While in the military, I took part in an accelerated engineering study involving chemistry, physics, thermodynamics, fluid flow, and mathematics.
Our weeks consisted of 40 hours of classroom instruction. This was mostly an instructor talking at full speed and filling a blackboard with notes which we burned our notepads trying to collect all of before the next set was replacing them.
After class, most students put in between 30 to 50 hours per week of study to try and make sense of the collective notes recieved throughout the day.
My learning methods are not very ... photogenic, to use a term out of context. I require a deep understanding and learn on a more intuitive level than verbatim recall.
Unfortunately, for the military, most tests were graded on a per-word basis for all terms and definitions, concepts, essays, and non-formulae. The tests were literally graded by deducting points for each word or phrase not directly recalled from our notes.
No matter how well the paraphrased answer represented the true meaning of the question, only partial credit would be awarded.
So, rather than try to write on the inside of my eyelids, (or come to class with an uzi and demand a better grade) I employed a little reverse osmosis(filters and all).
Every night before I fell asleep, I would instruct myself to process the material while I slept, and make it readily available to my conscious when an appropriate question was presented.
This was done with a working state (much like the Advanced Learning State; which, in truth, is an NLP working trance, or state of focused meditation [for the martial practitioners]) I layed out instructions for my mind and triggers that would activate those instructions (i.e. "pour out the notes when you see the appropriate question on a test", and "figure out what on earth I wrote in my notes today, will ya?")
On test days, I would answer the questions without really thinking on a conscioius level (any more than simply reading them and solving the mathematical equations) and just scribbled whatever came out instead.
I was highly successful with this. I could not visually recall the notes or documents, and did not have a highly conscious realization of the material; however, I could pour out the definitions and essay answers without fail (as long as no one asked me what I wrote afterwards). I finished in the top third of my class(10% of personnel entering the program reach graduation), taking away the intuitive understanding of the concepts that I needed to perform well in service, and leaving behind the vocabulary and dead forests of notes.
Not Photo Reading, in its greatest form, but food for thought.
