If you are like most people, you got REALLY excited when you heard about flash cards, mnemonics and memory palaces. Then, after you read a really tedious article, or watched an even more boring video by a Youtube wunderkind, you likely laid the idea aside and went back to the number one way that most students study: sequential review.

Sequential review is simply where you continually go over your notes (or the text book). It gives you a sense of "I'm really putting in the hours" in preparation of an upcoming test. If you take notes during class, have you noticed that your notes are simply a summary of what the teacher said? Certainly, it's not a transcript of what the teacher said-- after all, people stopped taking word-for-word transcripts back in the 1940's when Gregg Shorthand was king.

Either way, you are now making a summary of your class, and it's this summary that you are reviewing over and over. Is it effective as a method to retain the material? No, according to the memory researchers... yet, it's still the number one way students study. All the memory research will show you that what's called retrieval is what works, not review. You are about to learn the fast method of retrieval ever developed.

So, what about memory palaces, spaced repetition, flash cards..even the Gold Method? Each of these methods is in some way using the process of retrieval... actively recalling what you are trying to remember. To use the Memory Palace method, you are asked to visually walk through a known room -- in your mind's eye-- and remember the places and objects in the room. Them once you can do this (which may take some time, you place a BIG-STRANGE-COLORFUL image of what ever you want to remember and place it in the first location. Them you add new objects from your list to other directions. You then, actively go over the locations over and over and over again, actively recalling the sequence.

There are several limitations to this method. First, you have to have a pretty big room to remember 3000 words in a new language. Second, the method may work for visual objects (nouns) and visual activities, but one severe limitation is that no one uses a mind palace for grammar points, or even to recite long poems verbatim. We are going to show you how to do both.. with little or no training. You'll be able to recite entire sentences, poems, class notes... even foreign language sentences...immediately.

But, first, a story:

Dr. B. F. Skinner, the famous Harvard University professor, practically rewrote the best best methods for training animals... and, it revolutionized everything from dog training, to horse riding. The key thing that he discovered was that feedback had to be given to the animal within one second of them responding. Perhaps the goal was to get a pigeon to peck a blue square, but not the red circle. Skinner discovered that any movement of the bird toward the blue square-- if it was reinforced-- would begin to become more frequent. In a matter of minutes, a pigeon could be trained to do very complex sequences of behaviors... even play ping-pong with another pigeon. The key was immediate feedback.

During the midst of his famous discoveries, Skinner's daughter (now Dr. Julie Vargas, the president of his foundation) was in the fourth grade. She was tasked with having to recite a lengthy poem and was struggling, using the "read it over and over" method that so many of us use. Skinner had a different method. he wrote the entire poem on a chalkboard and had his daughter stand in front of it and simply read it out out loud. She completed reading the poem out loud, and that's when the magic happened.

At that point, Skinner erased a few of the words... let's say it was every 7th word. She again, stood, and simply read the poem out loud. This time, when she came to an erased word, she kept reading, filling in the word from memory. This process was repeated over and over, until all the erased. The little girl could recite the entire poem.

UPDATE: One of our secretaries had fulfilled a dream of becoming a lead singer for a local band. The problem? She had 2 weeks to learn the band's 40 original songs-- by heart-- she was not allowed to use notes on stage. We taught her this method... which we called VANISH ( we are vanishing the word-stimulus). The result? She was able to go on stage and perform all the songs from memory.

She used WORD to make sheets of vanished words... we decided to make it 1000 times easier by making a computer program. It's available to all our PRO MEMBER's (along with all our other learning software) for only $40 a year as of this writing. The VANISH software was born, and now, you can recite foreign language sentences, poems, computer software code and formulas, without any training.

Recently, researchers at the University of trained pigeons to read XRays of mamograms. Normally, it takes a doctor years of training to get to the 85% mark, it took the pigeons 2 weeks. are pigeons some kind of super-bird? No, they are nothing special. but, the training method that was used was based on Skinner's discoveries. We've developed software that does this, plus some of our own findings, that makes learning to read a foreign language, understand and speak much easier. it's called ATTENTION POINT LEARNING and you can read about it on our other blog articles.

Background article: BLOG: Personal Fluency