#mind mapping

okay so. storytime.

i spent ALL of last year studying like 6-7 hours a day for boards. i'm talking full dedication. highlighters in every color. notes so aesthetic they could be on studyblr. i was COMMITTED.

and you know what i got? mid scores. like perfectly average. nothing terrible but nothing great either.

meanwhile my friend? studied maybe 3-4 hours a day MAX. didn't even make pretty notes. and she TOPPED our entire class.

i was so confused and honestly kind of salty about it lmao like what was she doing that i wasn't??? was she just naturally smarter? did she make a deal with the devil? WHAT.

so i finally asked her and she introduced me to these study techniques that basically changed my entire life and i'm actually MAD that nobody taught us this earlier because we're really out here studying the wrong way for YEARS.

technique 1: the feynman technique (aka the "explain it to a kid" method)

this one BLEW MY MIND. here's how it works:

pick any topic. let's say photosynthesis or the french revolution or whatever. now imagine you have to explain it to a 10 year old using only simple words. no fancy jargon. no complex terms.

try it right now with something you studied recently.

notice how you keep getting stuck? yeah. those are the parts you don't actually understand. you just memorized them.

i tried this with organic chemistry and realized i'd been fooling myself for MONTHS. i could recite definitions but i couldn't actually explain WHY reactions happened.

so now whenever i get stuck explaining something simply, i go back and relearn that specific part. and suddenly everything makes sense??? like ACTUAL sense not just "i memorized this sentence" sense.

this technique is literally perfect for boards because cbse LOVES asking application questions where you need to actually understand concepts, not just vomit memorized facts.

technique 2: active recall (or as i call it, the "close the damn book" method)

here's what i used to do: read chapter. highlight important parts. read again. maybe make notes. done.

here's what actually works: read chapter. close book. write down EVERYTHING you remember without looking.

the difference is WILD.

when you force your brain to retrieve information instead of just passively reading it, you create stronger memory pathways. it's literally science. your brain has to work harder so it remembers better.

i started making flashcards for everything. formulas. dates. definitions. concepts. and i test myself constantly. even the stuff i think i know.

especially the stuff i think i know tbh because that's usually where i'm overconfident and wrong lmao

technique 3: spaced repetition (the "review before you forget" method)

okay this one sounds boring but it's MAGIC.

instead of cramming everything the night before (we've all been there), you review material at specific intervals. study something today. review tomorrow. then after 3 days. then after a week. then after two weeks.

each time you review it gets easier because you're reinforcing the memory right before it fades.

i use a simple calendar for this. nothing fancy. just reminders for when to review each chapter.

the result? when board exams came around, i remembered stuff i studied in JUNE. effortlessly. no last minute panic cramming needed.

technique 4: pomodoro (aka "25 minutes of actual focus is better than 3 hours of distraction")

i cannot stress this enough: those 6-7 hour study sessions i was doing? maybe 2 hours were actual focused studying. the rest was me on instagram, checking messages, getting distracted, daydreaming, etc.

pomodoro technique is stupidly simple:

set timer for 25 minutes

study with COMPLETE focus (phone in another room level focus)

when timer rings, take 5 min break

repeat 4 times then take longer break

i get more done in 6 pomodoros (3 hours) now than i used to in entire days of "studying"

technique 5: mind mapping (the "visual brain dump" method)

linear notes never worked for me. i'd write pages and pages and remember nothing.

mind maps changed everything. you put the main topic in the center and branch out with related ideas, using colors and little drawings and connecting related stuff.

one good mind map can fit an entire chapter on one page AND you'll actually remember it because visual memory is powerful.

before exams i just review my mind maps and everything comes flooding back.

the real tea:

i wish someone had taught me this in like class 6 instead of letting me waste YEARS doing ineffective studying. but better late than never i guess?

since learning these techniques my scores have literally jumped 20+ percentage points. but more importantly? studying doesn't feel like torture anymore. it actually feels... productive? satisfying even?

wild concept i know.

oh and i found this platform called Cubegon that actually builds some of these techniques into their study modules which is pretty cool. like they structure content in a way that forces active recall and spaced repetition, so you're using effective methods even if you don't realize it. wish more educational apps did that tbh.

anyway if you're still studying the way we were taught in school (read, highlight, repeat, cry), maybe try these techniques for like two weeks?

your future self will thank you.

Included thingies

Not everyone has everything.

Example of Joke Title (Ian's) and Funsies (Jayden's)

Soooooooooooo, we're doing pretty good. The application we're using is Nebulous on Itch.io. It's a mind mapping tool, so like, things get connected automatically when you mention another object's title or synonym.

Memorization tips for students - The Feynman Technique - Mnemonic Devices - Mind Mapping - Chunking

[DISCLAIMER: This is not a professional or scientifically or anything really backed method, this is something coming solely from peer / personal experience.]

In regards to an anon ask earlier, I was thinking about it and one of the ways we've approached improving communication - particularly internal - in a way that is a lot less prone to flooding or dealing with trauma or anything too overwhelming - is by approaching it following the concept of Memory Webs

I haven't read up on them recently, but "Memory Webs" were a thing that our AP Psychology teacher in highschool made us do because the AP Psych test was term / jargon heavy. Memory in the human brain has been shown to be HEAVILY associative and the ability to remember and connect things tends to rely on following a "web" of connected topics, ideas, concepts etc from one idea to the next.

So in our AP Psych class, she gave us these GIANT books for Vocabulary Webs that we had to slowly work on, each of which required 6 other vocab words / related concepts, a summarized definition, and an image to represent it. By doing this, you added 6 cues to recall the word (increasing the chance you'd remember it), a visual cue, an episodic memory of working on it, and a definition - all in all improving how connected the word is to other concepts in your brain and making it easier to recall it.

I personally like to look at DID and our parts in a similar manner sometimes where the large issue is that a lot of the nodes in the web of associations are either disconnected or connected through a hard-to-find and/or small chain. In that sense, parts struggle to be held together because they are not associated concepts. It's hard to reach other parts because the dissociative walls (which in our unsubstantiated opinion is less a 'wall' and more so a lack of reinforced neural connections, so I would call them dissociative caverns) keep associations from forming

As a result, alternative to more traditional ways of mapping your system and parts, a method I've liked to internally visualize systems and navigating system dynamics is through a memory web manner. (I actually have never done it physically cause the Ray part of my brain - also the most prominent part writing this rn - rarely liked to front if he didn't have to and did a lot of stuff internally)

Here's a bit of a breakdown using six of our parts if any of you want to try it out.

We personally like it because it strips a lot of trauma and stress off of it and makes it a lot more of a positive and present engaging activity. For the purposes of this, I'll be using the free online app of Milanote cause we've used it before for OC associative webs and I think it'll do fine enough. (Honestly it actually might just be a good way to log alter information now that I'm looking at it if you are at a place in recovery where keeping track of that physically helpful)

So we can start by dropping down the parts we want to include in the form of boards

So from here, we have a bunch of disconnected parts. However, we find that a lot of these parts have things that mean a lot to them, that illicit a strong emotion or reaction from them.

Some parts may lack it more than others (often in our case trauma holders and/or trauma locked parts) and that's okay and to be expected. This is a visualization method and if there isn't much connecting a part that is 100% okay.

For demonstration sake, I will now add bubbles around each part of things that were pretty early apparent that each individual liked.

Also for the purposes of how I know our system works and how I plan to do this, I am actually moving Riku to the center and you will all see why Riku is such an S tier center point with this model

So you can see some connections forming.

Some key things you can take from this visual that also applied to earlier stags of how we connected

Lucille and Riku are and have always been pretty darn connected, they go back as one of the longest duos and were split almost as a pair to deal with academics

Chunn and Ray have a very shared interest of "I don't want to do anything leave me alone"

XIV literally was just a piece of shit early on and didn't have any immediate HARD connections with anyone largely because he never was interested in actually engaging in things he liked in a positive way as his "favorite emotion" at the time was "being pissed off"

Lin - an originally trauma stuck / loop - is very very poorly associated with anything that isn't overtly trauma related (and that is saying something cause Vocaloid is trauma related) and thus has very few connections to other parts

So looking at this though, there are a few things that have some similarities between parts. What you can do is make plans to try to foster the interests that you do have and try to generalize it a bit more to also encompass what interests other parts have. So lets engage in hobbies a little more - explore a few concepts that mean a lot to parts independently - and find some more generalized version of those hobbies

(forgot to add easy listening to Ray's and "only wearing monochrome*" to XIV's earlier) (*there are a lot of nuances and caveats)

Damn, look at that. It's messy and ugly to have in a 2D form. I absolutely hate it, this would be so impossible with our whole system. But HEY, it's very connected - and that's the goal.

Compared to the previous one, you can see how easily it can be for one part's interests to start to drift into another. Because they are largely and strongly associated features to each part, they are a lot more accessible when engaging in their shared / associated connections and interests which makes it easier for the them to stay together near the front, stay associated with one another, and work with and communicate with one another.

Of course anyone following this blog goes "Where tf is Birds" and that I left out because it would ruin the point of the web as it actually is one of our traditional "you are around the system a lot? okay pick a bird" which serves to 1) be a fun system culture thing 2) be a means of welcoming a part in and 3) helps establish a foundational connection; we do the same with music but with music its a lot more elaborate and I probably wont explain it for other reasons.

But overtime, by fostering interests that were already present and encouraging parts to broaden and generalize their specific interest a bit, you end up with a lot of overlapping associations that can greatly improve internal communication, co-fronting ability, and just general fluidity and easy of moving around the brain web.

It becomes a good way of trying to figure out what you can do to encourage and help build connections and associations between parts by seeing where things are similar / could have more overlap (combat and martial arts, different types of fashion, different types of music, different appreciation for arts, taking over the world, yada yada yada)

And you wanna know the coolest thing? When you step back from the whole web you can see certain things appear that stand out the most and have some of the most connections.

If you ever intend to go to Final Fusion, those are the things that will likely be the most prominent traits of your whole self

For us? [REDACTED BIRDS for the point of the demonstration], Music, Fashion, Taking over the World, Recovery and Healing, Buddhism, Martial Arts, Arts in general - they're all some of our largest traits that persist in almost all forms as individual parts, partially fused parts, and fully fused parts.

And the BEST part? Doing this didn't require us to touch trauma at all.

❄️Day 12 of Winter Studying Challenge❄️

12/12/2021 - What is a favourite family holiday memory that has stuck with you through the years?

I think it’s how we all sit together at the table and give gifts to each other.