Once more, with feeling

Bored.  That is your brain’s way of telling you that what you are doing is not important.  Your brain is not going to bother much with remembering things that are not important. 

If you study while you are bored, you are wasting time.

The more important something is to you, the better your brain will remember it.  The trouble with a lot of what you have to study it that it is not important to you at the time you have to study it.  It may be really important to you when you have to take a test on it.  But that’s later. 

Remember all that semi-spiritual advice about living in the present?  Most of your brain does that naturally, even without advice.   So it doesn’t care about what it going to be important to you later.   You have probably noticed this.

But what can you do about that part of your brain that does look at the future?  The part that tells you that if you don’t study now, you will really wish you had sometime later. 

That’s the part we call the Vulcan.  It is not very emotional.  But emotions are what your brain uses to know what it important.  You get emotional about things that are important to you.  You remember things you get emotional about.  Can you get emotional about studying?

Go ahead and say NO.  NO!  NO! NO!  Put in a few four letter words if you fee like it.  Shout.  Pound on the table.  Pace the floor.  What kind of useless drivel is that?  Get emotional about something as dull as studying? 

The key, of course, is that you can fake it.  You handle that all the time.  You watch a television show.  It shows you how to fake emotion.   There really is no giant tomato about to eat New York.  You never thought there was.  But the show was exciting.  And you remember it better than you remember what you read in your textbook.

How do you fake it without help from Hollywood?   Use the news nuance:  Pick the bad guys.  Pick on the bad guys.  Take a position.  Any position. 

Decide to be against something in the assignment. 

It shouldn’t be in the assignment.

You think somebody just made it up. 

Maybe it is true, but it ought not to be.

Or take the opposite position.

Or make fun of something in the assignment.

You don’t have to believe those positions, of course.  You didn’t believe the giant tomatoes, either.  Just take a position and defend it.  Or ridicule the opposition.  

And don't just sit there. Stand up. Walk around.  Pound the table.  Talk out loud.  Practice for a speech. Wave your hands.  Mark gestures.  See that your face has a fitting expression. 

If you don’t find this easy, keep trying.  Faking it is one of those skills that develops as you get older.  You may have noticed that, too.

Your Empath

Study Skills Ratem

Memorize this!

Your Vulcan

If you have made a story, dramatize it.  Act out.  Be theatrical.
Stories
Your Storyboarder

Feeling, Team Study
 

Make a commercial
Audio

Compassionate
Creative
Humor, Sense of
Imaginative
Playful
Writer, Good