Intelligent Memorizing Strategies in the Realms of Gold

Posted on March 18, 2013 by Clark McKowen

Getting Curious

Usually when you become absorbed in something — or fall in love with it; it’s the same thing – remembering happens without conscious effort. All of a sudden it’s been “memorized.” For example, scores of poems are stored in my memory, but I didn’t “try” to memorize or learn any of them. They were fascinating. My nonconscious mind did the rest. If you’re not interested to begin with, use the Mess-Around Method I’ve described in some of my other posts; that is, browse, be playful, have some fun with the stuff. More often than not, you’ll find yourself becoming curious. You’ll begin to notice patterns, and you’re on your way. Your body takes rubbings, your senses envelope the rose, the lover’s eyes – whatever your body “looks upon.”

Taking Charge

Here are some of the techniques involved that you may not be conscious of. If a test or some work requirement is urgent, you can use them on purpose. You’re already using most of them – perhaps not consciously – so this is just a reminder.

Association
Analogy
Coincidence
Visualization
Rhythm and Rhyme
Melody
Grouping
Coined Words/ Acronyms
Sentences
Stories
Humor, Exaggeration, Irreverence

The Enabling Mode: Relaxed playfulness

ASSOCIATION

All memory techniques boil down to making connections, to association,. Making connections is involved in all deliberate, conscious memory work. The more links you create the more ways you will have to find the information later. If you want to store things on purpose, make associations, the more the better.

● Analogy

Students learning the relationship of current, resistance, and voltage,sometimes use this analogy. “The flow of electricity through wires is like the flow of water through pipes.”

That doesn’t mean they are the same. Current, resistance, and voltage are like the flow of water, the pipe’s diameter, and the pressure pushing it. If you can see the similarity, you can do things with wiring and so forth until it all becomes “second nature”, sort of like training wheels – another analogy. We’re just plain naturally “wired” to notice likeness – and difference.

● Visualization

See it.

Kids use visualization to remember how to spell troublesome words.

Make it bigger: Parallel? paraLLel. (Notice the parallel letters in para ll el.)
There, their, they’re?: THEre, THEir, THEy’re

To spell piece correctly, notice the piece of pie in piece. And so on.

If a word won’t stick, do something visual to it. Kids know dozens of memory tricks for spelling.

After you use the word a few times, you won’t need the memory device. I’ve written hundreds of thousands of words over the years. They flow off my finger tips without thought. I still have a copyeditor go over my manuscripts, though.

When it’s time to edit, pretend you’re a rotten speller.

Test-Taking Tip
Students who first take time to visualize the place where they prepared for the tests score higher than those who don’t. My guess is that the setting contains lots of nonconscious rubbings (connections) with what you’re working on, all sorts of associations we’re unaware of. Seeing the setting makes the connections available to the conscious mind.
During a test visualize the place where you studied.

_____________________________________________________________________
The Role of Music

The universe is a musical composition.

The music of the spheres is vibrating in throughout our nervous systems, and the first thing we must do when we get up in the morning is take down a musical instrument, as the 13th century poet Rumi wrote. That is, we have to get tuned up, in tune with, the melody that’s playing around us. That puts us in harmony with whatever’s on our plate. If it’s getting ready for a test, we’ve taken a major step already.

The Music of the Spheres

There are plenty of studies that show that when we are relaxed and awake, we do much better at learning and remembering. Once I realized that, there would be calming music playing when students arrived at my classroom. It became more and more a part of whatever we were doing. Foreign language classes that have students singing are more successful than those that don’t. A young man from Peru I know thought himself English watching Sesame Street and learning English-language songs. We all know that when we’re not attuned, we don’t ride our bikes as well. And we certainly don’t enjoy the ride.

______________________________________________________________________

Any batch of random information can be grouped one way or another. When you play around with a pile of facts, they will fall into a pattern on their own, like yarrow sticks – if we don’t interfere.

All we have to do is be quiet and listen.

The mind insists on making connections. It is very old and very wise. Trust it. John Phillip Sousa, the March King, said he took dictation from the inner chambers of his mind. His compositions “came to him” complete. It’s the same for everyone. No doubt the nonconscious mind sees connections from the what the conscious mind passes over to it and puts it all together.

Here are a few of scores of ways to use music in your long-term memory work. You may remember some of these simple examples from when you were a kid. The concepts work just as well for adults. They are perfectly respectable. Whenever the material seems to call for it, see if a poem or a song would help.

● Rhythm, Rhythm, Melody

I before e
except after c
or when sounded as a
as in neighbor and weigh

♬ C is for cookie.
That’s good enough for me
Oh! Cookie, cookie, cookie
Starts with C. ♬

Remember the Alphabet Song? Kids know what works. It’s a natural.

● Coined Words

Once you’ve gotten the feel of the colors of the visual spectrum (red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet), they can be retrieved in order. You don’t have to remember nine things, just remember

ROY G. BIV.

One student examined the key vocabulary of his geology class and with some messing around coined SAM GALOPAGUS. Maybe. I’m taking his word for it.

The Great Lakes?

H O M E S

Their location on the map?

S H O

M E

Know these acronyms?

NATO, NAFTA, GOP MADD

● Sentences

Planets out from the Sun?

Mother Very Energetically Made a Jelly Sandwich Under No Protest.

Students in every field from surgery to mathematics have created memory devices such as acronyms, coined words, and sentences for storing essential facts. With use, the device drops away and the desired material remains.

For longer lists, you can make up stories.

The twelve cranial nerves (olfactory, optic, oculomotor, troclear, trigeminal, abducens, facial, audiitory, glossophryngeal, vagus, accessory, and hypoglossal) could be stored into a sentence. A rhyming sentence would be even better.

On Old Olympus’s Towering Top
A Fat-Assed Giant Vaults and Hops

A story would require more involvement and even better retention:

At the oil factory (olfactory) the optician (optic) looked for the occupant (oculomotor) of the truck (troclear). And so on. You can’t help but form a mental picture as the story unfolds.

● Humor, Exaggeration, Irreverence

Make it funny, make it big, make it little, make it disreputable.

The mind delights in far-out, irrational connections. If you have some fun thinking up socially unacceptable or humorous connections, you’ll remember. Don’t be too serious.

This ought to get you started taking charge of the process.

In my next post, I’ll give you an overview of one of the most effective memory techniques of all: The Method of Places

Green Fire: Intimations of Higgs Boson

Posted on March 16, 2013 by Clark McKowen

Higgs boson

How does the universe create a rock out of sunlight?

You know those holograms you can stick your hand into, those laser projections you see at those science exhibits that I mentioned in an earlier post? What if you could flesh out holograms and make them “physical,” like your toaster? That’s sort of what nature (the cosmos, your Self) is doing way down inside your atoms, somehow or other turning an electronic light show into flesh and blood. How about that!? What a magic act!

If that doesn’t blow your mind, you could reflect on one atom in the nail of your little finger. What’s going on in that package of stuff you call your body? I recommend you write down your reflections. That usually turns the trick.

But if your view is still kind of ordinary, here’s handful of intimations to reflect on. You’ll have to give each one a chance to blossom.

And then try to connect them to each other and make a nice package.

And then, to make it better and better, reflect on the intimations of other postings here in the Realms of Gold.

Have a nice day. A nice life?

In the San Francisco Chronicle the other day I noticed a documentary is coming out, “A Fierce Green Fire: The Battle for a Living Planet.” The title came from Aldo Leopold who became an environmentalist after killing a wolf and seeing in her eyes a fierce green fire. I made a little poem out of that:

Awakening

In the dying
wolf’s eyes,
a fierce
green fire.

First Connection:

Immediately some lines in a song, “Guantanamera,” that Pete Seeger sings – a poem by the Cuban poet Jose Marti, who died in the revolution – popped into my conscious mind :

Y antes de morirme quiero
Echar mis versos del alma
Mi verso es de un verde claro
Y de un carmin encendido

Before dying I want to share these poems of my soul
My verses are light green
But they are also crimson red

We’re talking fire here, GREEN fire, CRIMSON fire. Atomic fire. Something visible in those eyes, something in that poet’s soul.

Next connection:

And right away, Dylan Thomas:

The force that through the green fuse drives the flower
Drives my green age . . .

The force that drives the water through the rocks
Drives my red blood . . .

How can I not connect those lines, lines that have been stored in my mind, body, Self, soul, for decades? What force would that be, Mr. Thomas? The force that makes toasters?

Next Connection:

Tumbling into my consciousness – of course! – Gerard Manly Hopkins’ “The Windhover” that I put into my February 15 post. In fact, I just now looked it over and that entire post fits gorgeously with this one.

AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion
Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!
[Hopkins addresses this entire poem to Christ.]
. . . and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,
Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermillion.

Gold vermillion, my, my, my!

Last – for now – Connection

This one’s from William Blake, whom I’ve quoted in other posts.

Being alive is a matter of making connections. And when we’re alive, like that wolf with the fierce green fire in her eyes, what greater joy is there?

THE TIGER

TIGER, tiger, burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

In what distant deeps or skies
Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
On what wings dare he aspire?
What the hand dare seize the fire?

And what shoulder and what art
Could twist the sinews of thy heart?
And when thy heart began to beat,
What dread hand and what dread feet?

What the hammer? what the chain?
In what furnace was thy brain?
What the anvil? What dread grasp
Dare its deadly terrors clasp?

When the stars threw down their spears,
And water’d heaven with their tears,
Did He smile His work to see?
Did He who made the lamb make thee?

Tiger, tiger, burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?

Particle Physics

All of the above is about particle physics, the force within the atom of your little finger’s nail.

The Zen of Remembering

Posted on March 14, 2013 by Clark McKowen

As Good as Necessary

To remember well enough to get through your classes with high grades or to remember what you need at the store or to turn out the lights when you get ready for bed, you don’t have to be a memory whiz. You don’t have to be a Matteo Ricci (1552 – 1610) – who developed mnemonics into a fine art and was fantastic at it – to get as good at remembering as you need to.

Most the tips I offered in the 1996 edition of Get Your A Out of College I’ve used sometime or other, but I apply them only when I must. I got pretty good at it when I was offering a college skills class and didn’t want to embarrass myself. Generally, I try to fix it so that I don’t have to.

But for several years I memorized the first and last names of the students in my classes during one one-hour session. And all the students did, too! I did it as an experiment, and I was the last person to name everyone. After a couple of times my hands quit sweating. That was great for the semester, maybe even six months or so afterwards, but of my 20,000 students I remember the names of only a handful – who found their way into my long-term memory because their imprint was stronger – and without conscious effort on my part.

I hope it’s becoming clear that you can remember as much as you want to or need to.

Generally, I find ways to avoid all that effort. So I add and item to the grocery list on the refrigerator at the time I think of it. If I don’t, short-term memory will erase it the minute I think of something else. That’s just how the brain is designed. So I go along with how our brains work. If I’m out somewhere and don’t have some way to write down something important, then I’ll probably use a memory device – then and there – otherwise, poof!, it will be gone. If I’ve been forgetting my cap or my reading glasses or my folder all over Alameda, I put my name and phone number on them–in BIG print. You can lay the car keys at the door you go out or attach them to an over-sized key ring that’s impossible to miss. And so on.

Assume your memory is rotten. Then you can apply strategies to compensate.

Go Along With How Your Brain Works

I tell my wife that I don’t have a good memory. I do know lots of memory strategies, though. I do know those. Even without thinking of them for a long time, I can retrieve them. And I never even tried. Working with them and getting the feel of them took care of it. (Taking rubbings. See my 3/2/13 post.) If you grew up with siblings, you don’t have to memorize them. You absorbed them, Bud and Sis and Joe; they are all over your organism. You don’t have to memorize how to ride a bike. Whatever you do becomes part of you. “There was a child went forth . . .”

The Zen way of remembering: Fall IN it, like falling IN love.

Oh, yes, and you can throw in the lines from Yeats’ “Memory .” (See my 3/2/13 post):

. . . the mountain grass [you]
Cannot but keep the form
Where the mountain hare has lain.

Books About the Realms of Gold

Posted on March 3, 2013 by Clark McKowen

All Things Are Connected

Let us not look back in anger,

nor forward in fear,

but around us in awareness.”
― James Thurber

That all things are connected is pretty obvious if you think about it a little. Your intelligence, for example, isn’t set off all by itself in the cosmos; it’s an aspect of the whole thing, completely interwoven with the whole thing. There is a life force flowing through the cosmos. Step back and you will see that the cosmos is itself that force — what’s more, you yourself are that force. All things are connected. If you think, that’s the cosmos thinking. Realms of Gold: Excursions in the Sea of Intelligence is designed to explore how all this fits together.

Looking back, it’s easy to see my books, written over several decades, were times-out for a look at all this wonderful interconnectedness that’s so often taken for granted. If you look at the descriptions below of some of them, you’ll see they were pointed to this present look around. The Sea of Intelligence is on one thing going on, and we humans are an aspect of it. This website, Excursions in the Sea of Intelligence, will make that clear. Realms of Gold is about why it matters.

Montage, Investigations in Language, which I wrote with William Sparke decades ago, was an interactive book long before the internet. It is full of quotes and stories, and poems and essays and puzzles and photos and science and math and music and grass and sky and air and God knows what. It was designed to engage the mind in thinking about how the world works and how a human being works. If there were any bored readers, I never encountered them.

Montage is all about language too, of course, and how language can imprison the spirit or free it. You can’t read Montage without realizing that prison or the open road is our own choice, to see or to perish, as Chardin rightly said.

Image, Reflections on Language traces the emergence of selfhood from before conception to after death. Who were you before your mother conceived you? In the beginning was the Word. What are some productive ways to think about that? How can a spiritual being live in a world of settled ideas? It’s the job of every one of us to disturb settled ideas. How can I take out life insurance without injuring my soul? Where do I live? Is it possible to live where I live? How much of my day is spent on what has happened; how much on what’s up ahead? What’s left?

Image, Reflections on Language does not solicit answers; it simply holds the door open. Reflection on such things enriches our lives, and we don’t care if school keeps or not.

Thinking About Thinking sets up explorations into our own minds, using the mind to think about the mind. How does thinking actually work; what is the physics of it, the chemistry, the coding and decoding? Where does metaphor fit in, logic, love? What about the genetic code?

Thinking About Thinking isn’t a how-to book. It’s a playground for messing around with ideas: Whatever you say a thing is, it isn’t. What are some ways to look at that as being true? Whatever you say a thing is, it is. How about some ways that that’s true, too. Can something be true even if it didn’t happen? What are some perspectives from which that idea makes sense? We think by feeling? We feel by thinking? Make both of them true.

If you aren’t smiling, are you really thinking?

There’s so much gained and so much lost in words, in the Word. And there is always Why bother in the first place? Can’t we just memorize the rule book and avoid the pain of figuring things out on our own?

The point of these explorations is not to get answers, which after all are only placebos, but to get a good look at this infinitely large and infinitely small universe. Wonder isn’t an answer. It’s an experience.

Teaching Human Beings: The Role of Language in Education is about a way to involve students in this journey no matter what discipline is being investigated. If you are looking at a clump of grass in a biology class or examining the periodic chart in chemistry or the subatomic field in physics or Ode to Joy in music, it’s always about getting a clearer picture of one’s own world, not merely about storing masses of information in the left-hemisphere of the brain. Ask Walt Whitman or Richard Feynman. It’s also about the feeling of wonder that sometimes comes over us on a bus in San Francisco.

Bon Voyage.

Taking Rubbings in the Realms of Gold

Posted on March 2, 2013 by Clark McKowen

Pouring God into God a la J. D. Salinger

Between Two Infinities

All day long

the Self

takes imprints

from the cosmos

and

nourishes

its

deepest roots.

The Warm Cushion of Your Brain

If the poem below doesn’t make sense right off the bat, you could use it like a saloon puzzle to practice on, like the one in my 11/7/12 post. The payoff is that tingly sensation that comes over you as you begin to”get” it and the burst of pleasure when you do. It took me a little while to catch on, but when I did, all sorts of realizations came popping out. I’m still discovering connections that make me smile, and with a little attention, are astonishing. I can guarantee you one thing: This poem is as wonderful as you are willing to let it be.

First, look at the poem and see if it makes sense to you.

Memory

One had a lovely face,

And two or three had charm,
But charm and face were in vain
Because the mountain grass
Cannot but keep the form
Where the mountain hare has lain.

– William Butler Yeats (1865 – 1939)

If the poem makes “sense”, you’re on your way to the Realms of Gold.

If it doesn’t make sense, mess around a while using the surface-features approach [5/29/12], noticing anything that’s there on the surface. Slow-walk it, too. [1/15/13]; let the images wash over your senses.

Or Try Some Connections.

Where is all the stuff from outside that got past your skin stored up? After all, you’ve accumulated an infinite pile of it, haven’t you? So where, actually, do you store her lovely face? What’s left of their charm when they have gone away? Did you save it up inside yourself somehow?

Generally by the time you are real most of your hair has been rubbed off and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints. But these things don’t matter at all because once you are real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.

–Margery Williams, The Velveteen Rabbit

Or Think About Gravestone Rubbings.

And then have another look at the poem. If you’d like to take home the actual lettering on some early ancestor’s gravestone, for example, you can make a rubbing. I did that one summer in Unity Cemetery just out from Latrobe, Pennsylvania, where some of my forebears – Hannas, Steeles, Niccolls – are buried, going way back to the late 1770s. (Fred Rogers of Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood is entombed there, too.)

What you do is get a big piece of newsprint, lay it over the gravestone, and rub over it with a charcoal pencil or an oil pastel or chalk – whatever’s handy – like what I did with a silver dollar pictured here. (That silver dollar “coincidentally” is dated the year Mary Steiner– my wife Ruth’s mother, who married Joseph Luttner – was born. Just think, a bit of the physical world in 1886 found its way into my hands and onto this posting and now on to you.)

What your Self is up to, as the day goes on, is taking impressions from of whatever it touches,

and then adding all those to everything that it’s ever encountered,

Like Making Rubbings Off Grave Markers.

There was a child went forth every day,

And the first object he looked upon, that object he became,

And that object became part of him for the day or a certain part of the day,

Or many years and stretching cycles of years.

The early morning lilacs became part of this child,

And the grass and white and red morning glories, and white and red clover, and the song of the phoebe-bird.

– Walt Whitman

You’re busy all day making rubbings off your encounter with wind and rubies.

The little kid sitting on a wall

in Carmel

eating ice cream

leaves an impression

on the warm cushion

of your brain.

It’s that that stays.

The Zero Point Field

That may sound poetic, but it’s also a description of how particle physics works. I’m talking about what’s down inside your atoms. Memory (our word for it) finds its way down that far into the warp and woof of things. Go far enough and our artificial dictionary distinctions between physical and spiritual dissolve.

Your constant capturing of rubbings off the world you move around in – of which you are a part and which is a part of you – is more like making holograms, those clever projections that physicists have figured out how to create. Most of us have seen those 3-D laser projections at science fairs or in the mall that you can walk around and see from all angles and even put your hand into.

Physically, that’s pretty much what your body (a big transceiver like the satellite dish on your roof ) does. By way of the sensors all over your body, inside and out, your Self is absorbing the pretty face and the charm in a permanent vessel that can never forget. If you cut off a bit of the hologram film and run the laser bean through it, it works just as well. Every little bit is the whole. What a memory device! That device is you.

Hold to the now, the here, through which a ll future plunges into the past.
– James Joyce, Ulysses

And, what a bonus!, all that went on before you started walking around the planet is in your DNA, your genetic memory — where all your forebears are and everything thing else too. Or as Wordsworth put it, “Trailing clouds of glory do we come, from God which is our home.”

Yeats understood this completely. If you “get” his poem “Memory”, you will get it on your senses. You will take a rubbing. Then you understand particle physics — yes, you do! — and the Zero Point Field – a sea of microscopic vibrations in the space between things –

where the little girl is eating her ice cream.

Memory

One had a lovely face,

And two or three had charm,
But charm and face were in vain
Because the mountain grass
Cannot but keep the form
Where the mountain hare has lain.

So, if you really want to remember something for some artificial thing like a school quiz, take a rubbing. Your self will remember.

What’s it all about?

Well, you have your work cut out for you:

Task: to be where I am.

Even when I’m in this solemn and absurd

role: I am still the place

where creation works on itself.

— “Guard Duty – Tomas Tranströmer

Natural Aids to Memory

Posted on February 26, 2013 by Clark McKowen

[The posts in this website are sequential, like the chapters of a book. I put the earliest at the top. If you want to go to the most recent, they’re listed on the left of this page.]

The Element of Love
When you love something, you don’t have to memorize.

For trivia storage, fake it.

In my previous post, before I fell in love, sort of, with those peaks, what was the process I used to store all those mountain elevations in my mind where I could get at them later?

No one’s really sure how that works. But we do know some of the things I consciously did. You’ve probably used them and lots of others yourself from time to time. Here, I’m just bringing them to your awareness. Then, if you like, you can use them on purpose.

● Coincidence

● Visualization

● Comparison and Contrast

● Rhythm and Grouping

● Luck

● When I saw that Fuji’s elevation is the same as the number of months and days of the year (12 and 365), ah! the gift of coincidence! In these realms of gold we live in, coincidence is all over the place, and the more you notice, the fewer things you’ll have to memorize. It’s done for you.

● When I imagined myself on Adams looking north, “up”, to Rainier and south, “down” to Hood, I was visualizing.

When you’re sitting in a classroom trying to recall these elevations, picture yourself on Adams and your nonconscious will supply all sorts of data you didn’t even realize you were absorbing. Visualizing is a powerful mnemonic (memorizing) tool.

● While I was messing around, I started associating the mountains with each other. I even started making a meaningful sketch. Fuji and Adams are about the same. Rainier is about 2,000 feet higher. Hood is about 1,000 feet lower. Diablo is about a third. Everest is two times higher than the highest of the American group

(By the way, using a pencil to trace, to draw, to copy, to connect, gets your motor neurons into the process, too.)

● Meanwhile, I was noticing similarities and differences among these mountain elevations. That was going on all by itself. It’s just natural, isn’t it?

● Your body is a musical instrument. (You knew that, didn’t you?)

You can feel it acutely sometimes while listening to a concert or while dancing. For the height of Diablo (3,849), I used rhythm and grouping. Saying “three thousand eight hundred forty-nine” doesn’t have much going for it. Calling out the digits – “three, eight, four, nine”– isn’t much better. But put it in the poetic, musical, mode – “thirty-eight, forty-nine” – and your nonconscious sort of likes that. Or if you say, “three-eight, four-nine” there’s an nice progression of digits to notice, and it feels good on the tongue. Melodious.

● Luck is a highly underrated participant in each moment of our lives.

It’s there all the time, and we can deliberately make it our ally. It’s just luck – I guess – that some of the elevations make interesting patterns. Hood: one, one, two, four, five (11, 245). Rainier: One, four, four, four, four (14,444). If we’re alert for such lucky accidents, they seem to pop up everywhere.

Relaxed and Comfortable

You may have noticed other natural mnemonic (memorizing) devices involved in fooling around with the numbers. If initial study of the material is treated as play, these natural memory aids will crop up automatically.

The hidden school subject that no one teaches is the art of memorizing, but how much you can remember for some quiz or test is what’s being graded.

In my next post, I’ll pass on some age-old mnemonic tricks.

Memorizing Raw Data

Posted on February 24, 2013 by Clark McKowen

The Mind Is a Connecting Organ.

Storing masses of unrelated data is impossible.

If the nonconscious mind doesn’t see relationships, bits of data float loosely around and can’t be summoned for trivia tests. The mind doesn’t know where to look. The bits and pieces probably are in there somewhere, but there’s no way to find all those isolated pieces.

Normally, in our real life – the life outside of school –

We learn the things we love.

Example:

Here’s a way to get all the senses into the mix . It’s from a reflection a student of mine from Puerto Rico wrote after she had spent a day on Mt. Diablo near our college. You can do this with raw data, too. Just let yourself get the feel of the facts.

Dear McKowen: I have spent a Sunday up on the mountain of Diablo: Motorcycling up and down, looking at the scenic view. . . . I brought back all the world on my face — cheeks set aglow by sunset sky, planes, hawks, people, woods, horses, spring flowers and wind.

It could be pinball machines, bluegrass, auto mechanics, the internet, ballet, oceanography. After sailing around awhile in that sea , we realize we’ve amassed hundreds of terms – without even trying. They’ve become interwoven in a pattern our nonconscious mind has generously created for us.

Terminology follows interest. It doesn’t precede it.

Unfortunately, in way too many school courses, you are expected to memorize the vocabulary first. That’s backwards. If students had a chance to fiddle around with a new subject first, they would absorb the language and ideas automatically.

An Example of Natural Memorizing

A colleague of mine, Karl Staubach, had been a forester on Mt. Adams in Washington. When I was working on the first edition of my college skills book, I decided to give Karl a little memory quiz.

Karl, what’s the height of Mt. Adams?

Oh, it’s 12,326 feet.

What about Rainier? (Which you can see from the west side of Mt. Adams)

That’s 14,444

And Mt. Hood? (visible to the south)

11,245

OK. How about Fujiyama?

12,365

All right. Everest, the highest mountain in the world?

It’s 29,002. It’s really 29,000, but that doesn’t look scientific, so they added 2 feet.

One more. Mt. Diablo (That’s a mountain near the college where we taught.)

The biggest mud pile in the United States: 3,849

The point is Karl never tried to memorize those elevations. Knowing them is a by-product of his interest in nature. No doubt he could tell the elevation of just about every other major mountain in the world. He knows all sorts of things about trees, too, and spiders and rocks and snakes. But he did not study these things; he would consider such behavior undignified.

This encyclopedic knowledge is the result of fascination, absorption and love.

Fall in love with something, and you won’t need to memorize it.

Before bar codes, the checkers at my supermarket learned hundreds of new prices every week. A student of mine who served cocktails in a bar could remember the drinks of a dozen people at a table and automatically bring a second round, getting each person’s drink mixed exactly as ordered. When I was a division chairman, I knew the office numbers of all 37 division members, most of their phone extensions, their schedules, all course numbers and titles. I never tried to memorize any of that information. Some nonconscious ally of the cocktail server, the checker, and the division chairman knew how to store the data and make it accessible for retrieval.

An Example of Making Raw Data Meaningful

But then you could find yourself in a required course and a teacher who demands that everyone memorize the elevations of six mountains – or 12 or a 100 – without your ever setting foot on any of them, or smelling the air or swimming in an icy mountain lake or seeing paw prints of a cougar on the trail. That situation is fairly typical of schooling, isn’t it, and it happened to me.

Since I was not very interested in mountains at the time, I thought this would be a good chance to try out a memory strategy, to commit raw data to memory long enough to pass a test, even though I couldn’t care less about the subject. Here’s a description of how it went – at least for the part of the process I was conscious of.

First, I jotted down the data I needed for the quiz. Since they meant nothing to me, there was no order.

Adams 12,326

Diablo 3,849

Hood 11,245

Everest 29,002

Fuji 12,365 Rainier 14,000

I started playing around to see what I might notice, light and easy and not really trying. Right away I noticed Rainier: 14,444 – a 1 and all those 4s. And look at Everest: so much higher than any of the others – 29,002, a little over twice as high as Rainier. (And the 2 at the end seemed so odd that I doubted I would forget it.)

Wait a minute! Look at Fuji: 12,365, a natural memory device built right into it – 12 and 365, the number and months in a year and the number of days in a year. (I’ve never forgotten the height of Fuji since I first saw that. How could I?)

Then I put Fuji and Adams side by side: 12,365 and 12,326 – a 39-foot difference, practically no significance at all. Look again at Adams: the digit sequence is almost the same as Fuji, and four of the five digits are indeed the same. Move the 6 to the right and stick in a 2; it boils down to the last two digits, and one unchanged and moved to the right. Only the 2 is new. So if I could retrieve Fuji (and who couldn’t?), Adams was duck soup.

Now look at Hood: 11,245, about 1,100 feet less than Adams or Fuji. That a good look at the digits: 1, 1, and 2, then doubled to 4, plus one for a 5 – 11,245, a nice pattern of digits.

As you can see, Diablo doesn’t come up to even half the elevation of the least of the others. It’s about one-third the height of Fuji or Adams. And look at the digits. Three-eight, four-nine; 3-8, 4-9. Take the digits of the 38 and add 1 to each: 49.

Continuing to play, I remembered that I had backpacked on Adams. Looking north I could see Rainier. Hood could be seen to the south. You go “up north” and “down south.” Rainier is “up” and higher. Hood is “down” and lower. Rainier is about 2,100 feet higher than Adams. Hood is about 1,100 feet lower.

Get Involved

Your senses are a powerful aid to connecting up the bits and pieces.

When you try to recall something, summon where you were, the setting, and all sorts of support you didn’t even realize becomes available. So, draw pictures, get the feel, whatever senses you can throw into the mix. Here’s a drawing we put into Get Your A Out of College to show how you could do this. But there are all sorts of ways to connect up the pieces. Be my guest.

Look what happened. Merely by playing, messing around, I began building relationships. Starting with Adams as the kingpin, I was able to retrieve all the other elevations or come close enough to get them all correct on a multiple-guess test.

No one has yet nailed for sure what the process really is that stored this information for me, but we do know some of the circumstances that accompany such good storage.

Footnote:

Guess what happened to me while I was storing trivia? I started getting interested in mountains, especially all those beautiful volcanic mountains that dot the drive from California to Canada. In fact, I’ve spent days and days on some of them and the theme picture for this website is Mt. Shasta. That’s education — so different from schooling!

In my next post I’ll point out some of these natural aids to memory.

Your Powerful Natural Memory

Posted on February 21, 2013 by Clark McKowen

Natural Memory – on Purpose:

● BE RELAXED

● MESS AROUND

For the unnatural process of storing and recalling trivia – in classrooms or offices,

● USE INTELLIGENT MNEMONIC STRATEGIES

Why It Works

When you’re stressed out, it’s hard to learn. Learn the way a little kid does. It’s child’s play.

Think how you feel when you learn to do things you love. You feel alive and well, and every bit of energy you use counts. You’re like a cat, at ease but not passive. All parts of your body and mind work in harmony. Be like that when you study, and you’ll learn and remember as easily as a little kid learns language.

So:

● RELAX

Play Music

When you study, play the slow movement of a symphony of a composer like Bach, Corelli, Handel, Teleman, Vivaldi – instrumental music preferably. We’re not sure why this works, but the pace is at about that of the alpha rhythms of your brain.

Take a Half-Speed Walk

One step per second (described in my 1/15/13 post) until you feel yourself quieted down.

The idea is to give your conscious mind something to do so that it can’t play distracting self-critical tapes. Your mind and body get a chance to work together harmoniously. Then, what you’re playfully picking up in the left hemisphere of your brain (for most people) can pass over to the non-conscious right side, which creates a meaningful network of interconnected data.

This is where understanding occurs, but it’s also a safe, secure place for storing your data, not randomly but in a network of connections.

Tune Up Your Sensorium

A Great Alternative to the Half-Speed Walk:

Sit in a comfortable chair, play the music, shut your eyes and give your attention to your toes.

As soon as you’re aware of your toes and can actually feel them (without moving them), move your attention back along your feet, your heels, your ankles, and so on.

Once you fully sense your feet, move on, up your legs, up your torso, your arms, the back of your head, until the senses of your whole body are wakened.

Your body will feel tingly all over, and any stress will have drained away.

MAKE MUSIC AND RELAXATION A HABIT.

● MESS AROUND

If you want to store up stuff for later recall, your mind has to find a framework or create one.

Beginning at the beginning is going blindly into the wilderness without a map. Without an overview, any effort to memorize is futile. The circuitry has to be set up. You need a format.

Messing around is another name for formatting.

The rest is pretty much the mess-around strategy I described in my 11/11/12 post for reading, browse, focus, absorb, reinforce.

Play your music and use a relaxation exercise.

You should feel good – comfortable and awake but not tense, no sense of pressure. Then look over the job. Do a pass through. It doesn’t matter where you start. You can move in any direction and pause anywhere, for as long as you like. Let your curiosity guide you. When you feel saturated, take a break.

When you’re ready, come back and do another pass through the whole thing again.

Keep messing around in this fashion until you become aware of the pattern.
Meaning will begin to emerge and take form.

Keep playing with the material.

At some point you will become aware of a pattern taking shape. Gradually you will flesh out your understanding.

Don’t try to memorize anything until you can say, “Yes. I really do understand this.”

If you have no experience with the subject at all, you might feel nervous and inadequate. (little kids would never feel like that, but you may well have suffered through lots of judgmental classrooms over the years that you haven’t got out of your system yet.) So go away for a while. Your nonconscious will be working on it in the meantime.

Keep coming back.

Suddenly It Makes Sense

Seemingly on their own, things that appeared hopelessly vague will suddenly start making sense. Just let it happen. There can be a number of passes through, some long, some short, some superficial, some intense.

Interact.

Sometimes you may want to interact. Go right ahead.

Try problems, draw pictures, fool around with possibilities.

The total time spent will be no longer than that of typical, fruitless methods, but the results will be amazing. You will have shifted the learning (and storage of data) to your brilliant nonconscious mind, which does this sort of thing effortlessly.

Your conscious and nonconscious programs will be working in harmony, and you will actually feel refreshed.

Bottom Line:

Browse. Browse. Browse.

● STORE THE TRIVIA

When you feel thoroughly comfortable and familiar with the material and confident that you do understand, then see if there is anything left to memorize. You will find there is hardly anything left to worry about. Without even trying, you will have done most of the memorizing, and the material will be lodged far more permanently in your mind than it would have been with conventional study methods.

In my next post, I’ll describe a couple of ways people have figured out for storing and recalling trivia.

The Realms of Gold Saloon

Posted on February 20, 2013 by Clark McKowen

Not Found in Headlines

It is difficult

to get the news from poems

yet men die miserably every day

for lack

of what is found there.

— William Carlos Williams, from “Asphodel, That Greeny Flower”

If you are looking at this website instead of today’s headlines, odds are you’ve caught a glimpse of what lies beyond the headlines and would like another glimpse. Some people, people like Rumi and William Blake and Emily Dickinson, live in the realms of gold all the time. Here’s a poem Emily Dickinson wrote describing her experience there. If you don’t see the gold right away, try the surface-features approach a while (described in my posts of 2/12/13, 2/4/13 and 5/29/12) . That should ramp up the lighting.

I taste a liquor never brewed

I taste a liquor never brewed —
From Tankards scooped in Pearl —
Not all the Vats upon the Rhine
Yield such an Alcohol!

Inebriate of Air — am I —
And Debauchee of Dew —
Reeling — thro endless summer days —
From inns of Molten Blue —

When “Landlords” turn the drunken Bee
Out of the Foxglove’s door —
When Butterflies — renounce their “drams” —
I shall but drink the more!

Till Seraphs swing their snowy Hats —
And Saints — to windows run —
To see the little Tippler
Leaning against the — Sun —

The Transparent Door to the Realms of Gold.

Posted on February 19, 2013 by Clark McKowen

The Door Between the Worlds

If the doors of perception were cleansed, every thing would appear as it is, infinite.

— William Blake

There is a door between ordinary reality and glazed reality. It is more than likely that you yourself have come to such a door.

It’s a choice we make.

Here’s what a handful of people who have passed through it have said:

It’s the door Mark Bittner (The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill) passes through one early morning in the parking lot at Coit Tower above Telegraph Hill.

“The sky was deeper than I’d ever seen it and my vision was astonishingly acute. As I stood there, I felt a great turning, and the entire material plane seemed on the verge of dissolving”

It’s the door that opens when William Butler Yeats drops a berry in a stream and catches a silver trout that becomes a shimmering girl. (“The Song of Wandering Aengus”)

“One has a vision; one would like another.”

It opens one afternoon for Sidney Field watching a hawk circling high above the Hollywood hills

.
“All at once the wondrous joy seized my heart. It had returned! I was ecstatic.” ( The Reluctant Messiah)

It opens for William Blake, who lives in eternity’s sunrise.
- He who binds to himself a joy
  Doth the winged life destroy.
  He who kisses the joy as it flies,
  Lives in eternity’s sunrise.

Walt Whitman passes through it and sings the body electric and knows of nothing but miracles.

It opens and Jane Goodall gets blown away by organ music, a Bach fugue (Toccata and Fugue in D Minor), reverberating in the soaring vaults of Notre Dame Cathedral.

“That moment, a suddenly captured moment of eternity, was perhaps the closest I have ever come to experiencing ecstasy, the ecstasy of the mystic.”

Here is how Ansel Adams describes the moment when he passes through it while climbing one crystal morning in 1923 along a ridge in Yosemite and becomes God’s stenographer.

I was climbing the long ridge west of Mount Clark. It was one of those mornings where the sunlight is burnished with a keen wind and long feathers of cloud move in a lofty sky. The silver light turned every blade of grass and every particle of sand into a luminous metallic splendor; there was nothing, however small, that did not clash in the bright wind, that did not send arrows of light through the glassy air. I was suddenly arrested in the long crunching path up the ridge by an exceedingly pointed awareness of the light. The moment I paused the full impact of the mood was upon me; I saw more clearly than I have ever seen before or since the minute detail of the grasses … the small flotsam of the forest, the motion of the high clouds streaming above the peaks. … I dreamed that for a moment time stood quietly, and the vision became but the shadow of an infinitely greater world – and I had within the grasp of consciousness a transcendental experience. — (Ansel Adams – in His Own Words, quoted in Ansel Adams, A Documentary, American Experience, PBS, 2002)

That’s the door through which Jacob Boehme passes and sees all heaven in sunlight reflected off a pewter bowl.

Eugene O’Neill encounters and passes through it sailing on a tramp steamer to Argentina, when he has “a single moment of complete clarity – without a sense of past or future. “

The feel of the facts:

The Poem of Creation

“If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can warm me I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only way I know it. Is there any other way?”

— Emily Dickinson

Perhaps God wasn’t trying

to intimidate

Job

but was simply showing

him

His unfiltered

creation.

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this: