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      Accelerate Your Learning and Improve Your Memory
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This month's learning tips come to us from Colin Rose,
author of Accelerated Learning for the 21st Century.

To remember more from any situation follow these steps:

1.  Relax - The best state for learning is a relaxed one.  High
stress levels actually reduce your learning abilities.  Prior 
to beginning a new learning task, breathe slowly several times.
Take a deep breath in and let it out very slowly.  This will
help create an alpha state in your brain and slow your brain
waves for better focus and concentration.

2.  Take Frequent Breaks.  If you want to recall more of what
you have learned, take a 2-5 minute break about every 30 minutes.
Your brain recalls what it learns first and what it learned last
the best.  Create more beginnings and more endings by taking
frequent breaks.  Simply get up and walk around, listen to your
favorite music if you like, do some stretches, etc.

3.  When learning new information, do something with it.  Use
colored flash cards to make mind maps.  Put the central ideal
in the middle and words and pictures of the related material
around the central circle.  Then hold this material up above
eye level and snap a picture of it in your mind so you can
recall it later.

4.  Read your new information aloud in a funny accent.  Use
humor to accelerate your learning.  The mind recalls things
which are unique and bizarre much more easily.

5.  Make a connection between what you know and what you are
learning.  Ask yourself, "What does this remind me of?"  The
brain works best by making connections between its cells
along the dendrites.

6.  Repeat what you have learned in your own words.  Pretend
you are teaching someone else what you have just learned.

7.  If you really want to put what you have learned into long
term memory - use the Ebbinghaus curve of forgetting model.
Repeat the material after 1 hour, 1 day, 1 week and one month.
This will strengthen the neural connections in your brain and
put the material into long term storage.

8.  Add movement to your new learning.  Think of a picture of
a dog standing.  Now picture the dog running after a rabbit.
Which is easier to recall?

9.  Play Mozart in the background as you are studying.  In
the book, the Mozart Effect, by Don Campbell, there is much
research to show that listening to Mozart pieces increases
memory and raises I.Q.

10.  Invent mnemonics to help you recall things. Use phrases
or acronyms to set certain facts into your memory.

11.  Know your strongest learning style and use learning
techniques keyed to it to help you accelerate your learning.
If you are primarily an auditory learner, make up a song to
recall information.  If you are a visual learner, be a movie
director and create a movie of the material.  If kinesthetic
is your best style, act out the information and use lots of
movement.  Invent a cheer and lots of new moves as you say
your new material.

12.  Make sure to chunk the new material into smaller bits
to make the learning easier.  Don't try and tackle all of
it at once.

13.  As you study, be sure to stop and look up to visualize
the material.  Pretend you are at the movies and looking up
at the screen.  Change your material into pictures to recall
it more easily during a test.

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Last updated:  Jul. 23, 2001 - 23:00 PDT