How to Learn Like a Genius

By Win Wenger, Ph.D.

Source: Project Renaissance


All of you reading this:
You have brains enough to run a galaxy. What are you doing with them?
One of the most frequently used paths to genius: find a knack that works for you. Get on a roll. Find ways to stay on that roll. Find ways to return to being on that roll, until so much else falls into that roll that even you begin to realize that you are, indeed, a genius.....

How to Learn Through a Periscope

We had enrolled our 4-year-old daughter in a neighborhood swim team, not for the sake of competing but simply for safety reasons, to ensure she would be competent in the water. During one of the team's meets, in one heat a clerical error had her swim as the only small kid among 8-, 9- and 10-year-olds. To our amazement, she swam far faster than ever before and finished right in the middle of the pack. "How did you do that?!?" we asked her. Her reply: "I made believe I was one of the big kids."

In the play Camelot, Merlin was working with Arthur, the young to-be king of England, at a point where Arthur was imagining himself to be a hawk. Asked Merlin of Arthur: "What does the hawk know, that Arthur does not know?" From "up there," young Arthur discovered that all those political boundaries everyone was always so worked up about simply weren't visible down there on the physical landscape — that England was one land. That was the beginning of his resolve in unifying England.

Like projecting your view through a periscope: let some aspect or part of you "become" a whole, distinct person who happens to be the world's greatest genius in what you are trying to learn. Through that new vantage point via periscope, see and understand easily what had been obscure to you before.

Just create such genius in the same sense that tribesmen of the Bear Clan wore the heads of bears to better understand the wilderness from which they made their living — while wearing a bear's head, discovering what would bears see in that landscape....

Or in the same sense that one young lad of our experience, about to "not make" his high school's baseball team, working with us during an hour of "putting on the heads" of his various baseball heroes, discovered through one of those "hero heads" how to get extra focus on the baseball by swinging not at the baseball itself but at an imaginary flyspeck on that baseball. He made the team; his first ten games he batted 800; at season's end he was voted MVP by not only his team but by his school's entire league.

Or in the same sense that in our very first 1977 experiment which launched Project Renaissance, a secretary starting to take violin lessons leaped from raw beginner to advanced student in two lessons by our special way of "putting on the head" of great violinists. She came by to visit our second experiment three weeks later and gave us a very nice concert. (ALL of us were getting similar results in our chosen areas even before we perfected this method!)
Each of the 47 diverse methods for such Periscopic Learning, through Project Renaissance's strategies of contextual projection and description, enables one to learn with understanding, or gain in skills, years' worth in only hours: truly "accelerated learning!"

Your "quick-hit" suggestion for this frame ... Imagine being a genius at what it is that you are trying to learn.

Imagine Being a Genius

While describing that genius to tape recorder or listener to make that experience more real to you, give special attention to imagining, as concretely as possible, in as sensory a way as possible, becoming that genius. Give special attention to the way it feels being that genius — that helps you discover the things which that genius would notice or discover. Especially physical feelings or sensations in the face and in the body, with the posture and gestures of that genius.

Hold onto the feeling of that particular genius while you are working at whatever you are seeking to learn. (Suggestion: also recover that feeling and bring it silently with you into the test or exam which usually accompanies the windup of such last-minute "learning emergencies.")

To discover how your deeper mind may represent a particular type of genius to you, try out several different types of genius first. Study what it might feel like in your body if, say, you were a genius mathematician. Describe all the differences in feeling in your body, posture and ways of moving when you are "being a genius mathematician" and being yourself.

Then imagine being a genius artist, and study those differences, then a genius in dealing with people, and so on. Once you've experienced directly for yourself how each type of genius feels differently to you, you can get the best defined patterns of feeling which go with the type of genius you need for this present occasion. "Wearing" that feeling, then, will let things occur to you or happen for you that otherwise would not, strengthening on this occasion your learning or test performance or general performance.

A similar suggestion, for when you are taking a test or exam: If you are good at one or more of the more involved computer games, or at chess, take that same cool, clear, positive-excited feeling with you into that exam. Re-create and "wear" that feeling there while you are working through that exam or test.

Understanding is the key here. These are not memorization techniques. These methods are not especially helpful in courses whose contents are mainly the memorization of things, especially the temporary memorization for tests and then forgetting — which typifies far too many classes and classrooms today. Don't turn to our kind of method if what you want is to memorize something for a test.

I hope that, whatever your schooling has been, you who are reading this still do positively value understanding.

By Win Wenger. This articles is excerpted from a much longer article title "Beyond Teaching and Learning" at Project Renaissance