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82 • Chapter 4
comfortable with the technique. The subject’s brain became
more efficient—the same as your brain becomes more effi-
cient as you become more expert.
As you became more interested in the subject, did you
talk to other people about your newest interest and get their
input? Perhaps you searched out information to make you
more knowledgeable in the same topic or a related one. The
benefits are quite broad. By talking to others, you exercise
other areas of your brain, such as the intrapersonal or lin-
guistic area. You also might have branched into other areas,
such as the right hemisphere for a touch of imagination to
become more innovative, or perhaps tapped into your spa-
tial abilities.
In this section of the book, we are going to present vari-
ous strategies to process information and learn something
new. Be aware that by practicing these techniques in a learn-
ing situation, you are exercising many regions of the brain.
You might feel rusty in the beginning, but remember that as
you practice, the activity shifts into other areas of the brain,
and you become more efficient as you become more prac-
ticed and relaxed. You wouldn’t want to exercise only one
area of your body, so be sure that you practice all the follow-
ing techniques in various types of learning situations and ex-
ercise all of your brain. Also be sure to discuss and practice
these techniques with your friends and family and exercise
those linguistic, intrapersonal, and interpersonal skills.
INFORMATION PROCESSING
Information processing describes an active method for learn-
ing something new. It is very easy to allow new information
to pass us by. It takes a dynamic analysis of the information
to make sense of it—to move it from short-term to long-term
memory. You must make the new information meaningful
for your brain so that the ideas will become important
enough to make their way to long-term memory. In this
chapter, you will learn how to work with information so
that you can better remember it.
