Learning on a Sunday

So it’s a quiet Sunday morning, and I’m on call.  Because I’m on call, I won’t be going to church this morning.  I learned that lesson pretty well.  I got ready for church several times, only to be stopped by a call that turned into four.  And four hours later, I’m still working on various things that seem to filter through and in.  So I don’t go to church when I’m on call.  I also don’t go to church when the kids are sick, but that’s because I don’t want to get the other kids in the nursery sick.  I dislike sick kids in the nursery, because kids don’t share anything except germs. 

In studying how to improve my memory, I think I’ve done a lot of work.  Occasionally, I think I should kick back and draw some of the stuff that comes to my mind while I’m thinking and imagining some of these things.  And I then sit back and ask myself: what good would it do?  Sure, someone else could look back and see what I think I was seeing in my head as I was visualizing a name, or what goes through my head while reading a book.  But then, the point of all the visualizations is to make them personal.  If they aren’t personal, and aren’t conclusions you would normally jump to, then that’s something that would not be memorable to you. 

So I haven’t done anything like that.  All I’ve done is start spreadsheets of names that I want to work on.  Because in memorizing names, you don’t memorize people.  You just create a mental vocabulary of names and how you remember them.  Now is this Rob (mental image of a carjacking) with the hook nose that you met at a conference, or is this Rob (same mental image of a carjacking) from accounting?  Two different people with the same name, and similar initial mental images.  The only difference is in how the two are hooked to that name.  The first Rob has a hook nose, and the 2^nd Rob is from accounting.  So both the carjacker and the person being robbed have hook-nose heads instead of regular heads, whereas Accounting Rob is counting all the items he is stealing, much like the Count from Sesame Street. 

Strong mental pictures are what is important in memory, and tying those mental pictures to other things that we have learned helps in the memorization.  But enough… I’ve just been called to go fix something.