"I can't remember.... (that date or name or fact)!"

"I can't make sense of this...why can't I ever learn anything?"

"It takes so much time and effort to learn this stuff....!"

And yet...

More than a century of behavioral research tells us that every experience, every awareness you have ever had, is still with you even if you "can't remember it."

--So why do most of us find it so much struggle to "learn?" --with such weak results for so much time and effort?

--To the point where "education" itself has been defined as "what you have left, when you've forgotten everything you've been taught!"

There are a lot of good answers to this question. We'll address some of the best answers here. We'll start on the road to those answers, though, by re-affirming what behavioral researchers have been showing us for more than a century:

That is what we are about.

Emergency First Aid:

What follows below, in this introductory chapter, is some quick-hit help. In part an overview of some of our methods, in part a few quick steps or easy ways to get a leg up on a learning situation which may be pressing you.

A lot of us have put off things until the last minute, especially in schooling or training situations. I have to assume that some who are now reading this have done likewise. The frames that follow can help some at least, right now.

These are not substitutes for the main actual methods in this book. With most of the main methods, once you've assimilated the method you can in a few minutes, hours or days acquire levels of conscious understanding and proficiency in almost any subject, levels which ordinarily would require years of dedicated effort and attention to build. All who are now reading this book and who follow its specified instructions, should become able to achieve this level of effect and comfort. --But now, for those of you who waited to get into this book until you got into a bind, here are a few frames. They are different enough from each other that, whatever your own particular situation, you should be able to get some immediate benefit from one or several of these.

One or more of these frames should be of immediate though modest help to you in your emergency. Please do, however, make a point of going on with the rest of this book and its main methods immediately after you've gotten through your emergency. Things can be so very, very much easier and more rewarding for you if you do.

Frame # One: Several Generally Helpful Things You Can Do--

1. Sometimes Even The Littlest Things Can Make A Big Difference.

-LIKE THE OUTCOME OF THAT PLAY AT SECOND BASE....

Did the ball get there first, or did the runner, or did the fielder? A huge difference in outcomes, if the runner got there a tenth of a second faster than the others, or slower. --Or if the ball got there faster than the fielder did! Or that little thing about whether the fielder got his foot on the bag.....

Just like games with various factors interacting, where "a miss is as good as a mile" and even an inch or a tiny part of a second make huge differences in outcome, even the littlest things can make huge differences in how well or how poorly you learn. Things so simple and so ordinary no one ever bothered to point them out. Lack of some tiny obvious practice or strategy can get you life-branded as a poor learner--or your child, or anyone whom you care about. Likewise,

Picking up on some little knack can get you on a roll instead and mark you as a great, gifted learner or even a genius. Here are some tips on some of these little knacks. If some seem overly obvious to you, others might not. --And if, on some of these, you think they couldn't possibly make that much difference, try them and see for yourself.

(Parenthetically, a Special Aside: you've taken too many people's word for too many things. It's time you check some things out for yourself instead of waiting for schools or other authorities (with their own mixed agendas and purposes and derivations) to tell you what's what. So--check these out:)

Some Hot Tips for Little Knacks of Learning--

So: "Little Things # 1" among these hot tips is--

MAKE YOUR "DRY FACTS" UTTERLY MEMORABLE! (And as entertaining and engrossing as possible!)

2. Talk Your way through the key points or issues. --WITH someone.

So that's the second set of hot tips,

Talk Your Way Through the Key Points or Issues, WITH Someone.

3. Experiment and Record:

So that's the third set of hot tips,

Fiddle with the Problem, Experiment, Observe, Record.

So that's the fourth set of hot tips,

Turn each Point not Understood into a Problem and Solve it as per the above.

So that's your fifth set of hot tips,

Explain key points effectively to someone younger, making sure BOTH of you now understand them.

So here in one small space are the 5 "Golden Sets of Hot Tips," where even remarkably little things can make remarkably big gains in learning for you:

All of you reading this:

One of the most frequently used paths to genius: find a knack that works for you. Get on a roll. Find ways to stay on that roll. Find ways to return to being on that roll, until so much else falls into that roll that even you begin to realize that you are, indeed, a genius.....

Support GBD.com without it costing you a dime. Learn How

FRAME TWO----

A Major Way YOU Can Learn Like A Genius

The previous were some very general, brief, and quickly assimilated suggestions to improve your learning. Many other programs have similar recommendations. In this section of frames for quick emergency coping, however, we had to share with you at least a little of what our program is special for. Here is at least a glimpse of one of the types of method which are special to this book and to our program, though it also is beginning to come into use in other programs elsewhere. We call it "Periscopic Learning;" also "Borrowed Genius" and a few other things.

How To Learn Through A Periscope--

Each of the 47 diverse methods for such Periscopic Learning, through Project Renaissance's strategies of contextual projection and description, enable one to learn with understanding, or gain in skills, years'-worth in only hours: truly "accelerated learning!" (Periscopic Learning in its 47 different versions, in turn, is only one of eight types of accelerated learning method unique to Project Renaissance. You do have something to look forward to in going beyond these first few "emergency first-aid" pages!)

Your "quick-hit" suggestion for this frame: imagine being a genius at what it is that you are trying to learn. While describing that genius to tape recorder or listener to make that experience more real to you, give special attention to imagining, as concretely as possible, in as sensory a way as possible, becoming that genius. Give special attention to the way it feels being that genius--that helps you discover the things which that genius would notice or discover. Hold onto that feeling of that particular genius while you are working at whatever you are seeking to learn. (Suggestion: also recover that feeling and bring it silently with you into the test or exam which usually accompanies the windup of such last-minute "learning emergencies.")

Suggestion: to discover how your deeper mind may represent a particular type of genius to you, try out several different types of genius first. Study what it might feel like in your body if, say, you were a genius mathematician. Describe all the differences in feeling in your body, posture and ways of moving when you are "being a genius mathematician" and being yourself. Then imagine being a genius artist, and study those differences, then a genius in dealing with people, and so on. Once you've experienced directly for yourself how each type of genius feels differently to you, you can get the best defined patterns of feeling which go with the type of genius you need for this present occasion. "Wearing" that feeling, then, will let things occur to you or happen for you that otherwise would not, strengthening on this occasion your learning or test performance or general performance.

Whatever the benefits you can glean from this immediate occasion, please know that by the stronger of these periscopic learning methods as found later in this book, you may easily learn in several days, sometimes in only hours, and with far fuller understanding. proficiencies which otherwise conventionally require arduous years to build. (This is also true of the seven other basic types of accelerated learning given you in this book.) This is especially true in the sciences and in most of the humanities -- and, oddly enough, in athletics, where kinesthetic understanding is involved.

Understanding is the key here These are not memorization techniques. These methods are not especially helpful in courses whose contents are mainly the memorization of things, especially the temporary memorization for tests and then forgetting--which typifies far too many classes and classrooms today. Don't turn to our kind of method if what you want is to memorize something for a test.

I hope that, whatever your schooling has been, that you reading this still do positively value understanding.

Oh, all right, we do have one short-term memorization technique a few pages below, for those of you caught in that type of learning emergency. Look up "STARS" - "Spaced Tape And Replay System" in the index and if you have a tape recorder, find some quick - if only temporary - relief that way. But 99% of this book and program, and rightfully so, is dedicated to finding and building true understanding. --With direct recourse to those further, richer regions of your mind and brain which see patterns, relationships, significance through those relationships. --Direct resource to those further, richer regions of your mind and brain wherein your understandings first appear.

Frame # 3: Psychology's Main Law And How To Use It.

Through behavior's prime "natural law," the Law of Effect, you can access any region of your awareness and bring it into full focus of consciousness where it's immediately useful to you. What is that Law of Effect?

Natural Law--

Natural laws are not the kind of laws which any legislature can pass. They are patterns of events carefully observed in nature, described in a form which allows one to recognize or predict where else such patterns of event will occur, and tested to make certain that these descriptions are accurate. You might or might not have a formal statement yourself for "the law of gravity" in physics, but you are well aware that there is such a law, you know that that law is there regardless of what Congress or any legislature might try to say about it, that the "enforcer" is nature itself rather than some policeman or government regulator. For example, you can pretty well predict even from your informal understanding of the law of gravity, the outcome of walking off of the top of a cliff.

Understand well enough, enough natural laws, and you can not only understand but pretty well predict most of what's going on around you (and within you!). If we knew enough of the actual laws of nature, everything happening to us and around us would make sense, and it would be a lot easier to make things come out in a desirable way. Most of science itself is an ongoing, careful, disciplined search for better understandings of natural law.

The Law of Effect--

Many-volumed texts have been written on the Law of Effect. A simple, informal statement of it, however, will suit most purposes even when closely examined. Here is that simple, informal statement of the Law of Effect:

This simple law can be taken in many directions, just as a simple screwdriver can be used in a lot of different ways. In this frame, though, we will look mainly at:

Let me give an example:

Ever start to have an idea, didn't do anything about it, and eventually forgot all about it?

--We all have done that, hundreds if not thousands of times. Only those ideas that you respond to in some way - telling somebody, or making a note of it, or acting in some way in response to it -- can you remember many, maybe even any, of your passed-over ideas now? Here is the problem with that:

Each time you let an idea slip through without responding in some way to it, you are reinforcing the behavior of being UNcreative. Each time you do tell somebody about it, or note it down somewhere, or in some way respond to it or act upon it, you are reinforcing the behavior of being creative. By reinforcing such behavior, you become more creative.

Likewise, each time you notice something others probably have not noticed, and you let that slide through without response, you are reinforcing the behavior of being UNobservant. --Alas, in fact, too much of the training and schooling we have going on, is training in what not to notice! --And each time you do tell somebody about it, note it down somewhere, or in some way respond to it, or act on it, you are reinforcing the behavior of being observant, of being perceptive. By reinforcing this behavior you make yourself into a more perceptive person, gaining permanent benefits of being more perceptive and observant.

Wherever you are, whoever you are, whatever your circumstances, you can easily do that for yourself. How observant or perceptive or creative a person you are is your choice, your doing, you don't have to have a special program provided to you. There are plenty of good programs which are a real convenience to have, but you don't have to have these, you don't even need anyone's permission, to make yourself as creative and perceptive and observant as you please. It's up to you.

Generally,

The more you can find to reward, even excite, your senses or imagination or pleasure in any body of learning, the more of that learning is reinforced into full focus of conscious awareness and of immediately retrievable memory. Moreover,

Everything suggested above, and most notably everything suggested in the first frame, are ways to find your own reinforcements in what you are learning, thus to learn it more effectively.

OK, so you've got a test coming up tomorrow morning. But let me ask you:

A) What are the things reinforced in you if your main reinforcement is just to get past that test?

B) What are the things reinforced in you if your main reinforcements are from within and from the added values you can gain from these effective ways of focusing your awareness?

Just one thought here - I'm sure you can take this question the rest of the way. How long has most of the learning you've gone through up to this point lasted for you or remained where it's useful to you? Can you relate that to what gets reinforced when your main or only major objective is to get by that next test?

(Here is where, if you happen to have previously acquired the "Freenoting" method taught next chapter, we'd ask for a Freenoting pause because that will bring out so very many astonishing realizations for you. If not now, though, after your immediate learning emergency is over and you've gone into the main part of this book, you might for fun come back to where I've put the three stars or asterisks, freenote there for 10 or so minutes, and discover just how much there really is for you that is revolving around even just this one point! --For now, just paperclip this page for easy return to it after you've read the Freenoting technique.)

Your life is controlled by what is reinforced in it. How much of that you wish to continue to entrust to others, and how much you care to take on for yourself, is up to you. --As is what directions you take this in if you do assume that added control over your own life by developing your own ways of reinforcing yourself.

The hot tip from this, your third frame, then, is almost the same as from your first frame:

Find ways to make what you want to keep, from your learning-efforts, as utterly memorable, as entertaining, as engrossing, as reinforcing as possible. And, from day to day and from point to point in your activities, examine just what it IS in you that's being reinforced at that point....and what you care to do about it.

FRAME FOUR--

You have heard before, that only 5 to 10 percent of the cells in your brain are developed at all. If you factor in the question of how well those cells are developed, the statistic becomes a little more alarming. Some brain cells have been counted with as many as 60,000 connections with other cells - one measure of their development. Most cells in your brain that are developed at all, only have maybe a dozen connections. Which means, it is not true that people's brains are 5 to 10 percent developed. Instead, factoring in the degree of development of such cells as are developed, less than a thousandth of one percent of their brains are developed!

--From which one may reasonably infer, that you, me, and those around you, all of us have some room for improvement. That's not a rueful "boy, do we have a long way to go!," but a hopeful "hey, look how far further we can get!"

Turning it on....

We know very. VERY little as yet about how to turn on more of our endowed natural abilities. Even the little we do now know, though, can make huge differences. However much advantage you find here or in the rest of this book, however, before you play king of the hill remember how much further room there is to go!

Here is a little of what we now already know--

Every serious researcher of the brain or mind has come to agreement on one point from their various observations: that for every awareness you are consciously experiencing, there are hundreds, if not thousands, of other awarenesses which you are unconsciously experiencing.

How have we learned to select and funnel a very few things to conscious awareness and to route everything else to unconscious, is in part by practicality. Most of the time at least, I don't want to put much of my attention into monitoring my liver functions or analyzing in detail why so-and-so four years ago seemed to be in such a hurry. But part of it was by accident of personal history, which may or may not have led you toward the best strategy of selection. --And part of it features aspects of our culture, some of which are useful and some of which lead you away from the best selection as to what goes to conscious attention and what gets dumped into the unconscious. For example,

In our culture, whatever your personal ethics, you perceive some value to "the truth" and to ways of "getting at" truth. Correspondingly, at least some of what reaches your conscious attention bears on truth and its discovery, even if you were an inveterate liar. If that weren't the case, you'd be hopelessly muddled and lost.

But also in our culture, we are all taught - by well-meaning teachers and usually also by parents and bosses - to "pay attention," meaning to look like you're paying attention instead of mulling things over, instead of imagination games which are the child's way of making sense of the world.

So all things considered, it seems possible to develop a better strategy in routing some awarenesses to consciousness and others to unconsciousness, so that more of what's meaningful and/or useful becomes clear to you. There is a little of that further on in this book, but more of:

--How to retrieve the more useful and meaningful parts of what had previously been dumped into unconsciousness.

I hope you interpret that to mean, not only the answers you need for tomorrow morning's test, but whatever it is, in the body of information you are studying, that might in the long run be useful and meaningful to you. Otherwise, you are reinforcing in yourself short-term rote memorization, and post-test forgetting, with all that effort you've burned to date as a result going to waste thereafter.

So part of this frame's suggestion to you is this: in whatever you are now seeking to learn, what is there in it that you would like to have more useful to you, more meaningful (meaning, how it affects other things in your experience), or draws upon skills you would like to build upon? Therein direct at least part of your attention; therein find your reinforcements; and you are on the way.

What's further at stake in retrieval:

Another major thing all serious researchers of brain and/or mind, for more than a century, have come to agreement on from their very different observations, objectives, and backgrounds, is: that every datum, every awareness conscious or unconscious, is still with you in memory. --Still there to be usefully drawn upon.

--Hey! Wasn't this where we came in? The complaint that you can't remember such-and-such on a test "when you need it," yet all that stuff is there somewhere in your memory - more information by far, in fact, than everything in print at a great library or at a major university! There, in your memory, somewhere!....

Some researchers found that out by using an electric needle to stimulate individual tissues and cells in the brain during brain surgery. Others found that out by use of certain experimental drugs. Many others found that out by use of deep hypnosis.

Fortunately, neither electroshock nor drugs nor hypnosis is needed in the slightest, to enhance your ability to learn. My little daughter in that swim meet certainly never resorted to any of these. I have used hypnosis--but not for twenty years. It's far harder to get anything like these effects going with hypnosis than by our present methods.

Simply (1) act in some way upon or respond to what you are learning, to reinforce it and the skills associated with it; and (2) respond more to, and so reinforce, those elements within that learning which relate to being useful to you beyond that test, and/or which draw upon or lead to your further skills and proficiencies. And, in terms of retrieval,

Start interacting with whatever sector of awareness or memory you want to retrieve. Start with the part that's most easily accessed, and by describing in detail to someone or to your tape recorder, find that some leads to more which leads to yet more. (In some sectors the most accessible part may be even pure imagination. Even by focusing and describing what's in your imagination in certain ways, will lead into direct retrieval and experience of what you were searching for.) Worth noting: you've got within you - l'il ol' you! - more insight and understanding than can be found in print in a major university. A remarkably easy way for you to get at that treasure-trove: simply find a way to describe, from your own impressions, recall, imagery, or even imagination, in detail and at length to an audience, thereby putting the Law of Effect at your service in getting to your buried data.

This is, in fact, once you've done it a time or so, so easy to do that the easiest way of learning almost anything is to simply start describing, aloud to an audience, everything you know, think you know, perceive, or otherwise guess, in the context of what you're trying to learn. Describe rapidly, without worrying yet about accuracy, and keep going for awhile. Soon it may become apparent how remarkably much of the subject you actually already know! --And what remains, then, to be learned by whatever method, integrates rapidly around that already-known core.

You don't need any "magic pill;" you don't need any hypnosis.

With or without hypnosis, the fact remains that by the stronger of the periscopic learning methods we introduced in Frame Two and feature later on, and by each of our seven other main types of accelerated learning method, one may easily learn in several days, sometimes in only hours, and with far fuller understanding, proficiencies which otherwise conventionally require arduous years to build. --Especially in the sciences and in most of the humanities - and, oddly enough, athletics, where kinesthetic understanding is involved. Understanding is key here: these are not memorization techniques. The Law of Effect is the second key here. Where do you want to find your reinforcement in the learning you are now pursuing? What do you want, in that learning and in yourself, to get reinforced? The third key: find more ways to interact with what you are trying to learn, so those reinforcements can begin to happen and so that more of what you are trying to learn can find its way to useful consciousness.

So those three keys - going for understanding, choosing where you want the Law of Effect to affect you, and interacting more with what you are seeking to learn --are your third set of "hot tips."

Taken together,

Details may differ, but all these frames are saying pretty much the same thing:

Whatever your educational history and experience--

You are brighter than you think. Much brighter. You have huge untapped potentials. Everyone who has seriously researched brain or mind, whatever their starting point, is in agreement on this important point. Albert Einstein himself, worldwide a household word for "genius," is believed to have been mildly retarded before he started doing some of the things we will teach in this book. You don't have to make yourself a genius if you don't want to, but you don't have to make heavy weather either out of what should be an easy, productive pleasure: effective learning with meaningful understanding.

Good luck on that test of yours tomorrow morning! I hope that beyond that short-term emergency situation, I will see you in the meaningful rest of this book! --Starting with a general explanation introduction and Freenoting, in Chapter Two next...

©1992,1999 by Win Wenger and Project Renaissance - copying, printing, and/or distributing is strictly forbidden without prior consent from the author

To reach Win Wenger, please visit his website at Project Renaissance.

New information on the latest Double Festival is available here.

This version originally published on Anakin's Brain (now Genius By Design)