more studying

I’ve had a head cold the last few days.  It’s hard to concentrate on anything until well after the sun has come up.  I guess I’m saying that to say my attempts at studying haven’t been very good the last few days, and my desire to study at all is minimal.  Being sick and trying to study is a really horrendous feeling.  It’s like the brain won’t concentrate on anything other than the slime in your throat and the coughing of lung goo.

In studying Mega Memory by Kevin Trudeau, I find the part I’m worst at is concentration.  Concentration is a game of making pictures into words, and is a vital part to remembering names.  Names aren’t something I’m generally interested in remembering, but that is just another technique.  The big thing is building concentration puzzles for names will also work for technical terms, and I always have a desire to remember technical terms.  And if you can do it for a person’s name you met five minutes ago, then you can do the same thing for a technical term you want to remember. 

There’s another method he discusses for remembering what you have read in a text book.  The technique is simple: while you are reading, imagine yourself teaching someone the information.  Anything that walks through your real eyes walks right out of the mouth to your imaginary classroom.  Once again, this is a technique I wish I had been taught years ago.  I can’t speak to efficacy at the moment, but what I remembered before was pathetic in comparison to what I remember now.  I still have my moments, but this seems to be helping. 

As another side note, I used the techniques on Wednesday and actually remembered to do everything on my list without writing anything down.  To get the entire list to stick, I spent twenty minutes out of my day.  But the confidence of remembering the list was amazing.