One of the best hacks we try to teach in our courses is harnessing the powers of unconscious. Here I outline three examples of doing this.
Plus one
We have discussed synaesthesia before. We train synaesthesia for making sense in complex environment. Unlike the regular definition of synaesthesia, recently I read a new interpretation: The synesthesias are traits in which a sensory stimulus yields the expected sensory response plus one or more additional sensory responses. We use “this one more additional response” as a basic quality of markers. The visual association to the text, graphical illustration of a formula, emotional subtext of a text – all of them include this bonus response. We generate this “one more additional response” automatically, without effort, using the subliminal powers of our mind. It costs us virtually nothing, yet it doubles our ability to handle information (dual coding principle).
Sublimation
We are no angels. The dark side is as important in our lives as other motivators. We train to sublimate the dark side and generate motivation [strong emotions], creativity [dark humor] and persistence [loss aversion]. Here we take something that is experience as negative by most people, and make it work for our own purposes and to the benefit of the people around us.
Repetitions
We generate as many repetitions of the content retrieval as we can. We do prereading [1] and quests before learning – so that we have initial retrieval of the information. Then we read [2] the information. Then we retrieve -3= it again to generate markers. And again [4] to add details to the markers. And again [5] when we link the markers together. And one more time [6] when we analyse the content we read. When we are done with the critical content, we performed approximately 6 retrievals. This effective frequency of repetitions is a magic number of repetitions that is considered to work. And again, we get these repetitions with little effort if any.
Harnessing the dark powers of our subconscious mind we improve our learning skills. We become more accurate, creative and persistent. Do not underestimate the power of subconscious.
I choose not to discuss sleep-learning of foreign languages, self-hypnoses and other interesting and controversial ways to use your subconscious. I leave the research and experimentation to you.
