[Hey, everyone, I met a guy named Brice in college and we became really tight and still are to this
It’s finals and you show up at school with no books, no idea
where the classroom is and, by the way: you don’t have any clothes on!
Have you ever had this dream? Showing up on test day completely unprepared?
No? Well, good for you. You’ll do fine on the upcoming test.
For the rest of us who have been there: there’s still hope.
The underwear-before-a-test dream is your brain’s way of
working out the feeling of unpreparedness. But don’t worry! It doesn’t mean
that you ARE unprepared, necessarily. It could simply mean that deep in the
recesses of your grey matter you have forgotten a minor fact. Like the name of
your friend’s pet hamster.
Our minds have been fascinatingly and
wonderfully created. They are as intricate as any computer and able to hold
massive amounts of information. The
problem is that we can’t always get to that information. Why? Because we are
not putting the info in the right places.
When I was little,
before we moved to our new house, my parents had a “junk drawer”. I can
remember opening that drawer only to find what looked like an “eye spy”
picture. Anything and everything—useless and important—all thrown together in a mash of chaos.
Think of your brain as a big, grey, squishy drawer
organizer. Hundreds of little sections for lots of different things. A section
for faces; another for names; one for foods you can’t stand and still another
for useless facts that you remembered the night before your big test.
That junk drawer is what your brain-drawer looks like the
night before your big test. The reason? You shoved a bunch of information in at
the last minute and went to sleep leaving
your brain to sort it all out. The underwear dream is just your mind’s way
of kicking you for making it put all that stuff away. And it might need to toss
some older information to make room for the new stuff. So: there goes Hammie
the hamster and where you put that piece of broccoli you were supposed to eat…
and, oh yeah: that you need to get dressed in the morning!
Hello anxiety!
But there is still hope of not arriving to class naked.
Certain things don’t need to be remembered all the time. Our brains do
something called “Object Location Memory” where it brings up a necessary memory
from deep within our minds when we see objects throughout our day. For
instance: when you see the shower handle, you know that turning it one way is
hot. Not because you need to remember
that going into the bath, but because as soon as you see that handle, your
brain pulls the memory up and applies it. So you won’t have to remember to get
dressed because once you see the closet door, as you do every morning, you will
go into automatic memory recall.
One last thing I’ll leave you with that will help you with
that information you are cramming into your brains right now: there is a
memorization method, used since the Roman empire, that taps into this innate
sense of object location. It is called the method of loci. It’s a way
to trick your brain into drumming up the stuff you memorized for your big test.
In a sense, you are organizing that drawer before
you go to sleep. Simply “attach” a fact you need to remember to a specific item
in your bedroom- say your dresser. Then, when you are trying to remember the
answer to 37, you just bring up the dresser in your mind and wham: the fact
comes back to you! You can work your way around the room for up to 20 items!
Pick the biggest topics you have difficulty with and stick them to your stuff.
By taking the time to organize
the information, instead of just pushing it willy-nilly into your head, you
can get a peaceful nights rest and still make it to school fully clothed. Now…
where did I put my socks?
Brice Bunner
Author, writer, Pagefiller.Follow me @babunner and check out my blog: Fall Down; Go Boom
My second ebook just hit the e-shelves! Check it out.
No comments:
Post a Comment