Mental imagery is a key part of learning, but nobody mentions it in schools.
Mental images are quite simply the images we hold in our heads. All these pictures are held in your Occipital Lobe, the part of your brain just above the dent where your skull meets your spine.
When we were born we have few mental images, and neuroscience has told us that the occipital lobe stores more and more pictures as we grown up that can be roughly categorised as faces, objects, locations and no doubt many more topics that are unique to the individual such as sports techniques, gaming strategies and favourite holidays.
Part of successful recall of images is to be able to take a good “picture” of something you want to recall. For instance if you lose a bunch of keys you may not have an image. Next time you put your keys down take a picture in your mind of where you left them, complete with the background. When next you are on the hunt recall that picture in your mind and you will find your search easier. Whenever you are looking for something just picturing it will assist you. In addition, taking a picture of for example locking the front door before you leave and where you parked the car will even assist you in reducing some symptoms of OCD.
“Visual thinking is a tremendous advantage.”
But we don’t even mention mental imagery in schools although every school is committed to multi-sensory teaching and learning and mental imagery is a vital part of visual learning. So we don’t talk about mental images in schools, but it is explicitly mentioned in the National Curriculum – it can’t be right that we don’t teach teachers about the key role mental imagery has in learning!
We would be pleased to tell you how mental imagery can be developed for every aspect of learning including literacy, numeracy, concentration and so much more. Just email olive@empoweringlearning.co.uk
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Olivehickmott 