Visualisation

You might remember that earlier on in the course we briefly touched on something called 'visualisation'. Visualisation is a technique used by top sportsmen and women, entertainers, businessmen and many other successful people. Often, top people, those who have reached the top of their career ladder will pay specialist coaches thousands of pounds to help them learn positive visualisation techniques.

In simple terms visualisation can enable you to mentally experience the answer is to your questions during a study session, this will help your understanding and memory.

You can start to learn about visualisation here by simply reading the next couple of pages (there is more about visualisation in Part-Two Online).

Mental experience can be as powerful as actual, physical experience - you only have to think about some of the dreams or nightmares that you have had to recognise that your brain doesn't always differentiate between real and imagined experiences.

Visualisation taps in to the power of your brain to help the memory process to work better.

Using visualisation when answering questions

No rocket science here! Just plain common sense...

When you read about something, actively visualising the scene, as if watching a film, or imagining that you are actually there helps your brain to assimilate the information. Visualisation is just like day-dreaming; you are mentally trying things out. You can do this as you read some of your multiple-choice questions, especially those that provide situations that are easy to visualise such as the driving or teaching.

Most people find it easier to do this if they look up, close their eyes, sit back, relax, and allow a picture of the scene to form in their mind's eye.

You may choose to do this from different points of view.

For example, you could view the scene as the driver of a car, or as an observer looking at the scene from outside the car.

You can then add a sound track, a commentary to what you see, picking out the most important points and asking yourself questions about the most appropriate course of action to take.

As you do this, it is a good idea to check your feelings as to what would be the right thing to do. By doing this you can explore the situation in your mind as if you were actually there.

The visualisation method will perhaps work with more questions than you might at first think.

Not just the obvious questions

The visualisation method is not only useful for questions about driving, it will help with any question that has some 'active' content. Consider the following example for a moment...

To use visualisation to answer this question you would perhaps spend a moment thinking of a time when you were really motivated to learn something. What was it like?

Now keeping in that frame of thought, notice how it felt to learn - and notice how you felt when you 'look ahead'

Then check the situation against the answers you are given to determine which one seems most correct. You may well find that the answers you feel most confident about look right, sound right and feel right.

Next: A simple visualisation exercise...