Friday, October 13, 2006

Secrets of Being a Genius - By H. Bernard Wechsler

How-to Ace School and Career

What if you could access and retrieve your long-term memories at will?

Would you have a Competitive-Edge and sail through school and your career
in the Fast-Track?

Would students laugh at exams, and executives look forward to presentations for
promotions and raises?

Three Learning-Systems

We humans have five major senses, and three of them teach us everything
we know. Vision, touch and hearing are the key tools of learning. Taste and smell have too small a bandwidth to waste time on unless you are a dog or cat.

The largest brain bandwidth for humans is our sense of sight, which sends 10 million bits of information per second. Our sense of touch, called kinesthetic,
tactile, and haptic sense, produces 1-million bits of information per second.
Finally, our auditory sense produces between half-a-million to 1-million bits
of information per second as perceived by our brain.

Approximately 80% of us are visual learners; we remember mental images
(pictures) of what we read and write. Exams are created for visual learners.

There is a Einsteinian secret of how to remember and recall what we saw and
read. It is stopping to write or dictate into a recorder our own abstract (summary)
of the key points we can mentally visualize.

To ace exams and have people think we are a genius, we have to create a mental-image and associate it with what we want to remember. What does it remind you of?

We have to collect this information in our 3rd-Eye, the site of our Pineal Gland,
and when we want to retrieve and recall information for an exam, look upward to our Eye-Brain Link (3rd-Eye), and call it up by using the name we gave it.

Example: the Battle of Trenton. The Secret of visual information is using our 3rd-Eye as a retrieval tool of long-term memory.

Kinesthetic

About 10% of us are kinesthetic (sense of touch) learners. We have to feel things and work with them rather than seeing picture. These folks make great engineers,
architects, work in laboratories, and write computer programming.

The Einsteinian secret of those who learn best through their sense of touch is to
Twiddle-Their-Thumbs. Let’s be clear, when they want to learn and remember,
they must rotate all four fingers on each hand, back-and-forth across both their
thumbs. It requires between 1-2 minutes to twiddle their thumbs for creating
long-term memory, and the same couple of minutes to retrieve the memories
before an exam. They remember how they felt (emotions) when they originally learned the material, and they use their fingers to access the associated memories.

Kinesthetic learners relax by closing their eyes, inhaling and exhaling three deep diaphragmatic breaths, and using their 3rd-Eye by looking upward, to crack their Eye-Brain Link.

Auditory

Auditory learners create long-term memory by the use of focusing primarily on hearing words in their minds Ear. Their secret Einsteinian strategy is pulling on their left-earlobe simultaneously with remembering.

First they must close their eyes, take three deep breaths from their diaphragm;
inhaling and exhaling increases oxygenation, and helps create mental imagery and associations to summarize for long-term memory.

They must access their 3rd-Eye by looking upward (Eye-Brain Link) to retrieve their long-term memories for exams, and remember to stroke their left earlobe to trigger their Auditory Cortex.

What’s The Story – Jerry?

1. Goal: Read, learn and remember a chapter or a classroom lecture for an
exam or presentation.

2. Now imagine what you just studied was a movie, and summarize it in writing, or dictate what you recall into a recorder by listing the 1-2-3 key ideas. Make sure you give your mental-movie a title to later identify it: example, Battle of Trenton, Macbeth or Supreme Court.

3. Close your eyes, focus your attention upward toward the center of your
eyes. Focus mentally on the middle of your eyebrows.
We call it the 3rd-Eye; it is the camera lens of your mental-movie projector.
By focusing upward with your 3rd-eye, you are connecting with your Eye-Brain link (Optic Nerves), for long-term memory.

4. Now create a Virtual-Realty Mental-Movie or series of photos, of what you just read, studied and learned. Create a mental-image (on the movie-screen of your mind) that reminds you of the major elements of the event.

5. The two key elements of memory are: creating an exaggerated, ridiculous
mental-image, you can associate with what you want to recall.

Example: you want to recall the following: Winning the Battle of Trenton

George Washington crossing the Delaware River, on Christmas Day, 1776,
with his 2200 patriots to attack the Hessians in Trenton, N.J. Mentally picture a Dog named George wearing a 22 on his front of his hat, and 00 on the back, hissing (reminds you of Hessians, the German mercenaries England used to fight the Americans), cutting down a Xmas tree.

They won because of a single strategy: surprise. It was a holiday and the Hessians were sleeping when the Americans did a surprise-attack.

6. Your job is to brief your best friend about what you read, studied and

learned. He or she should see it all in his or her own minds-eye.

7. Answer these six questions to frame your summary:

a) Who are the major characters? (male/female, titles, occupations)

b) What did they do to get in trouble? (the conflict is about what? what

happened?)

c) Where does it take place? (indoor, outdoor, U.S., Europe or Asia).

d) When does it occur? (past, present or future).

e) Why did it happen? (why is it happening? why not?)

f) How did they overcome their problem? How did it happen? How much?

8. In the Exam room, relax and close your eyes for less than one-minute,
look upward to your 3rd-eye (Eye-Brain Link), to review your mental-
movies. To retrieve your mental-movie, silently subvocalize the name of
your mental-movie, The Battle-of Trenton.

In your minds-eye you will see the dog named George, wearing the hat with the number 22 in front and 00 in back, reminding you of Washington’s 2200 soldiers Now see George, the dog, cutting down the Xmas tree. That will remind you of the date, 1776, Xmas day. Next, you will hear the dog Hiss, reminding you of the Hessians, who the Americans defeated, in the first major American victory of the Revolution.

Endwords

You don’t have to know everything, just the important things. All it takes to be a
genius are a few tools and strategies to learn and remember. They are listed here, will you use them?

See ya,

copyright© 2006

H. Bernard Wechsler

Author, Speed Reading For Professionals, published by Barron's; former
partner of Evelyn Wood, creator of speed reading, graduating 2 million,
including the White House staffs of four U.S. Presidents.

Interviewed by the Wall Street Journal and Fortune Magazine.

http://www.speedlearning.org

hbw@speedlearning.org

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