Study Skills: Hunting And Gathering Information

The importance of involving our physical bodies and senses into practical learning strategies has long been underestimated or even ignored. Find out why working with visual association techniques can boost your ability to recall information.

Human beings lived as hunters-gatherers until only a few thousand years ago. The expression “hunter-gatherer” describes a lifestyle in which the food supply focused on hunting and gathering food in the wild rather than cultivating crops and raising animals in captivity. Before humans developed these techniques (and managed to safeguard their water supplies), life was a constant struggle for survival. One of the characteristics of the hunter-gatherer lifestyle was that community groups frequently had to relocate to find water and to renew the available food supply. This nomadic lifestyle was extremely demanding. In fact, instead of using the word “lifestyle,” the term “struggle for survival” might be more appropriate.

The keys to survival revolved around the use of the body and application of the senses. Humans would not have survived if they had not become good at running, smelling and tasting; using their eyes and working with their hands; and learning to orient their position in space. In other words, the body and the senses were the main instruments our ancestors had to rely on in order to survive. In contrast, they did not have to rely on their capacity to understand math, law or history.

These days, our brains and the ability to apply learned knowledge have reduced our dependency on our bodies and our senses. We invent and make use of technology, thereby delegating all kinds of activities to machines and intelligent devices. We don’t have to run any more, because we have learned to construct and use bicycles, cars, buses and planes. We don’t have to detect dangerous plants by smelling and touching them, as supermarkets only sell food that is not poisonous. In many parts of the world, we no longer depend on our bodies and senses to survive.

Nonetheless, our physical bodies and our minds are still innately prepared to perform these functions, possibly because the step from hunting and gathering to our current lifestyles is a recent event in the development of the human race. We are still much more hunters-gatherers than we would usually like to think. I propose, then, that our talent to work with visual information is part of our inheritance from the days of the hunter-gatherer and that this is also the reason why most people find it easier to remember sequences of images, or physical items that we can smell and touch, than information that is primarily abstract, like much of the information in a textbook.

Unfortunately, the importance of involving our physical bodies and senses into practical learning strategies has long been underestimated or even ignored. For example, looking back at my formal education in schools and universities, we were never showed how to use associations for the learning process. In fact, too often, learning has been organized contrary to the inbuilt physiological needs of our bodies and our minds, wasting an enormous potential. Yet, this potential still waits to be used— and for free. So, why not hunt and gather information instead of food and animals? Why not work with your body and your mind instead of working against it?

Involving our bodies and senses in the process of studying and learning gives us the chance to make use of an innate system that has helped our species survive hundreds of thousands of years. Involving our bodies and senses in the process of studying will make it easier to store and recall information. For example, working with visual association techniques is one very simple but highly effective and successful strategy that can help you to recall information on demand. Using unusual, strange and memorable images and items as retrieval cues may be your key to success in that upcoming exam.

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