the best ways we know of to build your general powers of understanding. So for a variety of reasons, you might want to shoot beyond the minimum and incorporate Image Streaming as a frequent practice, even after that skill has taught you to work effectively with what you are actually seeing, as distinct from what you expect to see — which, in turn, has taught you also the most effective forms of Predictive Imagery.
So you may have a Big Three instead of just a Big Two among your regular practices to supercharge your learning:
- Predictive Imagery before each major chunk of learning;
- Freenoting after each major unit of insight and/or learning; and
- Image Streaming generally.
Beyond the Minimum
There are literally hundreds of different specific techniques and methods whose use can profoundly ease and accelerate and extend and enrich your understanding and learning. A browse through our website will bring you across a few of these. Among the most productive of these:
- Borrowed Genius lets you shift your point of perspective in such a way that you can experience a topic in the way a genius in that topic might experience it.
- Concept Underpinnings — another use of Image Streaming, this time to build up those most fundamental of all concepts through which you understand everything else. The present scripted instructions are for use of the most general form of this process, but it is easy enough to adapt the process to the foundation concepts of any subject of study.
- DEAM and/or Evoked Sidebands — As with so many methods for problem-solving, turn the central question into a search for the keystone understanding of whatever topic or subject.
- Windtunnel is like Freenoting, only done in audio instead of writing.
Before Exams
If you have a learning buddy or friend from one of your classes, arguably the most productive review of that course you could make would be to take, adapt and follow the instructions provided for Final Exams.
Short, Sweet and Simple
It all boils down to this, though:
The best starting point is your own first-hand experience. A good, clean, simple place to begin that experience and start gathering benefits is to bring into focus the key to what you are trying to learn or understand. Everything else fills in around it much more easily and meaningfully. To get that key into focus:
- Predictive Imagery before each unit to be learned or understood;
- Freenoting or Windtunnel after each unit of text or learning or set of ideas.
How is that for short, sweet and simple?
It would be interesting to see — it just might make a nice little bit of stir and of difference on your campus — if such practices became widespread there. What do you think some of those differences might be? Or you can keep it all to yourself to nurse your maximum advantage over your classmates.
FURTHER READING:
- Super Skills For Students by Isa McKechnie
- Dynamic Teaching by Harman Benda and Win Wenger