How I Memorize Things

Alex Prestwich

9/8/13

Core B

How I Memorize Things

The question you gave us in class on Thursday was a question I have never heard or even thought of before. It makes you think of not just how you learn, but of how your brain works. As you were talking it really made me think of what goes on in my brain while I'm trying to memorize maps or vocabulary. Not just the obvious such as my mind tries to make a rhythm or that I repeat it to myself softly but what goes in my brain, the strongest machine there is.

Now as I write this I am thinking of the ways I study. I am usually sitting down at my desk looking at a piece of paper which has on it the criteria that I need to memorize usually for a quiz or test. As I sit there staring at that piece of paper I easily get distracted and I can tell my brain isn't fully involved. When I notice that I try to say what I'm thinking out loud and it usually takes form as a simple rhythm.

As I look back on the time I spent there I realize how much of my life I have wasted on a simply horrendous way to memorize things. The way that I used to is to stare at the paper that I was assigned and say it out loud. This has no way to fully involve my brain and it does not stick because of that. The discussion we had was so more in depth than I ever imagined a discussion about memory could ever be. All the ways that a brain works was a surprise to me. As I sat there listening to the discussion I was thinking and trying to analyze how my brain works. I reached the conclusion that my brain is not associative. I realized that it is tactile and hearing. A mixture of the two helps me the best to memorize the criteria well. I took me all day to figure out if my brain visualized things in black and white or color. The conclusion came to me while I was writing the rough draft. My brain sees things in black and white there are no colors involved. As all of these things came together, it hit me that I have been studying wrong my whole life. Instead of the monotonous bore of staring and reciting I need to accommodate the way of studying for my brain.

My conclusion is that my brain is tactile and hearing based. My brain also has to block things out. But instead of blocking other sounds out with silence my brain uses music as a barrier for other