1. WHAT IS VISUALISATION?
Visualisation simply means: seeing things in your mind’s eye. Important for
memory techniques: whatever you want to remember you HAVE !!! to create a
picture in your mind.
The other way around: If you don’t have (cannot, don’t want to create) a
picture you cannot remember that piece of information.
Well, that is not entirely correct. You could revert to your old strategy
which is repetition, as in: repeat the item for 200 times and hope for the
best. However, as you notice, this sounds facetious and hopefully this approach
is in the past.
Here we aim for making remembering easier and easier.
In this section you learn to move from ‘easy’ items like tomato to
‘difficult’ items (as in anything you want to remember). I put the words easy
& difficult in inverted commas, as you will learn in this section, once
this skill is mastered, there is absolutely NO difference between easy and
difficult information. The shift is towards: You have a picture or you don’t.
If you have a picture, then it is very easy to remember, if you don’t have a
picture, well then it is not easy to remember.
Sometimes (just for my own fun, as I do know the answer already) I ask the
student after a ‘difficult’ exercise (the ones you encounter in this chapter):
Did you find this difficult? And the answer is always the same: Doesn’t make
any difference any more!
A word of caution: occasionally, and I mean very occasionally it happens that students find this part hard to accept. I promise you: There is no ‘technical’ difficulty, it simply is a barrier in your mind. Sometimes very logic people cannot grasp how ‘this works here’. My advice: Simply give it a go, and do mechanically the steps suggested in this chapter.
I promise: It just will fall into place. It’s as simple as that.
The learning part of this chapter is:
You have to have a picture (of what you want to remember).
You do NOT have to know the meaning of the item.
I will never ask you: do you know what this means.
I will always ask you: do you have a picture.
This is really, really important.
