You Mean I'm Not Lazy, Stupid or Crazy?!: The Classic Self-Help Book for Adults With Attention Deficit Disorder (44 page)

Use Multisensory Strategies—Don’t Just “Try to Remember”:
We know we probably don’t really need to say this again, but always write down your appointment if you want to arrive at the right place at the
right time! You probably already have notes written and posted in a variety of places throughout your house. But don’t stop at simply writing down your reminders. Notes are great prompts for short-term memory but don’t really help you store information for subsequent recall unless you actively use them as memory tools.

To do this, you need to write things down and practice them. Read your note,
close your eyes, visualize it and say it aloud. Check the accuracy of your visual memory by looking at your note and then practice it again. By using your kinesthetic channel (writing it down), your visual channel (reading it and mentally seeing it) and your auditory channel (saying and hearing it), you’ll have a more secure anchor for later recall.

Mental image associations are useful for folks
with good visual memory and can be combined with other kinds of sensory awareness to improve the quality of remembering. Try memorizing your company’s product specifications list, for example, by seeing and speaking the words, writing them down and pointing to them in your catalog as a metronome beats. If you’re trying to remember to turn on your security system before you leave your house, visualize
the control box and the room sensors. Move around your house to each sensor and imagine yourself flipping a switch at each location. This will help you see and feel yourself proceeding through the activity and will help to fix the process in your conscious memory.

Use Visualization Combined with Associations:
Much of what we learn is accomplished through various associations. One idea naturally
flows into another and creative thinking is born. Sometimes the associations occur logically and effortlessly—you associate the sound of the teakettle whistling with the action of turning off the burner. The memory is called up automatically. When less obvious associations are required, your creativity gets a workout.

When you say “That reminds me of …,” you’re using an association to prompt
a memory. Your ability to accurately recall memories largely depends on how you initially organize the associations of input.

When you call your local animal pound to report the ferocious animal who just took a bite out of your leg, you quickly identify your assailant as a large brown dog. You don’t have to describe the beast as a fur-covered animal with four legs, two ears and eyes, one tail
and a snout resting over a powerful jaw of two rows of very large teeth! You know it’s a dog because you have previously categorized the information in your memory bank. You rely on a mental outline.

Whether you’re remembering dogs, history events or a current project at work, you need to put the multiple pieces of data into a mental outline. There are far too many details to remember if you attempt to do it piece by piece. Work at identifying common threads or logical ways of grouping the pieces under main headings so you have fewer things to remember. Your main headings become flags that
guide you to the other items you need to remember.

When you use a comb on your hair or a glass for your drink, you’re using the simplest kind of
paired
or
grouped
association. When you use
analogical thinking
to remember things, you associate them by similarity. You remember your friend’s birthday because it is the same as your child’s. The converse is
differential thinking
, which uses comparison
and differences to form associations. You remember that your doctor’s office is on the east side of the street because his name is Dr. West.

Organizing your memory by using categories is particularly useful for lists. For instance, if you have to remember to go to the butcher shop and fill the gas tank for your grill, the two items are logically connected. With little more than a quick mental
image of steaks on the grill, you will probably remember your two errands.

Sometimes, you have to be a bit more creative with your associations and mental images. If you have to remember to call the vet and go to the dentist, you can try visualizing your Great Dane lying back in a dental chair with cotton stuck in his jaws! By pairing the two items and visualizing them in a humorous way, you
have a much better chance of committing them to memory.

It might seem that these techniques complicate things by adding extras to the memory burden. But they actually reduce the complexity by providing cues to remember things that would otherwise have no intrinsic reason to be remembered. Of course, if you’re suffering from a terrible toothache and your
dog has just broken its leg, you probably
won’t need any additional reminders!

Invent Your Own Mnemonic Tricks:
Developing useful mnemonic tricks (memory techniques) is limited only by your imagination. Many tricks for remembering can be devised using letter codes. One well-known one is using the word “HOMES” to recall the five Great Lakes: Huron, Ontario, Michigan, Erie and Superior. The five-letter code calls up the names more precisely
and quickly than your trying to remember them without any cues.

How can you remember that the boss of the school is the principal instead of the principle? One trick might be to think of the ending—pal. A pal is a person so the correct spelling of the school’s boss must be principal. Now, it may be hard for some of us to think of our principals as our buddies, but we think you get the idea!

What about the spelling of the container we use to keep our drinks hot or cold? It sounds like it should be spelled thermis, but it’s not, because a thermos has a circular opening, like an “o.” Thus, the correct spelling is thermos.

Tricks are also effective for remembering a series of numbers that are random or may not immediately suggest any mental image. One way to remember a series of numbers
is to make the information familiar by designing a clever storage framework. The combination for your lock—14, 27, 30—might be difficult to remember without a memory trick. But if you remind yourself that the first digit in each number increases by one, and the second by three, you’ll improve your chances of remembering them.

Chunking
is another trick that many of us use. Remembering a seven-digit
telephone number becomes much easier when you break it into smaller groups of two or three digits. If the smaller parts happen to contain your age or house number, it’s even easier to remember.

A coding system combined with a visual association is another good way to remember numbers. Try setting up a list of numbers using either rhymes or visual cues: one=run, two=moo, three=bee, four=shore,
five=hive. If you prefer visual cues set up your list slightly differently: one=long stick, two=kids on a seesaw, three=a triangle, four=the tires on your car, five=fingers on one hand.

When you need to remember that your car is parked in space 134, you can translate it to run-bee-shore and visualize yourself running from a bee that is dive-bombing at you on your beach blanket at the shore. At
first glance this may seem complicated. With practice, you may discover that it can really work. Numbers don’t have any intrinsic meaning—this trick assigns meaning to them.

Rehearse, Rehearse, Rehearse!
Without planned rehearsal, the best memory techniques in the world won’t work very well. When it’s time to recall something, review the strategy you used to store it. And then practice, practice,
practice the strategy—again and again and again!

Cram sessions won’t work! Your teachers were right when they repeatedly warned you not to wait until the last minute to study. Information is retained best if it’s practiced over time. This enables you to practice informally in between and build on the partially learned information from earlier sessions. Educators refer to this as
overlearning
.

General Learning Tips

Use Music or Background Noise:
When you were a child doing your homework, were you continually amazed at the seemingly magical power of the radio or television set you turned on? Within
milliseconds
after you hit the power button, did your parents arrive at your door with dire threats of the consequences that would follow if you didn’t turn it off? How did they get there so
fast?

Although parents and teachers alike have preached for years that learning must take place in a quiet area with no distractions, their sermons may have missed the mark. In reality, quiet can be excruciatingly distracting for some of us! Quiet can foster wonderful mind trips and excursions to places much more exciting than the desks in our rooms.

Background noise, particularly music, can
be an effective tool for blocking out the expanse of quiet that permits your mind to roam. It also helps to ground you on the task at hand by blocking out the extraneous noises in your environment. Although studies have suggested that Baroque music is a particularly effective backdrop for some kinds of learning, you’ll need to figure out what music, if any, works well for you.

Television typically
creates more distractions than it prevents because of the story line and the message created by accompanying music. But if you’re careful about the specific program you watch, TV can be a useful learning aid. Reruns are probably best because you’ll be less inclined to become distracted by the plot. Some ADDers report using the TV for the dual purposes of intermittent self-reward and a refocus
of wandering attention. They report that periodic glances at the screen interrupts the wandering and grounds them on their work.

Schedule Learning Times:
Try to become aware of the cycles of your internal clock. This isn’t necessarily a simple task, because ADDers typically have fairly unpredictable cycles of arousal and fatigue. But you may find that you are generally more efficient during one
part of your day than another. You need to schedule intense learning during these peak times and leave the car washing for the other times.

Use Color to Maximize Learning:
This is another tip primarily for the visual learner. Adding color to your work space can make use of your strong visual channel. Use a large piece of brightly colored poster board under your paperwork. The color can
pull
in
your focus. Placing a color transparency over a page
in your policy handbook can improve the rate of your reading and the level of comprehension. The transparency makes the text appear sharper and clearer and therefore easier to read.

Walk, Juggle or Ride an Exercise Bike:
Many of us can have extremely small mental fuel storage tanks. As we use up our meager resources of brain fuel, we become
increasingly under-aroused and just plain tired. Sitting down to read anything more complex than a comic book can be an instant sleeping pill! To keep our storage tanks filled, we need to continuously pump in additional fuel. We can often do this by moving.

What about reading while you pedal your exercise bike, or taking a brisk walk with your upcoming meeting notes playing on your tape recorder?
Can you watch a learning video while you do your floor exercises? Any physical activity paired with data input can be helpful for visual, auditory and kinesthetic learners.

Get Comfortable!
There is no right or wrong way to learn despite what you may have been told about sitting up straight and quiet at your desk. If you like to twirl in your desk chair, go ahead and do it. If you prefer standing
up or leaning against the wall, go for it. If you need to chew on toothpicks while you work, that’s okay too.

Go with your instincts and do whatever it takes to facilitate your learning. You know better than anyone else what works for you, so erase the teacher and parent learning advice tapes from your memory bank. Orchestrate your personal learning environment so it works for you.

A Final Word: Learning Disabilities and ADD

Estimates of the number of learning-disabled individuals vary. The U.S. Office of Education estimated in 1978 that there were under two million learning-disabled children. But most specialists disagree, some estimating that there are at least eight million learning-disabled children.

A specific learning disorder is described by the U.S. Department of Education as
“a disorder in one or more of the basic psychological processes involved in understanding and using language, spoken or written, which may manifest itself in an imperfect ability to listen, think, speak, read, write, spell and do mathematical calculations.”

All learning has four components: input, processing, memory and output. A learning disability is a disruption in the learning process within
or between these components. The following chart from the book
The Misunderstood Child
, by Larry Silver, M.D., provides a summary of specific learning disabilities.

Input
/
Perceptual:
A disability in the brain’s interpretation of sensory impulses