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Using Your Internal Space |
Everyone represents the information that they use in a spatial way, although few people are explicitly aware of this. Being aware of these spatial representations, we can make use of them to get our brains to behave in the way we would like.
Here are some ways to play with the way you organise this internal space.
Now think about things that you've seen but didn't completely understand,
such as a recent lecture. Where do you locate things of this kind? (It's
almost certainly a different place.)
Now take an idea that you don't completely understand, and imagine that it's connected to you by a big piece of elastic. Push it from the place where you keep things you don't understand further and further away from you; and keep doing this until it's infinitely far away. The elastic is really stretched, right? Now let it rebound to the other place, the place where you keep things you really understand well.
Does this change how well you understand the idea? Check it out next time you review that idea.
Now when you sit in class, consider the line between you and the
lecturer. Does it intersect one of these places? What do you think that
means? If you sit in different places in different classes, does the line
intersect spaces where you keep different things?
Now take the situation as you would like it to be. Make a vivid
mental image of this too, and turn it into another icon. Where is this
icon spatially?
Now imagine a large wheel that fills the space between the two icons, so that they are on opposite sides at the rim. Imagine the wheel beginning to spin slowly, so that the icons start to spin around each other on the rim. Imagine the wheel gathering speed, until its rim is a blur and you can't see the icons any more.
Repeat this a few times. After a few days, see if your approach to the
situation hasn't changed.
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