3. Learning is Fueled by Emotion

No one forgets their first kiss. Why? It’s because your first kiss is a highly emotional experience. Remember where you were when you first saw the world trade center hit on September 11th? Almost everyone does. Emotional experiences are powerfully imprinted in our minds. On the flip side, think about the subject that bores you most. How easy is it for you to remember it? Say you have no interest in history. Contrast how much you remember from your history reading with how much you remember from a magazine article on something that really interests you.

We don’t tend to think of learning as an emotional experience, but it is. Emotion has a powerful influence on learning. For the most part, we study things that don’t have much emotional significance to us, and so we only experience the negative consequences of the relationship between emotion and learning. Namely, that learning is hard and takes a lot of work (because we're bored and what we're learning isn't emotionally significant to us). But learning doesn’t have to be hard, and putting our emotions to work can help us learn more effectively and easily.

How do you make physics or social studies or tax codes emotionally charged? For one thing, simply will yourself to be emotionally engaged. Take a minute and focus in on why your are learning what you are learning. Presumably it’s to achieve some goal. Think about the goal and the positive emotions that will be associated with achieving it. The key is to make yourself really believe that what you are studying is important. Studies have shown that just focusing on the importance of the material in front of you (which attaches emotional significance to it) can drastically improve rates of retention.

An even more powerful way to emotionally engage with material that you’re studying is to use visualization techniques. Maximizing Memory is all about how to do this. Make sure to fuel your visualization with emotionally significant images, and to try to really experience the mental movies you’ll be building with as much feeling as possible.