Create a Lively Visual Metaphor or Analogy

One of the best things you can do to not only remember, but understand concepts, is to create a metaphor or analogy for them.

Often the more visual the better.

A metaphor is just a way of realizing that one thing is somehow similar to another.

Simple ideas like one geography teacher’s description of Syria is shaped like a bowl of cereal, and Jordan as a Nike Air Jordan sneaker, can stick with a student for decades.

If you’re trying to understand electrical current, it can help to visualize it as water.

Similarly, electrical voltage can feel like pressure.

A push. As you climb to a more sophisticated understanding of whatever topic you’re concentrating on, you can revise your metaphors or toss them away and create more meaningful ones.

Metaphors and visualization, being able to see something in your mind’s eye, have been especially helpful not only in art and literature, but also in allowing the scientific and engineering world to make progress.

In the 1800s for example, when chemists began to imagine and visualize the miniature world of molecules, dramatic progress began to be made.

Here’s a fun illustration of monkeys in a benzene ring from an insider spoof of German Academic Chemical Life printed in 1886.

Note the single bonds, or the monkeys’ hands, and the double bonds with their tiny little tails. It’s often helpful to pretend that you are the concept you’re trying to understand. Put yourself in an electron’s warm and fuzzy slippers as it burrows through a slab of copper. Or sneak inside the X of an algebraic equation and feel what it’s like to poke your head out of the rabbit hole.

But just don’t let it get exploded by an inadvertent divide by zero. In chemistry, compare a cation with a cat that has paws and is therefore pawsitive. And an anion with an onion that’s negative, because it makes you cry. Metaphors are never perfect, but then in science, all models are just metaphors which means they break down at some point.

But nevermind that. Metaphors and models are often vitally important in giving a physical understanding of the central idea behind the process or concept you are trying to understand. Interestingly, metaphors and analogies are useful for getting people out of Einstellung that is, being blocked by thinking about a problem in the wrong way.

For example, telling a simple story of soldiers attacking a fortress from many different directions at once can open creative paths for students to see how many low-intensity rays can be effectively used to destroy a cancerous tumor. Stories, even if they’re just used as silly memory tricks, can also allow you to more easily retain what you’re trying to learn.

Metaphors also help glue an idea into your mind. Because they make a connection to neural structures that are already there.

It’s like being able to trace a pattern with tracing paper. Metaphors at least help you get a sense of what’s going on.

I’m Barbara Oakley.

Thanks for learning how to learn.