Some people (including me) generate visual markers without actual visualization. The symptomatic of subliminal reading is very interesting. By following reading speed, eye motion, association creation, reading progress and some other criteria both Anna and me can tell that the student uses visual processing of the text. The student reads fast and retains very well. …
Saccades, skimming and scanning
While the basic reading technique includes saccades, not everybody is sufficiently comfortable with saccading eye motion. There is a large amount of literature of scanning and skimming for specific purposes as complementary to reading. Specifically you can use both skimming and scanning for prereading, but also you can use the characteristic eye motion of skimming …
Superlearning for programmers: databases
Big data of all sorts is a good skill to have. There are many related skills: relational databases, nosql databases, data mining, natural language processing… Healthy control of each of this skills means good salary and many job openings. Personally I worked with several methodologies rather briefly, and while I have some skills and practice …
Comprehension vs retention
Very often I need to explain difference between comprehension and retention. An interesting tool to explain this is Bloom’s taxonomy of cognitive levels. While there is controversy related to validity of the taxonomy and which variation of the taxonomy is correct, I will use it below as a visualization tool. For more detailed explanation of each …
Storytelling and superlearning
I promised myself to write a post about creating marker-ready stories. Instead I am writing an article on storytelling. Storytelling is a great skill I want to master one day. The skill is important from various perspectives as following: All stories teach compassion and self-compassion. Bad things happen all the time. Each of us has …
Mnemonic major system
The mnemonic major system is quite ancient. In its most pure form, each number is a letter and letters form words that can be easily remembered. Ancient alphabets and new champions When we consider the Hebrew alphabet, each letter is a number, and Kabbalah is using this to achieve miraculous deeds. In Hindu there is …
Memory palaces
Memory palace/loci is the oldest method available for memorization, and still it feels like we are very far from using its full potential. If you are interested using memory palace for any specific application, I suggest you to try Anthony Metivier’s books. Anthony has demonstrated how memory palaces can be used virtually for anything with …
Mindmapping
So far I have referenced Tony Buzan books for mindmapping. I am realizing that I need to give my students a short and useful explanation of how to use mindmapping and why. This post is intended to be useful, so I will not go into historical, classical and programmable aspects of mindmapping, but focus on …
Generating rhythm when speedreading
When teaching speedreading we often ask our students to use rhythm. In this post we describe the issue of rhythm in depth. A usual effect of lack of rhythm was summarized by on of our students “First 5 min are easy then getting harder, I slow down and I have to rest”. Usually this means …
PAO memory technique
PAO is one of the most advanced and yet fun to use techniques. PAO means person-action-object. It is commonly used in memory championships. As far as I know (could not find a link) PAO was invented by card-counters. Each card face was associated with personality – Kings, Queens, Princes – and even with specific royalty …