Unlocking Academic Excellence: How to Use Storytelling to Accelerate Learning
Imagine you’re at your favourite restaurant, fiddling with a gigantic EpiPen. You’ve been waiting for the spaghetti you ordered, but when the waiter arrives, he serves you a live heart beating in tune with Asake’s “Remember.” Then, rather than apologise, the waiter uses cutlery to drum on your head, which triggers your anxiety and causes your shoes to become waterlogged with sweat. It’s bizarre and improbable, right? But it's also an incident you’re unlikely to forget.
What if I told you this was a way to learn and memorise the side effects of epinephrine? I’ll highlight the keywords I infused into the story.
EpiPen: A physical object representing epinephrine
Heart beating in tune to Asake: Tachycardia
Head drumming: Headache
Anxiety: Anxiety
Sweating out of feet: Perspiration
Our brain is wired for stories. Learning how to weave educational information into stories makes learning fun, supercharges your memory, and accelerates your understanding. And in this post, I will teach you how to use stories to memorise anything.
“But I’m not creative,” you might object.
Do not put limits on your imagination. What you use to tell the story doesn’t have to be impressive. It can be irreverent, raunchy, comical, or outrageous. That’s the beauty of this technique. The aim is to remember your learning material and eventually get good grades, not win a Nobel prize for creative writing.
So, relax. You’ve got this.
How to learn using stories
- Allow your imagination to run wild
The story you pick should be relatable to you. Imagine scratching what you’re meant to learn into your room’s wall.
Imagine a rickety danfo filled with blood, and use it to remember that RBCS help in oxygen transport.
The more bizarre it is, the more it’s likely to stick. Exaggerate and go wild.
2. Employ visualisation
Concentrate on visualising as much detail as you can. Form mental images incorporating the senses—touch, taste, smell, motion, and sight—into the story.
For instance, picture a baby with rainbow-coloured teeth riding a creaking four-wheeler bike and use that to remember that tetracycline causes discoloration of teeth in babies.
3. Use a familiar location:
Incorporate locations you’re familiar with into your story. Maybe try fitting the generations of cephalosporins into your family album or using your room as a reference point for what you want to learn.
These stories shouldn’t exist in a vacuum. A physical location helps to ground the story and enhance the storytelling detail.
4. Use specific imagery
In the epinephrine example, I imagined fiddling with an EpiPen to remind me that these side effects are particular to epinephrine.
Academic learning is usually bulky, and you don’t want to get your stories mixed up because your imagery wasn’t specific enough.
5. Use it to learn information in order
Sequentially infusing and linking keywords into a story makes it easy to learn anything.
For example, to learn the first 20 elements of the periodic table, imagine that in your bedroom, a hydrogen bomb is ticking, but standing in the way of detonation are a thousand helium balloons, and so forth.
PS: The technique is built on a foundation of understanding. First, understand. Then, make it fun to remember. You’ll be surprised at what you can recall, even after leaving school.
What have you been struggling to learn? What is boring to read? Try storytelling! It might become your go-to technique.
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