Existensis

Why are some subjects difficult to think about? Such as maths or scientific theories, some may find them enjoyable to think about but no one can disagree that they’re harder to contemplate than the usual “what will I have for breakfast?”. On the same note, memorising mundane details about your day or just recalling specific facts such as that girl’s name can be excruciatingly numbing on the brain.

We’re a so called intelligent species, built just for this kind of thing. Why if we have developed the ability to think certain ways, are they so mentally hard to do. Turns out, it’s not difficult, we’ve just been doing it wrong. The generation before us and before than weren’t too up on their neuroscience or psychology. Therefore we weren’t brought up and thought in the best manner possible that could harness the great power that is the mind. How to think isn’t a subject thought in school, nor a life lesson that many of us are thought. How do you know that inner dialogue in your head is the best way to think. We didn’t always have language, both primarily as a young child and secondarily thousands of years ago.

Monkey’s can be seen solving difficult problems. One in particular was a nut down a tube too small for the monkey’s hands. No obvious tools provided. What would you have done, how would you have thought about it? The monkey isn’t talking to himself in his head, yet he solved the problem ingeniously. He sucked water from his water bottle, and spat it into the tube, repeat until the nut floated up to the top and he could take it. He had this solution in a matter of seconds. Clever fellows, shame some treat them so inhumanely.

Memorise this string of words, take a minute or so to look: telephone, sausage, monkey, button, book, glass, mouse, stomach, cardboard, ferry, Christmas, athlete, key, wigwam, baby. Don’t read on until you’ve at least tried feebly. Now unless you’re some kind of savant you only managed a few, and certainly not in order. Here’s a better way of doing it; linking imagery. Come up with vivid, somewhat strange pictures that link one word to the next. Think of a telephone, but the handle is a sausage. The monkey picks up the sausage receiver and starts to talk. He’s wearing a suit, you close in on the picture to see his button. Inside the coat pocket is a book he takes out. The books pages are panes of glass however. You don’t want to read, but surf the internet with a mouse using the glass book as a mat. But turns out it was a real mouse and you squashed it with your hand. Yuk, so you clean the mess with a slice of cardboard. Origami that cardboard into a ferry, the ferry may turn out red.. On the back of this real life ferry is a big Christmas tree all lit up. There’s a runner/athlete running up and down one of the branches and as you zoom in on his sweaty chest, there’s a shiny gold key round his neck. Use this key to open the brown sort of hairy wigwam. And inside is the baby in a cot.

Now think about that set of events, and really picture them in your mind. Now repeat the words or write them down. Do it backwards starting with baby. This is absolutely effortless, bar imagining the pictures. Much more easier than merely memorising strings of words containing letters. That is one of many ways that should be used to think as opposed to the failed method of just sheer repeating in your head over and over. You may have heard of the method, but here’s more to research; the loci method (matching points during a common journey you take to a word or something to remember, then going through the journey). The memory palace, this is a much more complicated but more useful method of memorising which can have ground breaking results. People have been known to card count effectively using this method.

Memorising numbers is another issue, a way to go about it is linking a specific number to a letter. 7 would be T, 8 would be B and so on. Making words and sentences from this is the only work needed. With practice it can be done very quickly and give astonishing results. We’ve trained our brain to think one way, training it another just takes practice.