Priming Study Technique Pt II: Remember More With Dopamine

Click here to read: How to Prime Part I

The Priming Study Technique Secret Ingredient

The real secret to fuel your priming study technique is Dopamine.

Most readers and learners fumble when it comes to using their brain to their advantage. They end up force-feeding themselves information. And often forget much of what they’ve read which leads to wasted time re-reading or accepting the loss.

If you only take one thing, link your learning to dopamine while you study.

Boost your retention like it’s on steroids.

But that is exactly why you prime. I’ll dive deeper into bridging the two together shortly.

But first, let’s recap what we covered yesterday.

We’re riffing on the Elizabeth Filips’ (former Ali Abdul apprentice) approach to priming:

  • Your mind is associative; use priming to help new ideas stick.
  • Place new topics in context by finding real-world experiences or ground-level examples from google news (stories).
  • Match your legos to new concepts by connecting what you know to the things that stand out in your google news story.

Ok, back to leveraging dopamine…

Emotional Investment

Using emotional investment is an arc reactor for memory and recall. (If that reference doesn’t make sense think mini-nuclear power plant).

The first step is understanding the consequences of not learning this topic and the benefits of learning it. Then make them personal. Dopamine is the neurotransmitter tied to anticipating reward or pleasure. So we look for an element of the story and topic that compels us to learn more.

We look for our natural curiosity.

The best things are personal or family experiences. Find someone you can put a face to. The stronger the connection we can find with the topic the more curiosity and dopamine we can loop in.

Make it personal then you’ve made it stick.

Image the Impact on People to Give it Weight

In her example, Elizabeth was researching Multiple Sclerosis.

Initially, MS was both complex and dry topic to learn from a text book. But it became real after finding the story of Actress Selma Blair. Listening to her share her account showed Elizabeth how similar they were having both been misdiagnosed, even if it was for different illnesses. That personal connection makes remembering the story (and facts) more effortless.

It’s connections like these that allow us to prioritize the information we store in our brain.

Because you understand how the mind works, you this can use priming Study Technique to etch the information you chose into your memory.

I’ve included the video below if you want to deep dive into the topic more.

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