Mini cheat for your exams
- BirdieChao
- Jul 16, 2017
- 5 min read
This is Birdie's 17th personal artcile
“Humans only use 10 percent of their brains”. This is an urban legend that has been widely spread in the recent days, especially after the release of the movie “Lucy”. It’s shows us how great we can be if we just maximize our brain by just a little bit.
But don’t get me wrong, I’m not so powerful to teach you how you can become Lucy and uses all 100% of your brain. I’m just here to share a technique that is originated before the paper is even invented.
Memory techniques.
Before any form of recording can take place, humans often make use of this kind of memory technique to remember things that happen in their everyday life. However, as paper and pen gets invented, we slowly lose the ability to remember things as well as our ancestors. (Maybe that’s why our ancestors had those unbelievable achievements like the pyramid)
Just as I said above, with the invention of pen and paper, we slowly lose the ability to remember things as well as our ancestors. And since there’s at least a few thousand years after we invented pen and paper, let’s see how strong our memory is. (without the technique)
If without your phone’s contact list, how many people can you call?
If without Facebook, how many person’s birthday you remember?
You might say this as unfair because we already have those devices to help us remember and why not just use it because we can right?
Then how about the things you tried to remember for exam. How often do you remember all the things you remember?
How often do you forget one’s name right after the person introduces him/herself?
This is the state of our memory right now, we just can’t trust our brains that much anymore.
So today, Birdie is here to share one memory technique that as a student I think would be the most useful one. Out of the all I’ve learnt yet. Called the hooking method.
It’s basically hooking whatever you want to remember onto your body parts and every time you want to recall what you remember, you just refer to the body part and that will trigger that information you want to retrieve.
The best way to learn is through an exercise, so let’s have a mini exercise so you can understand it better on how we can use it. There one book that I’m reading recently and each chapter has 8 mini parts inside. Let us just remember the 8 parts of the first chapter, goal setting.
It’s a Chinese book, so pardon my translation.
1. Have a big goal first, then the direction will appear.
2. Start from the smaller goals.
3. 7 reasons why you fail when you set a goal.
4. Focus of one goal, don’t chase 2 rabbits at once
5. Know what you want asap
6. Eliminate a bit of yourself everyday
7. Goals must be keep upgrading
8. Choose what’s most suitable for you
If I give you 3 minutes, you might probably remember this. No doubt, but if I mix up the sequence and ask you in random orders, it might probably mess up your memory sequence and take you a long time for you to recall. Because you need to slowly count to the number and answer.
For the hooking method, first you need to make yourself a tool. The best tool is your body. Then, cut your body into 8 parts this time, since we only need 8.
The 8 parts would be:
1. Hair
2. Eye
3. Ear
4. Nose
5. Mouth
6. Beard
7. Neck
8. Heart
Make sure you are god damn familiar with your tools before you start hooking. Once you are familiar, then let’s get started.
1. For hair, imagine that your hair sudden grew longer and form a huge arrow above your head, this show that you need you have a huge arrow(big goal) that points to a certain direction.
2. For eye, imagine when you opened your eye, you see yourself behind a starting line and there are only small little stones that you can step on to reach the finishing line. (start with small goals)
3. For ear, you imagine that when you dig your ear, there 7 pieces of dirt that fall out. And that’s the 7 reasons why you fail to set a goal.
4. For nose, think even though there no nostrils, you can only smell one single smell at once. So don’t chase 2 rabbits at once, focus on one.
5. For mouth, think that you have a very picky mouth and you have a very strong crave that you want to eat something right not. So you will know what you want very quickly.
6. For beard, just think that you need to shave your beard everyday to stay clean and the beard equals to the things you want to eliminate
7. For neck, imagine you have a mini card reader insider your neck. And after sometime, you will always need to take out that card and upgrade to a new one. (Keep upgrading your goals)
8. For heart, it means that follow your heart and do what’s most suitable for you. If you don’t see yourself as a doctor, don’t be one.
That’s the technique, and after spending 5 mins getting familiar with it. I’m sure that every single one of you can tell me what are the 8 parts of setting a goal. Even in random orders. Because all you need is to recall the number, then the body part which will trigger the information that you need.
Lastly, and most importantly. When you hook anything onto you, make sure that it is an image that you can see. Try your best to not hook just purely words, use your imagination and create images out of the things you want to remember. Because just as the quote says, a picture depicts a thousand words. Just by making what you want to remember into picture, you will remember it much easier.
There are a lot of other techniques that are available elsewhere. But since we are just students and our main focus will of course be our academics, I think this one simple technique would be enough for some of the basic memorisations that will be required for an exam.
However, if you are interested in challenging your brain more, to maximise your brain capacity, having more techniques with you that allows you to never forget names anymore or even holding a national record in memory with you. And you are in SP, I have one good news for you.
I will be collaborating with a memory training company, Memory Ark Pte Ltd, and my course mates to form this new club in SP called the Memory Sports Club. Other than just learning memory techniques from professionally trained trainers, this club will also be having exclusive networking opportunities with the big players of memory in the world as we are holding an international memory championship this year, and I hope that we can host it every year.
If you are interested or if you know any of your friend that may be interested in joining this Club, feel free to click on the link below to signed up for the club!
https://goo.gl/forms/BTehIBs97Ktf9S0O2
And, before you leave. I just want to thank you so much for reading my blog, just by knowing that my blog is being read by someone would definitely make my day better. So feel free to hit the like, comment what you think and subscribe to my blog. I update my blog every week so I’ll see you next week!
It's your choice
To live in your dreams or to be living your dreams
-BirdieChao
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