Programming Your Brain for Successful Learning in Nursing

For starters, we must remember that as humans we are VERY visual creatures. Our visual system (at least for a great majority of us) is our main means of finding our way around and gaining input for our brain to understand things in the world. With this in mind we will continue.

Language developed much more recently than our visual system. For this reason, we have to remember to use language for what it is and no more. It is a set of rules and instructions with a primary purpose of conveying information to other members of our species. It is NOT the optimal way for us (in our own mind) to understand things. This can be pretty difficult though since we are basically taught that language is the end of all means when attempting to understand material presented to us. Textbooks provide us with those giant paragraphs of mumbo jumbo that we are expected to be able to recall word for word on our exams. We must remember that words themselves have no meaning, only the objects, ideas, thoughts, and bits of reality these words describe actually mean something. We can rewrite/rephrase/recognitate most anything, in our own words, and still have nearly the same meaning as our textbook.

For example, let us start with anemia. This word basically means a decreased amount of red blood cells in the body. The world itself, means nothing. Only when put into context does it really have importance.

So let's say your patient has this, um, anemia. How can we make this useful to ourselves? Obviously the patient won't have a tattoo of the word "anemia" on his or her chest, so we really need to visualize what this means in a way we can remember it.

Try to close your eyes and picture a vial of blood. In its reddish glory we picture that vial moving around in our hand, with the little droplets adhering to the walls of the vials, and slowly draining back into the main puddle at the bottom. Make note of how red this blood is in your mind. Now picture this blood being from an anemic person. No, in real life, it will look the same, we know that, but that's boring and does not help us. But since we did get this blood from an anemic patient, maybe we should make it different, at least in our mind. Picture it being more of a pink, maybe a little clearer... you know, since it has less of those oxygen shuttling red blood cells in it. Now picture yourself drawing anemia on that vial with a nice yellow marker.

Since most people probably know what anemia is, this may not seem fantastic, but for those who didn't, we have provided a great visual representation of what anemia is, one much easier to remember than simply the word itself. We have created a visual hook for the word. This is the most elementary step in using visualization in learning.

Let us take this a step farther. Let us use... sickle cell anemia. That terrible illness that us whiter folk have had to mercy to escape. Again, this is a pretty common illness (knowledge wise) that most of us have heard of, yet let's use our little trick to make it stick (unfortunately these little abnormal cells do tend to stick).

Picture a sickle shaped red blood cell. I suppose we could use a mining pick for an example. Visualize yourself picking up a mining pick, but instead of a metal sickle on the end, you have a distorted red blood cell with a handle sticking out of it! Now close your eyes and think of the problems this would cause if some of your red blood cells were shaped like this little tool. Obviously it would not flow well in your blood vessels, I mean it has two sharp edges. It would also more than likely get clogged in areas were sharp bends and turns and the like are located in your body (think joints). Man that stuff would hurt if those little things got jammed up in our joints and caused a giant red blood cell traffic jam. Don't forget the other organs that have teeny tiny vessels also! (lungs, spleen, etc). If you really want to get creative and remember that this illness affects the African American population, just picture that sickle being driven into a giant piece of coal, since coal is black. (no racism intended).

Look at that! You have basically figured out a few of the basic problems that people with this disease suffer from. Now read on through your textbook and pride yourself in figuring out what happens with the disease without even reading the symptom list, and you'll understand how important this visualization is. Just by knowing that these cells are basically sharp and sticky, you can figure out the problems they cause without even reading on the entire disease or looking up its symptoms

I know that these examples may not be 100% accurate regarding what actually happens, but this little set of factoids will likely stick with you much longer now, in contrast to trying to memorize a long list of symptoms that would otherwise have no meaning to your visual brain.

So try this out with some other diseases.

In short:

• Make an image hook for any illness you are trying to remember
• Visualize what is different in the disease compared to normal physiology
• Elaborate to yourself what you believe would go wrong
• Compare your own thoughts to your text and add in addition information using the technique described above.

The next post we will try to make this a little more complex by adding more visual hooks to a certain illness, and I will make this one much more difficult, and it will require many many hooks. We will also add in the location factor, which is also very important.

Keep practicing!

If you want to go into more depth while I knock these shifts out so I can get to writing the rest, look at a few texts by dominic o brien. I especially like his book on exam taking. you can find it on amazon for less than 10 bucks probably.

See you soon !