On Senses and Studying.

Something curious hit me when I was studying. No, not a pie.

You know those sensory tests you take as a kid to determine which method of studying is “best” for you? If you’re visual, optimize your knowledge acquisition to suit. And stuff.

If I recall, I tended to come out somewhere in the middle. Nothing really popped out. I remember taking one recently, and still, rather towards the center. I used to think, “Ah, I’m balanced!” But now, I wonder whether I need a synthesis, perhaps a consilience, of the senses to really absorb things most efficiently. Lack of any particular sense popping out could mean that there is no dominant sense. Might be easier if you can just rely on one method easily, no?

I noticed how I was studying. I do this a lot to further refine. There was a list of words I needed to memorize. If I just went over the page over and over again, it wouldn’t make much difference. Maybe, slowly, I could do it. I transferred them to notecard, then went through them forwards and backwards.

Two things happened. One, there was the tactile process of writing it down. All I did to study for my nutrition test was to recopy my notes, doing a little rephrasing when I could, and then going over the joined copy of notes. Writing it over forces me to reprocess the information. Like priming the brain. How often do we really understand things when we first write them down? I digress.

Second, if possible, I visualized. Most of this is bone vocabulary, so I tried associating various words with logical locations. Other things, like “fissure”, I had to get creative. On a basic level, we know what a fissure is. I associate it with earthquakes, cracks in the ground. But for bones, the definition has something to do with a cleft or slit. So guess what I associated it with.

Yeah. Vulvas definitely have a fissure along the slit, if you have any sense of humor. You bet I won’t forget it.

Thirdly (nevermind I said just two), I found myself talking to myself. Yes, I do that a lot. I find I can not remember a word if I can not pronounce it. I can’t visualize a word if I can’t pronounce it. As a kid, spelling bees amounted to me visualizing a word and seeing if it “looked” right, then transcribing the visualization into letters. Dead-serious.

Above all else, what’s abundantly clear is that I don’t learn from reading text. As a kid, I could get by from just paying attention in class. Maybe I could read ahead and follow along in class as it went along. I can’t pull that off anymore. “Reading ahead” tends to do jack shit for me, because I don’t know what I’m supposed to be looking for.

My point is that I have the unfortunate need of being creative to get things to stick. Associations like crazy. But when I do get them to stick, typically, I know it rather intuitively. ..Typically. It’s as I noticed years ago, I can’t learn things in a vacuum. I have to see the big picture. When I learn concepts, I learn them completely.

*shrugs* Just observations. As I suspected, I’m hungry AGAIN, so I’ll go eat. I have a second test tomorrow that I’ll be studying for.