Employing Imagination in Accelerated Learning - Part 1

Accelerated learning provides a set of principles and foundations that contribute to making learning and teaching more enjoyable, easier, and more effective. The principle of learning and teaching without prejudice comes at the top of these principles. If you look into the philosophy of accelerated learning, you will realize that the capabilities of learners are constrained by teachers’ prejudices about their limitations, whether they declare that or use suggestions to pass on their beliefs about learners through the daily interaction between the two parties within the educational process.

These principles originally came from the results of the latest studies, research, and experiments in brain research and learning, which in total seek to provide a clear answer about the best way in which a person can learn. Results generally agree that immersion in learning is real learning, and that there are ways to help learners, as well as tools and techniques to reach the state of immersion in learning. 

Suggestion in Accelerated Learning:

Suggestion and imagination will be talked about in an entire chapter in the book of Accelerated Learning, which is a chapter full of documented and confirming experiments on the effect of suggestion and imagination in releasing or discouraging learners’ abilities, in a clear indication of the importance of each of them in achieving the goal of Accelerated Learning, which is to create a positive environment for learners where the teacher is not an obstacle to the immersion of learners in learning, but a facilitating factor in it. That can be done through the use of a positive language stemming from their positive thoughts and full of positive suggestions inside and outside the classroom, with honesty and accuracy in the promises the teacher makes to learners about their ability to succeed by focusing on fun, curiosity, and discovery which leads them to reach solutions.

Al’iiha’ (or suggestion)  in the Arabic language is the sound of speaking, and it is a characteristic of the Arabic language. It is a subtle sound that indicates an indirect meaning through allusion, exposure, metonymy, symbol, and implication. Its words carry meanings that ultimately influence a person’s beliefs or behavior.

These words often reflect the speaker’s beliefs and thoughts, and in this context, we mean the teacher. The teacher’s words describe reality without being the reality, and the accuracy of the words they use expresses the accuracy of the idea that accompanies these words. If they use words with vague and imprecise connotations that express a general idea during the teacher’s communication with the learners, this will lead to a different interpretation between what the teacher says and what the learner receives.

“What I am going to say may seem difficult, but you must learn it.” How does this phrase sound to you? What does it suggest to you? What effects can it have on the learner? It hides the teacher’s beliefs and convictions, which they reached through their personal experience in learning and teaching, as well as their principles and methods.

“Again, we have to hear more difficult complex concepts”. This is how the learner receives it, and at the same time it sends the teacher’s deep belief that their level of understanding as an adult is better than the level of understanding as a young learner with little experience. This arrogance pushes the teacher to act as the center of the educational process and the primary and only source of information inside and outside the classroom, which deprives the learner of the initiative to ask questions or clearly express their level of understanding.

It is no wonder then that we hear most adults express their suffering that do not end with the end of school in mathematics, physics, grammar, or a foreign language, and the reason is these vague words full of hindering beliefs for learners, which the teacher throws at them, often in good faith, without considering their effect on them at the time.

What is more dangerous is that these suggestions ,with their negative meanings, reach the depth of the learner’s identity and belief about themselves, so that the expressions of laziness, failure, and stupidity become part of the learner’s self-definition. These prejudices about the difficulty of mathematics (for example) make the learner adopt a belief that says: “My brain was not designed to understand mathematics”, a belief that contradicts what studies have shown in brain research that all humans are predisposed to understand all knowledge and science at birth, but they are later distinguished by specific preferences according to the influence of the environment in which they are born.

What self-respect and confidence in abilities do we ask the learners to have, when these suggestions destroy their inner world! This teacher did not take into account the learner’s humanity, experiences, and unique personality. The teacher, who deeply believes that the learner is the center of the educational process, acts as a facilitator of learning, listens more to the learner, and tries to discover the most appropriate learning method for learners and their motives to help them build and develop their knowledge and personalities.

Imagination in Accelerated Learning:

The next principle in accelerated learning is to align learning with the way the brain works. Once again, studies based on learning and brain functioning confirm that for learning to be effective, it must stimulate the entire brain, with both its left and right hemispheres. Studies tell us that the left hemisphere is the location of languages, logic, interpretation, and arithmetic, while the right hemisphere is the location of geometry, non-verbal processes, recognition of visual patterns such as faces, and fonts, as well as auditory recognition and spatial skills. Also, we use the left hemisphere more when examining details, while we use the right more when thinking about the overall image.

Studies also tell us that people of all ages display internally measurable activity in the left hemisphere when they externally engage in proximity behaviors, cheerfulness, and other positive emotions, while avoiding behaviors and negative feelings have been found to be related to the activity of the right hemisphere. Also, there is some evidence that speaking by itself promotes positive emotions, and artistic activities are a means of expressing negative emotions.

What does imagination do to the brain that can help us learn?

First we have to define imagination and distinguish it from mental wandering. Imagination is “the ability to visualize to create a mental impression of visual sights, sounds, smells, tastes, and tactile memories.” This means that imagination is an intentional and directed process to form these impressions, and it is not random as mind-wandering, which most people confuse it with, which is a “random brain activity that occurs when thoughts drift to an internal preoccupation other than the one we usually engage in externally, which leads to us losing the course of conversation and the sense of time and place.”

Imagination enables us to enter into a state of total immersion in the activity of the moment (learning), while mind-wandering carries us away from the moment and confuses what happens in it and what the brain summons in the moment of wandering of emotions, thoughts, and memories. Imagination contributes to building learning, so what is learning?

Learning is memory and memory is learning, and learning consists of two processes. The first is to obtain information, and the second is to retain it. In this context, Sir Frederic Charles Bartlett (a British psychologist and first professor of experimental psychology at the University of Cambridge) states in his book “Remembering” published in 1932 that:

“Remembering is an imaginative reorganization, an imaginative reconstruction, or the establishment of a relationship, that directs us toward a whole mass of past experiences or reactions, and toward brilliant fine details that usually appear in the form of pictures or words.”

As Paul (1988) emphasizes in describing the process of remembering: “We remember what we perceive and only perceive what we pay attention to, and pay attention only to what we desire.”

Imagination-based activities help learners focus their attention on what they want to learn, and then enhance their perception of information. However, this type of activities requires training the learner to carry them out in a way that contributes to making learning faster and more effective, and retained for the longest period of time in memory by directing the learner’s attention in a systematic and studied manner by an experienced teacher in employing imagination techniques.