Imagination Rehab: Reverse Learning to Break Mental Blocks

How visual learning, absurdity, and reverse memory recall unlock genius.

To look backward for a while is to refresh the eye, to restore it, and to render it the more fit for its prime function of looking forward. — Margaret Fairless Barber

One of the easiest ways to learn something is to learn it backwards.

Over the years, a number of NLP practitioners reported that their “learning disabled” clients, both children and adults, had difficulty making stable, clear imaginary pictures. Somehow, for some reason that nobody knows but more than a few suspect has to do with watching television, these people have either lost or never developed in the first place the ability to consciously create pictures in their heads.

The visual cortex, that part of the occipital portion of the brain that processes images, is absolutely huge when compared to just about any other single-function part of the brain. It’s ten to fifty times larger (depending on how narrowly you define it), for example, than the temporal-region auditory processing areas such as Wernicke’s or Broca’s regions on either side of the head. It occupies most of the back of the head and is huge.

The reason for this is pretty obvious when you think of it. In the one microsecond-long picture — what you see right now when you look up quickly from this article and then back — there are literally billions of individual elements which go to make up that image. For the brain to process this, for us to be able to discriminate between over a million different colors, and to remember these images for years at a time, takes enormous brain processing horsepower.

For this reason, the visual part of the brain is one of the most powerful tools you have available in your mental toolkit. And it’s why if you can see something, or make a picture of it, you’ll remember it long, long, long after the “rote memory” (trying to remember the words by repeating them) part has gone.

Unfortunately, this simple fact about how we learn hasn’t yet made a complete transit from the laboratory to the classroom. Teachers still ask kids to recite things over and over, trying to cram them into those tiny auditory-processing parts of the brain, in order to memorize them. Very little emphasis is put on making pictures, except perhaps by the occasional highly-visual teacher.

So, to learn something, make a picture of it.

Imagine yourself sitting in a classroom, and over your head is one of those thought-balloons like in the comic strips. And in that thought balloon is a picture of you drawing a picture on an easel. If you can make that picture, one of the strongest memories you’ll carry away from this book is that you can learn things when you make a picture of them.

But, as mentioned earlier, many “learning disabled” people — those with “deficits” and “disorders” — have a difficult time making pictures. Their imagination apparatus has become sluggish.

Fortunately, the solution is easy and painless. As with learning to ride a bike or drive a car or read or type or anything else, there is one main thing which will quickly produce proficiency at making mental pictures: practice.

But how does a person know when they’re making good mental pictures? This is where the “backwards” part comes in.

Try this experiment. Find somebody — child or adult — who thinks of themselves as a poor speller. Get a few vocabulary words that they don’t know how to spell and would like to learn. Let’s say that one of those words is, for example, Connecticut. Or for the younger set, perhaps llama.

Now, have them make a mental picture of the map of the state of Connecticut or of a llama. When they say they have the picture, ask them to use a mental paintbrush to paint the word on the picture, one letter at a time, saying the letters out loud as they do it.

Now comes the reality test. If they’re really a “disabled” poor speller, odds are that they made a fuzzy, jiggling, poorly defined picture, and therefore can’t easily pull it back up and read the word off it.

So, ask them to look at the picture and to read the word off of it backwards. In order to do this, they must stabilize their picture. And that exercise of stabilizing the picture, done just a few times (sometimes it takes as many as twenty or thirty repetitions, each time with a different word), teaches them how to make clear, stable, useful pictures.

Memory teacher Harry Lorayne takes this a step further. If you can make a picture, he says, and make it an absurd picture, then you’ll have instantly committed something to memory.

This method, which Aristotle first taught as a way of memorizing speeches (he called it the Loci method, since he used absurd objects mentally placed in his house as speech-item reminders), has been around for a long time.

This is the basis of techniques to remember people’s names: think of Pat running around and patting everybody on the butt, or Loraine having rain pouring out of her hair and over her face, or Bill covered with dollar bills, or Dick…well…with an ice-pick for a nose. (See how hard it is not to imagine things?)

If you need to remember a to-do list, just make each item absurd and then link them together. The store is exploding with loaves of bread popping out of the windows. They’re raining down on the bank down the street. This is causing money to flow out the front door of the bank like a river, right into the front door of the dry-cleaner’s shop.

Pick up the bread, cash the check, pick up the clothes. The list could as easily be twenty items as three.

When NLP practitioners began teaching kids how to dissolve their spelling disability by reading off pictures backwards and practicing making absurd images, many noticed an interesting side effect: the kids became more proficient learners in virtually every area of academics.

They became better and faster learners of life skills. They could follow directions. They didn’t lose things as often. They had learned how to learn.

It’s all about those pictures and harnessing the horsepower evolution or the gods gave us to see and instantly process our world.