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The Rainbow With The Pot Of Gold

We live in a world where ‘education' and the accumulation of skills have assumed fanatical proportions. We tch tch at heavy school bags, but continue putting noses to the grindstone. Always in the hope of the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. Except, that in the first decade of the 2000's the way to that pot is no luminescent rainbow. And the sad part is, it needn't be so. The proof of the pudding -- the training experience of companies including U.S.A.-based AT & T's National Product Training Centre and Audi, IBM and Seimens in Germany; Pentagon's Institute of Defense Analysis; and teacher Charles Gritton's efforts in a Des Moines ghetto school that became a case study of success.

Putting the ‘no pain, no gain' credo of learning to shame is the concept of accelerated learning, perhaps more famous as ‘superlearning' following breakthroughs made by Sheila Ostrander, Lynn Schroeder and Nancy Ostrander since the 1970's. However, the ball was actually set rolling about a decade before they started. It was behind the Iron Curtain in the 1960's that Dr. Georgi Lozanov, a Bulgarian psychiatrist, first applied suggestion and relaxation techniques to classroom learning and termed these methods ‘Suggestopedia'. These pioneering techniques engendered and gave impetus to what we now know as Suggestive – Accelerative Approaches to Learning.

Accelerated learning believes that the human brain can work at least two to five times faster (‘superlearning') and retain more and for longer periods (‘supermemory' or ‘hypermnesia') if it is put into the ‘right state' of "relaxed alertness" (therefore non-stress, therefore pleasure) for learning. In a nutshell, it works by addressing our unconscious as well as our conscious mind, exploiting the power of our own imagination since it has been found that a trained imagination helps learn better – thereby aiding in accessing what are termed as the "success patterns" in our bodies, minds and emotions.

Significantly,...