Following up on my post from yesterday, reporting that my percentile had dropped a great deal - I now know why. What the "daily spark" does is throws up a random level of a random activity at you... and in my case, it was level 4 of an activity I'd never even attempted at level 1! So my percentile in this is 8%, which dramatically drops my overall percentile. So I'm going to take two courses of action from this: practice that particular activity until I am up to level 4 and can raise my percentile to at least 75%; and in future, only attempt the daily spark if it is an activity and level I am at least close to!
02 July, 2015
New Direction
As much as I do love the SuperLearning course, and believe in its effectiveness, I've decided to take a step away from it for now. Rather than following it to the letter, I've decided to keep to its basic principles and teachings, but find my own activities to get me there instead. Foolish? Perhaps. But I believe this will be more sustainable. So for now, I'm going to focus on two things:
The website Brain HQ for the memory and "brain training" aspects; and the book Breakthrough Rapid Reading to learn to speedread.
I'll report back on how that works out for me...
The website Brain HQ for the memory and "brain training" aspects; and the book Breakthrough Rapid Reading to learn to speedread.
I'll report back on how that works out for me...
01 July, 2015
Week 1 Day 3
Brain HQ
My percentile has gone down since yesterday... but that actually happened after I did miserably at the "Daily Spark" exercise, so not entirely sure what it says about anything.
SuperLearning
Well... I really want to do the Week 1 suggested exercises... and I actually have an opportunity to do them today... but I just can't seem to motivate myself to do it. Not good enough!!! I need to make myself do this! I am telling myself that Brain HQ is better than nothing - and I do believe that to be true - but there is a lot covered by the SuperLearner exercises that ISN'T covered by Brain HQ, too. Aaaaaaand it happens to be the exercises I am least fond of. But I need to do them. Grrrrrrrr need motivation / to force myself into it.
Will see what happens between now and the next blog post.
My percentile has gone down since yesterday... but that actually happened after I did miserably at the "Daily Spark" exercise, so not entirely sure what it says about anything.
SuperLearning
Well... I really want to do the Week 1 suggested exercises... and I actually have an opportunity to do them today... but I just can't seem to motivate myself to do it. Not good enough!!! I need to make myself do this! I am telling myself that Brain HQ is better than nothing - and I do believe that to be true - but there is a lot covered by the SuperLearner exercises that ISN'T covered by Brain HQ, too. Aaaaaaand it happens to be the exercises I am least fond of. But I need to do them. Grrrrrrrr need motivation / to force myself into it.
Will see what happens between now and the next blog post.
Week 1 Day 2
Brain HQ
30 mins of Brain HQ was all I managed to fit in today - 5 mins in the morning and the other 25 mins I completed just after midnight.
Here's where I'm at now:
It's an improvement on yesterday, and I'm definitely happy with that. When playing "Right Turn", during my second go-through I found that it just sort of "clicked", and that relying mostly on "gut instinct" / intuition, I could get them mostly right... but I could also feel myself much more easily able to rotate the images in my mind's eye. Unfortunately I didn't seem to carry this through to the third go-through... but it's a start!
I also watched the first episode of "Redesign My Brain" Series One. This is an excellent show, and highly relevant to the SuperLearner course. It even features the Australian memory champion Tansel Ali (successfully) teaching Todd Sampson how to memorise a deck of cards using the memory palace technique. The guy who guides Todd to improve his cognitive functioning is also a co-founder of Brain HQ.
30 mins of Brain HQ was all I managed to fit in today - 5 mins in the morning and the other 25 mins I completed just after midnight.
Here's where I'm at now:
It's an improvement on yesterday, and I'm definitely happy with that. When playing "Right Turn", during my second go-through I found that it just sort of "clicked", and that relying mostly on "gut instinct" / intuition, I could get them mostly right... but I could also feel myself much more easily able to rotate the images in my mind's eye. Unfortunately I didn't seem to carry this through to the third go-through... but it's a start!
I also watched the first episode of "Redesign My Brain" Series One. This is an excellent show, and highly relevant to the SuperLearner course. It even features the Australian memory champion Tansel Ali (successfully) teaching Todd Sampson how to memorise a deck of cards using the memory palace technique. The guy who guides Todd to improve his cognitive functioning is also a co-founder of Brain HQ.
29 June, 2015
Week 1 Day 1 (again)
Ok... is this my second or third attempt to really, properly start this SuperLearning thing? Third, I think. Let's go with "third time's a charm".
So here's how today went:
Brain HQ
I stumbled across http://www.brainhq.com/ a couple of days ago, and signed up for it yesterday - just for one month, to try it out. I'm pretty confident that at the end of the month I'll be signing up for another 12!!! This is really awesome stuff, really fun, and once the system figured out where I'm at, it has the right level of "pushing the limits" of my abilities. Many (if not all!) of the activities I believe to be HUGELY beneficial for anyone taking the SuperLearner course (I plan to write a separate post on this).
I used this as a warm-up today, prior to getting into the SuperLearner activities. Found myself automatically using the memory techniques I have learnt in the SuperLearner course, most noticeably with "Memory Grid". There are a certain number of cards (depending on your level) laid out in a random pattern, something like this:
It's like a standard game of memory, except auditory. When you click on a card, you hear a syllable spoken. For each syllable, there are two cards that "match" - i.e. the same syllable is spoken for two cards. Your job is to click on matching pairs in as few clicks as possible. I found this incredibly easy - and here's how: I simply associated each syllable with a word (some of them actually were words, like "lab"). I then clicked on the first half of the cards from left to right along the screen, and as I did so, created a story, and an animation of it, in my mind. So it might be something like "Matt kissing my rib in the lab, and his mother naging him about the dusty rug". That's 6 syllables remembered very easily. Then I go through and click the other half of the cards, one at a time, and match each to its corresponding card in the first half.
I'm not sure if it's by design that if going in order from left to right, the first cards you click on don't contain any pairs amongst them. Either way, I believe this strategy would still work even if the cards were more mixed.
The other games I played included: Juggle Factor; Right Turn; and Target Tracker.
I did a few exercises yesterday also: Mind's Eye; and Sound Sweeps.
Here is where I'm sitting today: 94th percentile overall; 89th percentile for my age. Note that I'm in the 99th percentile for memory!!!
Visual Short Term Memory Training
Started with same settings that worked for me last time. 400 pixels, 6 symbols, intermediate. Did that for about 2.5 mins, got bored. Moved up to 7 symbols.
Did terribly at that ~3 times, then realised I need to focus more in the centre of the space - rather than allowing my eyes to dart around trying to focus on the various letters, and doing so for way longer than necessary, too! Unfortunately this is easier said than done. Need to work on this - lots. (i.e. focussing on the centre of a saccade, while taking in everything within it).
Stayed on this level for around 4 mins. What I found most difficult, actually, was figuring out where to focus my eyes in time - not knowing precisely where on the screen the box appears. If the box appeared first, blank, then the letters after a short delay, that would make it an awful lot easier to focus in the centre. This is something that wouldn't be a problem when speed reading, of course.
Practice Linking Markers
I looked at this properly for the first time today, and was about to attempt it... then realised that I really didn't feel able to retain anything right at that moment. I may come back to this and the other exercises later today (split it up throughout the day), or perhaps I just need to do less in one day, until I become more used to it? We shall see.
So here's how today went:
Brain HQ
I stumbled across http://www.brainhq.com/ a couple of days ago, and signed up for it yesterday - just for one month, to try it out. I'm pretty confident that at the end of the month I'll be signing up for another 12!!! This is really awesome stuff, really fun, and once the system figured out where I'm at, it has the right level of "pushing the limits" of my abilities. Many (if not all!) of the activities I believe to be HUGELY beneficial for anyone taking the SuperLearner course (I plan to write a separate post on this).
I used this as a warm-up today, prior to getting into the SuperLearner activities. Found myself automatically using the memory techniques I have learnt in the SuperLearner course, most noticeably with "Memory Grid". There are a certain number of cards (depending on your level) laid out in a random pattern, something like this:
It's like a standard game of memory, except auditory. When you click on a card, you hear a syllable spoken. For each syllable, there are two cards that "match" - i.e. the same syllable is spoken for two cards. Your job is to click on matching pairs in as few clicks as possible. I found this incredibly easy - and here's how: I simply associated each syllable with a word (some of them actually were words, like "lab"). I then clicked on the first half of the cards from left to right along the screen, and as I did so, created a story, and an animation of it, in my mind. So it might be something like "Matt kissing my rib in the lab, and his mother naging him about the dusty rug". That's 6 syllables remembered very easily. Then I go through and click the other half of the cards, one at a time, and match each to its corresponding card in the first half.
I'm not sure if it's by design that if going in order from left to right, the first cards you click on don't contain any pairs amongst them. Either way, I believe this strategy would still work even if the cards were more mixed.
The other games I played included: Juggle Factor; Right Turn; and Target Tracker.
I did a few exercises yesterday also: Mind's Eye; and Sound Sweeps.
Here is where I'm sitting today: 94th percentile overall; 89th percentile for my age. Note that I'm in the 99th percentile for memory!!!
Visual Short Term Memory Training
Started with same settings that worked for me last time. 400 pixels, 6 symbols, intermediate. Did that for about 2.5 mins, got bored. Moved up to 7 symbols.
Did terribly at that ~3 times, then realised I need to focus more in the centre of the space - rather than allowing my eyes to dart around trying to focus on the various letters, and doing so for way longer than necessary, too! Unfortunately this is easier said than done. Need to work on this - lots. (i.e. focussing on the centre of a saccade, while taking in everything within it).
Stayed on this level for around 4 mins. What I found most difficult, actually, was figuring out where to focus my eyes in time - not knowing precisely where on the screen the box appears. If the box appeared first, blank, then the letters after a short delay, that would make it an awful lot easier to focus in the centre. This is something that wouldn't be a problem when speed reading, of course.
Practice Linking Markers
I looked at this properly for the first time today, and was about to attempt it... then realised that I really didn't feel able to retain anything right at that moment. I may come back to this and the other exercises later today (split it up throughout the day), or perhaps I just need to do less in one day, until I become more used to it? We shall see.
24 June, 2015
Week 1 Day 3
Visual Short Term Memory Training
These are the settings that I found work best for me right now, in terms of being doable while offering a decent level of challenge:
These are the settings that I found work best for me right now, in terms of being doable while offering a decent level of challenge:
Focus Visualisation
To start with, I tried using a photo of my family that I happen to have on my desk, taken in front of a "green screen" at Seaworld last year, the background filled in with a significant amount of detail. I tried this for around 4 minutes, but was getting nowhere. I suspect two reasons for this:
- The photo was TOO personal - I kept filling in the details of my family members' faces as I expect them to look (what I normally see in my mind's eye when I think of them), rather than as they actually are in the photo.
- The ridiculous amount of detail - with essentially no real context (fake images photoshopped in behind a real image) was probably just a really bad pick to start with.
I then used the following image, and spent around 3 minutes on it at which point my eyes started to hurt too much so I left it there.
I found I had much more success with this image. At first I wasn't really sure what to do with it... but then as I started focussing on the different areas of the image, I found myself creating links to my existing memories - e.g. the close-up grass in the bottom right corner reminds me of the hills the Teletubbies would roll down; the tree-surrounded, grassed area higher up on the right reminded my of the cemetery where my grandfather is buried (not actually sure why - it doesn't actually look a lot like it); the cloud at the top left became a velociraptor; the snippet of ocean on the left associated with Robbie Williams singing "Beyond the Sea"; the tree in the centre made me think of a tree in a TV ad for ancestry.com.au.
I think the next step could have been to link these together into a short story or animation, but it didn't actually occur to me to do that until writing this.
Create Visual Markers for Abstract Stuff
Did this for around 5 minutes, although that did include a bit of figuring out what it was I was supposed to actually be doing. It seemed obvious at first, but then I started wondering what this exercise was training. Reading any word that I know the meaning of, no matter how abstract it is, I have no trouble creating a vivid image in my mind to represent it. For example "assail" - I immediately imagine a guy hitting a woman (no idea why those genders) with the mast and sail from a ship. So I'm not sure whether I am particularly natural at creating markers for abstract words, or missing the point of this exercise? I guess even if I find it easy already, I can still improve this skill with practice.
17 June, 2015
The Easy Way Out
Today I spent some time recording a video course that I am in the process of creating. While trying to remember what it was I want to talk about in each section, I knew that it would be a perfect opportunity to practice creating and using markers. The thing was though, I was trying to get through the course creation in as short a time as possible (well, as short as possible while still producing a quality product, that is), and as much as I am sold on the advantages of using markers... I'm nowhere near proficient with creating or using them yet... which means that it just takes too long to justify use in situations like the one I was in today.
This made me realise just how much of a commitment will be needed for me to make this change in my life. Because that's what it is - it's a major change to the way that I live my life, the way that I operate on a daily basis. It's all too easy to "take the easy way out" - to do what I've always done, because it's quick and nasty and it works... and I'm so very well practiced at it. The Art of Memory is the road less traveled for a reason - it's a way of life contrary to the way we have experienced thus far, and an awful lot of unlearning, learning, time, and commitment is needed to travel that road to a more productive and enjoyable life.
This made me realise just how much of a commitment will be needed for me to make this change in my life. Because that's what it is - it's a major change to the way that I live my life, the way that I operate on a daily basis. It's all too easy to "take the easy way out" - to do what I've always done, because it's quick and nasty and it works... and I'm so very well practiced at it. The Art of Memory is the road less traveled for a reason - it's a way of life contrary to the way we have experienced thus far, and an awful lot of unlearning, learning, time, and commitment is needed to travel that road to a more productive and enjoyable life.
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