Significant dates 1945
1066
1666
1789
Sandwiches 650465
91891This explains why it is that those with the most active minds, those
people who are genuinely interested in a subject, can remember a sur-
prising amount of detail, over a wide range of topics. We all know
friends who don’t seem particularly bright in class, but who, if you get
them on a subject they find really interesting, like baseball, cricket or
football, can recall a staggering amount of detail: batting averages of
players, how many times a particular team has won a particular trophy,
who scored most goals or made the most runs in a season, and so on.
They can even analyse the most complex abstract concept, like a
googly or a flipper in cricket – concepts that are as difficult to picture
in your mind’s eye and then analyse, as any scientific or academic
concept, like a black hole or the conditions likely to bring about an
economic recession. For example, Chambers Dictionarydescribes the
googly as ‘... an off-breaking ball with an apparent leg-break action
on the part of a right-arm bowler to a right-handed batsman, or con-
versely for a left-arm bowler ’.Needs are the secret to learning
and rememberingThe point is that we only learn when we have a need to. It’s easy to
see, then, that those people who appear to know and remember a great
deal are just good at creating needs. Our friend who might not do well
in his college work, can show all the intellectual skills when it comes
to cricket or baseball, because he’s interested in these subjects and,
therefore, he’s better at creating needs in them. Once we’ve created
these we become active, not passive, processors of ideas and infor-
mation, and we begin to create structures out of what we know. Our
minds then take over and begin to self-organise, generating more
structures, which attach to those we first created. And before we
know it we can recall a vast amount of material, that we never thought
possible.162 PlanningHTW21 7/27/01 8:24 AM Page 162