Lesson 14 - Watch How Danna Studied
If you’ve done Lesson 14 then you’ve already written down your My Ultimate Life goals.
Does writing down your goals seem stupid and too much like busy work? If it does, then you’re not alone. I thought the same thing when I watched the lesson. In fact, the first time I watched the lesson I fast forwarded through the 2 minutes of quiet. I thought that the lesson was too childish for me to take seriously.
But then I thought about it for a bit.
I remembered this girl Danna from college. Danna never participated in the study groups we organized. She never partnered up with a classmate or had a study date. Instead, she studied by writing the material over dozens and dozens of time by hand. She insisted that the only way her brain would remember the information for the tests was by writing the information out longhand.
The whole class mocked her for it and told her that her brain functions like the rest of ours and that study groups were proven effective. Time and time again though, Danna got higher marks than the rest of the class.
It turns out that Danna’s brain does function like the rest of ours, only Danna knew something that we didn’t. When the human brain needs to deconceptualize information (turn information from a concept into something tangible) there are two ways that our brains accomplish this. Either our brains’ create a visual picture and tries to remember the visual picture or our brains require a physical action to help it remember.
To give you an example, do you remember where you were when you had an important conversation? That’s your brain using a physical action (where you were standing) to remember.
Danna figured this out without the help of her Psych 101 class. She knew her brain would not only remember information better if she physically wrote it down, but that it would help her deconceptualize it as well. She was able to take complicated math theorems and philosophy concepts and understand them simply by writing them out.
Lesson 13 underscores this same concept. It’s one thing for me to think in my head that I want to be successful though my love of art, but by forcing me to write that down, I see how ludicrous it is. Or how brilliant.