I was asked a very interesting question recently and it was one that I had been asked before but until now I had not really considered my answer. A blind person from Australia sent me the following e mail:

I recently visited your Web site and was delighted with the information contained, however, I am about to embark upon a BSc in Environmental Science and would love to improve my study skills. I am blind so will be dependent upon a cassette for lectures and my trusty computer for just about everything else.

I have been trying to find another way of "Mind mapping" other than the obvious visual one, haven't been too successful I'm afraid. If you have any suggestions I would be delighted to hear from you.

Now most of the strategies that I personally employ are visually-based, i.e. I make strange and bizarre pictures in my mind to allow me to remember all sorts of things. So the first problem that I faced in dealing with this person's request was that to go into greater depth with some suggestions, I would need to know if they had always been blind.

I would need to know this so that I could understand whether they had a visual frame of reference on which to base any visualisation strategies. If they had always been blind (I use the term "blind" because that is how they described their condition) then I have no idea how this person "sees" things in their mind's eye. So all of a sudden, without being able to enter a discussion with this person, I had to avoid recommending visual strategies in case they had no relevance to this person's way of thinking.

This is the advice I gave:

As I don't know how you see pictures in your mind's eye, I would suggest that one great strategy is to summarise your audio notes into another form, perhaps using your computer. The process of summarising, ie the thinking that you will need to do, will help you reinforce the key points.

Perhaps identifying the 7 key points for any body of information will also help. For example, let's assume you have a particular topic that you can break down into 7 key areas. Then take each one of those individual areas and break them down into 7 key parts (but now at a lower level). Without specific memory techniques, the human brain is capable of (some would say limited to) remembering 7 pieces of information about something. So if you can remember 7 things about something that is itself one of 7 parts of something that is itself (up a level now) a seventh of something, then you can begin to recall and remember lots of information.

If there are sequences of information that you need to remember, try making up silly stories or stupid sentences to recall them.

Perhaps you should make your own summary tapes of what you have heard so that you can listen to your own voice repeating the information. Another good idea that will work well is if you record your voice asking lots of questions (with a break between each to allow you time to pause the tape while you answer). Then play that tape regularly and get used to recalling the answer. Play this tape more than the source information tapes so that you get used to recalling the knowledge. Just the process of generating this tape will assist in your overall understanding of your subject.

A general point when you are learning is to use the "little and often" approach. Do a little bit each day - how do you eat an elephant - one bite at a time. Another point to bear in mind is that because of something called the confusion factor, stuff you learn will become weaker in the memory as other stuff is experienced. Until you make the physical connection in the brain stronger (that is all learning is - a physical link between brain cells) then you will find it difficult to recall stuff as time goes on. Information is at its most fragile in the first week of learning and so if you review what you have learnt (maybe the 7 key points of the 7 key points and so on) then you will condition it into your memory. The ideal frequency is a review after 10 minutes, 1 day, 1 week, 1 month, 3 months and 6 months. Each review strengthens the physical link until eventually it is so strong that you will always remember.

I hope these ideas help you. I have written them from the viewpoint of only imagining not having sight, and so they are to a degree somewhat speculative and theoretical. However I am pretty confident that they will help (if you use them!). Let me know how you get on and if there are any other ideas that could help people who have a visual impairment.

I am waiting to hear how my Australian friend gets on.

If you have a visual impairment, how do you learn when you study and do you have any techniques that you could pass on to others to help them?

To ask about any aspect of Accelerated Learning, e-mail michael2008 (at) happychild.org.uk . Due to Michael's hectic schedule, he may not be able to write back, but will do his best to cover the main issues raised, in future articles [more about Michael on the page here].

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