Tommy Collison

I’m an aural guy. I’m very not-paper-and-pens stuff. I will know 50% of a song’s lyrics after the first listening, and there are at least 3 musicals I can sing the entire libretto for (regardless of how well I sing them…).

I learn by taking it and changing it like putty and arranging it in such a way that I can comfortably commit it to memory. C has none but G has 1; D has 2 and A has 3. That’s my creed for remembering how many sharps the different keys have. I’ll always know in Business that the balance sheet goes Fixed Assets, Current Assets, Current Liabilities and Financed By because I’ve sat down with them and said them to myself 100 times each.

That’s my study method: I write down the stuff I need to know and find some way to put a rhythm to it and finally learn it off. I think that’s why audio books appeal to me so much, because that’s my preferred method of taking in information.

A friend of mine has a slightly similar but vaguely different method: he’s very musically orientated too, so he takes a song he likes, that he knows inside out from every angle, and replace the lyrics with what he has to learn. Most recently, Stuck in a Moment by U2 has become The Christopher Columbus song. I glanced across the room at him as we did that test in History and saw his mouth moving furiously as he wrote, and I knew he was recanting the song over and over again.

Photo owned by Vivianna_love (cc)

What about you? How do you commit stuff to memory? More interestingly, are you a visual learner? do you have to write stuff down to remember it? Also, is it that you need the scrap of paper that says ‘don’t forget the milk’ or is it just the act of writing it down is enough?

Then you have tactile learners; those who learn by doing. I don’t use it all that much and therefore don’t know a huge amount about it. They’re basically the folk who need to be doing stuff rather than watching a how-to video on YouTube or listening to a lecture.

I find the learning process so intriguing. It’s like fingerprints, everyone’s is different and I’m fascinated to learn about how others do it.

To recap, the 3 types of learning are:

Aural, who learn by sound, hearing instructions or being told how to do it
Visual, who learn by watching, writing it down or being shown how to do it.
Tactile, who learn by doing it for themselves and is the more involved of the three, I’d wager.

So, which type are you?

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