Chapter 4: Brain Works

If I asked you what you did today prior to your reading this, you could tell me about what time you woke up, what you had for breakfast, where you sat down, what you did, etc…  and you could tell me fairly accurately.  If you go to a new restaurant once and decide to go back, you can return easily the second time quite by recognizing familiar landmarks.  But if I introduced you to a couple of business associates that you didn’t need to know and told you some of their names and what they did, you likely couldn’t remember two weeks from now.  Why? 

Because first of all your brain remembers story, event and visual location.   This is why you can remember what you did and where you have been.  You also remember stories of others so that when you go to lunch with a friend, you share stories with one another.  In fact this is what makes up most of our conversations. 

You also have a natural ability to know location based on visual clues.  It’s why you are able to tell someone how to get to that new restaurant.  You might not be able to tell them every street name, but you can tell them to take a left at Sonic and it’s across the street from Target.  These things you don’t consciously work to remember.  They are right-brained and have made imprints on your mind.

Secondly what makes things easier to remember is the level of personal significance.  I remember a young man in college who told multiple people dreamily on the first day of school that he had, “met Rhoda” that day.  A few minutes later he would absent-mindedly mention again that he met a girl named “Rhoda.”  The following year they were married.    Whether it is a young man who has just met a beautiful woman or if it is the name of your new boss at work, if the information has personal significance to you, more than likely you will remember.   When the right-brain is activated first through emotive impact, the left-brain remembers absorbs information more readily.

Ask the older generation where they were on December 7, 1941 or on November 22, 1963, and they will know.  Or if I asked a later generation what they were doing on January 28, 1986 or even Sept 11, 2001, vivid details could be given.  These moments in American history, the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the assassination of JFK, the explosion of the Space Shuttle Challenger and the terrorist attacks on US soil stand out like vivid images because they had emotive impact on our hearts, lives and futures.  What happened mattered in a significant way.  The same can be said of a wedding day or the day when a first child was born.  Life-changing events are often fixed deeply into our memories because they have struck our emotions and imaginations.

With this in mind everyone in earth is constantly memorizing every day.  We memorize where the bathrooms are at in a particular building, we’ve memorized our way home from work or where the fruit section is in at the supermarket.  And most of this memorizing comes without even trying.  Be encouraged.  Our brain is a memorizing machine.

It’s not that we can’t memorize, it’s that we need methods to memorize in the way that our brain learns—through story, event and visual location.   This is the right-sided aspect of our brain that acts like a door handle to open the left-sided part of our brain.   It is never more true than when it comes to Scripture.   

The memorization process used in this booklet is called the film-making method and takes advantage of the brain’s natural ability to remember.  To give you an overview, there are five steps involved:

1)  Research the Relationships

2)  See the Movie

3)  Tell the Story

4)  Add the Words

5)  Getting it Out

It’s good to note that these steps stand or fall together.  This is easier said than done as it is surprising at how quickly we tend to fall back into the old patterns of rote memorization.  It’s what much of our modern education has been built upon so it’s familiar.   But trust the process and take the time to do the work involved.  A little time in the front end will yield greater results in the end.