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Appendices from the Memletics Manual

Additional information referred to from the chapters in the book.

This section contains some further content and examples. The additional content includes:

• Tips for learning Memletics
• Association exercise

Tips for learning Memletics

Memletics is a system for learning more effectively, however it also takes time to learn how use all the parts of Memletics together. In this section I’ll give you some pointers to help get your Memletic training program underway.

My first suggestion is to learn Memletics with another learning goal. As you know I developed Memletics out of my flight training, however flying is just one way to learn Memletics. You may want to try applying Memletics to some topics that help your work or career. Communication, presentation or negotiation skills are often helpful in a wide variety of areas. You may want to apply Memletics to a recreational activity, such as sailing, photography or orienteering. You can apply many of the topics to sports. School and college students can find many opportunities to apply Memletics to their studies. The key point is that Memletics is far easier to learn if you are applying it to a personal learning goal.

If you want some ideas on learning programs to kick off your Memletic training, review the Overview chapter. In this chapter I outline many activities in which you could learn and apply Memletics.

Another suggestion I have is to get a hold of the Memletic Learning Checklist. This checklist is available from the website(. It contains a few pages of notes that you can review as you start each learning objective. This checklist covers many of the points below.

Let’s look at some more specific details on learning the various parts of Memletics.

• Memletic State. You can apply some parts of Memletic state immediately before or during a learning activity. Other parts may take weeks or months to develop. I suggest you review each part of Memletic State and decide the priority areas you need to work on. If you find there are many, you may want to select only the key areas to work on in the beginning. Don’t go out and change your diet, change your sleeping habits, start an exercise regime, stop smoking, start mediation, start Neurobics and do a stress reduction course all in the first week, while also starting a challenging learning goal! Start small, address a few areas at a time and build on successes.
• Memletic Process. Use the checklist to guide you through each of the steps. Use the “quantity not quantity” approach. Don’t worry about trying to follow every step to the letter. Instead, understand the basic principles and use them a lot! Over time you can integrate more of the ideas to further improve your learning.
• Memletic Techniques. Use the technique selection matrix in the Process chapter to select the techniques that may be relevant for each lesson you undertake. Don’t try to use them all. Try a few at the start and see which ones work for you. Keep in mind your preferred styles when choosing the techniques too.
• Memletic Styles. Do the style questionnaire to understand your current learning styles. Review the descriptions of your strongest and weakest styles, and then decide on a few ways to expand both of those areas. Remember to start small. You have plenty of time to try the other areas!
• Memletic Approach. Spend more time in this part as you begin the course. As your goals have a big impact on your motivation, spend some time exploring those goals using visualization and scripting. Get a hold of the “Learn To Fly guide” even if you are not learning to fly. It gives you an idea of some of the items to consider during this phase.
• Challenges. Don’t try to learn or memorize the entire challenges chapter. Instead, keep in mind some of the symptoms of common challenges. If you feel you are having some difficulties in those areas, go back into that chapter and see if you can find material that is relevant. If not, get on the website and talk to others.

While you may feel you are training alone, keep in mind that you also have the Memletics website where you can discuss your challenges and successes with others.

Above all, keep in mind that improving your Memletic fitness takes time. It’s like physical fitness. You can’t go from a long period of unfitness to running a marathon without time, effort and perseverance. The good news is that while your fitness improves, you notice the positive benefits early in your training. Enjoy them and use them as motivation to keep going on your journey.

Association exercise

I reference this exercise from the Memletic Techniques chapter. It proves the power of association. It should take less than 15 minutes.

Let’s take a list of fifteen household items. Look at the list and try to memorize all the items in the order I present them (across then down). Do this for two minutes, then cover the list and write down as many as you can remember. No peeking!

What score did you get? If you scored fifteen right, well done. If not, let’s try a simple way to make sure you remember all fifteen items.

I’m going to present fifteen scenarios for you to visualize. Spend twenty seconds on each, before progressing to the next. Close your eyes, and imagine what the scenario would look like. Be creative! Not only see, but think of what it would sound like, smell like, maybe even taste like. Let’s start.

Visualize a pencil that is three feet long, standing in a microwave oven. Not a normal microwave oven, but an oven that’s obviously made for microwaving pencils. It’s four feet tall, very narrow, and has buttons for “light pencil,” “medium pencil” and “dark pencil.” See yourself putting this pencil in, pushing the buttons (hear the “beep” as you push them), wait a moment, then take out your “cooked” pencil. Take a bite.

See a normal lamp stand, but instead of a light bulb there is a tiny microwave oven. The light comes from the light inside the microwave oven. It doesn’t work well. Turn the light on and off a few times, and every time you do, it beeps at you.

This lamp you were looking at just grew arms and legs, walked across the living room, and sat down in your favorite chair. You are yelling at the lamp, telling it to get off the chair. “Furniture is not allowed on the furniture!” you yell. It doesn’t get off and instead sulks and looks insulted.

You feel a tap on the shoulder, and turn around and there is the TV, also with arms and legs, yelling at you to leave the lamp alone! There is a picture of Darth Vader on the screen, and then the TV pulls out from behind it a light saber and starts swinging it around. Hear the sound like in the Star Wars movie, and smell the ozone.

You realize its time to fight, and pull from behind you a… fork that’s about the same size as a light saber. You fight for a while but realize it’s not doing you much good because the end of the fork keeps getting sliced off. It’s getting shorter and shorter. You can feel the heat of the light saber getting closer and closer.

The TV is about to slice you up when there is an almighty crash! You open your eyes and through the ceiling has fallen a huge tube of Colgate toothpaste. It’s fallen right on the TV! You prod the toothpaste tube with the end of your fork and yes, toothpaste comes out (is it regular or minty gel?).

You walk around the toothpaste tube and see a clock hanging there. But this is no ordinary clock. It’s wired up to the toothpaste tube and it looks like a… toothpaste bomb! The clock is ticking (hear it), and it’s almost twelve o’clock! You start to run for your life.

But there is a buzz at your front door. It’s the pizza man (smell that pizza). The pizza man is also a bomb-disposal expert. He dumps the pizza at the front door, rushes in and disarms the bomb.

The pizza looks so good at the front door you decide to use it as a doormat. You walk in and out of your, feeling the pizza under your feet. Mmmm it still smells good.

You are about to close the door when a big apple rolls in the front door and squashes the pizza. This is a huge apple, and it barely fits through the door. The pizza sticks to the apple, and it rolls around for a while. Every time the pizza goes underneath, it squishes. The pizza doesn’t smell so good any more.

You decide to go and clean up at the kitchen sink. As you turn the tap on something weird happens. Instead of water coming out, the tap seems to draw the apple (sitting on the floor) towards it. The tap draws the apple all the way to it and then sucks it in. The apple shrinks as it goes in, and the tap expands like a snake eating a rat. The tap is squeaking and rattling, and then “plop,” the apple is gone.

But wait. What’s that sound coming from the tap? It sounds like… like barking? Suddenly hundreds of miniature dogs come streaming out of the tap. You manage to turn the tap off and they stop, but you still have one hundred or so tiny dogs running around the sink, barking and yapping.

The dogs make such a noise they wake grandma up. She comes over to the sink, sees all the dogs, and then faints. But instead of fainting on the floor, she faints on the ceiling. You try jumping up to pull her down, but you can’t reach.

At that point your study desk comes into the kitchen. It’s floating! You jump up on top, and it floats up close to the ceiling. As grandma wakes up, she falls a small way onto the desk. It then floats back down to the ground.

This is a crazy list, so let’s call it our “Crazy List.” How do you write a crazy list? Obviously with a crazy pencil! Imagine trying to write the list with a pencil that is laughing its head off. This pencil is really loony!

Turn to the next page to start the review…

Review

Review your associations by completing the missing words…

You would write a crazy list with a crazy _____________

If you were going to cook one of these you would put it in a ________________, which is also the light bulb for a _______________, which sits in your favorite ______________ so you yell at it until the ________________ taps you on the shoulder. It’s upset. It pulls out a light saber so you have no choice but to pull out your trusty _____________. It doesn’t do you much good and you are about to be sliced up but a giant ________________ tube falls through the ceiling. Unfortunately, the tube is also a bomb because it has a ____________ ticking on the other side. Luckily, the ____________ man turns up and he happens to be a bomb disposal expert, but he drops what he was delivering at the front door. It looks so good there you decide to use it as a ___________, until it is squished by a giant ________________ rolling through the front door. No problem, it’s sucked away when you turn the ____________ on at the kitchen sink, but before you can turn it off, miniature ___________ come out and into your sink. These wake up _________________. She sees these, faints and falls to the ceiling. You can get her down because you happen to have a floating ________________.

Turn to the next page to test your recall…

Check

Now close your eyes and review this whole crazy story in your mind. As each item from the list comes into your mind, write it down and continue with the story in your mind.
 

How did you go? If you missed any, review the scenes that link the items on either side. While this may seem a cumbersome way to memorize a list, with some practice you can create these stories quickly. You now also have a way to memorize any list with great accuracy!

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