Results of the experiment:

«Dreams & enhancing your skills»

14 december 2021

experiment dreams and autoenhancing of skills

These results may be of interest to people
who want to improve their thinking
and mastery of skills by 17%
in a wide range of areas
by taking 1 minute a day.

How was the experiment carried out?

Read about these steps, especially if you are an experimenter.
As is always the case with experiments, we've got you a bit fooled :)
And thank you very much if you participated in this experiment!

Stage 1

In order to compare the effectiveness of the first stage with the second, participants were asked to start recalling their dreams.

What is the easiest way to start remembering dreams better?

There is a good reception:
tell myself today "Tomorrow I'm remembering my dreams".

So once a day, participants were notified to tell themselves this.

How was the data for this phase collected?
Participants in the experiment wrote details from their dreams. For example:

A huge crane with thick legs
walking over me clumsily

Need to put more thermometers in the box ,
so that the temperature is higher

An excavator was banging on the window with a bucket to wake me up

Stage 2

But there was no stage 2.

The participants in the experiment were told that in the second stage one small detail would be changed.

And to start the second stage, you have to take a break from the first.
No longer have to tell yourself 'I remember my dreams'.
One could even say 'I forget my dreams'.

What was actually measured?

How the phrase "I'll remember my dreams tomorrow" helped me remember my dreams.

Results

The dream recall graph:

dream recall graph
Week 1
"I remember my dreams"
Week 2

Why does one phrase make such a difference to remembering dreams?

This can be explained by the Kaizen effect and Pareto's law.

What is Kaizen?
This is the Japanese philosophy of small steps, used successfully
by both individuals and entire corporations (e.g. Toyota).

The idea is to take a small step regularly (once a day).

This is roughly what Pareto's law is all about:
There is a 20% effort that gets you 80% of the results.
That is, a small step that gives you 80% of the result.

In this experiment, a small step was the phrase 'I remember my dreams'.

How do you use this in your life?

Do a simple experiment.

For example, when you have read a book that is important to you or when you have completed a training session. Just look at your outline once a day for 10 seconds. For a month.

For what?
To focus your brain on this topic. To make him see that it is important to you so he can get a better grasp of the subject.

Your task is to look at the outline regularly for 10 seconds a day.
A month or more (if the topic is large).

And the magic will happen automatically.

Just like when participants in an experiment automatically start remembering dreams after the phrase "I'm remembering my dreams tomorrow." Even when their brains were in a half-asleep state.

What does focusing your attention do for you?

  • Flow state
  • It is easier for you to remember more important information
    (that you thought you would remember for sure)
  • More interesting solutions come to you (e.g. when you look at the project objectives on a daily basis)

When to do the focus

This experiment did not measure this issue.

However, there is an opinion that it works very well
when a person sets tasks in the evening for the morning.

You may be familiar with it yourself when you do something that doesn't work out for you.
It is late at night. You are tired.
You go to bed without having solved the problem.

And then you wake up. And immediately you find a simple solution.

What happened?
You went to bed focused on the task at hand. You slept through it.
And from "somewhere" in the morning, a solution emerged.
It didn't matter what it was. The subconscious mind solved the problem or something else.

The main thing is that focusing in the evening before going to bed works very well.
And that is why many people set tasks from the evening to the morning.
So try to focus closer to the evening.

By the way, we sent out a reminder to the participants of the experiment "I'm remembering my dreams tomorrow" just in the evening.

A plug-in for your focus

Apart from mind maps, we are fanatical about Kaizen, about the focus it provides.

That's why we've combined mind maps with kaizen in a special plug-in for IOctopus mind maps.

What is the point of the plug-in?
Regularly send you an email notification reminding you to look at some kind of mind map.

The point of this experiment is to explain to users of IOctopus mind maps
why this plug-in is needed.

How do I use the plug-in?

When learning something new, or setting goals for a project.

  1. Create a mind map (at least in the abstract).
  2. Set up e-mail reminders with this plug-in.
  3. Look at this map for 10 seconds a day.

Check out the plugin

P.S. So engrossed in writing this text. That even the tea in the thermo-cup got cold.
Probably also because I regularly looked at the mental map with the goals, which included:
"Create an experiment result page" :)

P.P.S. So try this plug-in after all (you probably already have some map) https://ioctopus.online/email-reminder

Author of the article: Roman M.

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