Improving learning skills through memory techniques can be a valuable tool to fight against the loss of cognitive functions associated with aging. Could learning tarot improve your brain health? That is what we’re going to explore.
Learning tarot to overcome memory loss
Just as muscles need stimulation, the mind needs to be continually learning. This encourages cell regeneration and helps make sense of the neurochemical and electrical processes that continuously occur in an active brain. When we are born, neuroplasticity is at its peak as we’re dazzled by colors, words, landscapes and new emotions.
In adulthood, we develop a tendency to seek comfortable sensations and routine emotions to strengthen our sense of stability. This results in low brain stimulation, depression, and a sedentary lifestyle that leads to a plethora of symptoms and health problems throughout our society: diabetes, depression, dementia and Alzheimer’s.
Avoiding these cycles of inactivity is possible when new passions are incorporated into the repertoire of activities in our lives. Whether taking dance lessons, classes to learn another language, or learning to decipher the Jungian enigmas that hide in the tarot, the important thing is to keep the brain awake and busy establishing new connections between each cognitive department.
This article presents an option for those who seek to improve their memory, prevent degenerative brain diseases, and stimulate their minds by using tools and techniques to increase retention. To do so, we will use a cluster of knowledge that exerts a peculiar fascination on the human brain: the tarot.
How learning tarot could improve your brain health
We start with the idea that the tarot does not have healing powers per se although it may, as a symbolic system, help to reveal secrets of the unconscious in the Jungian psychology approach.
However, learning to read it, getting in touch with its symbology, establishing connections between trumps, memorizing the relationship between them, enrolling in a tarot school, sharing with other students, and creating personal interpretations of each card are all activities that require the development of acute mental agility.
All these processes – like learning a new language or a modern dance style, joining a book club, or directing a scout group – will move you, pull you out of your comfort zone, help you make new friendships, and generate entirely new sparks among dendrites that never had the opportunity to meet before.
Memory techniques to improve brain health
Using memory techniques is a convenient way to facilitate the study of tarot trumps. Their effectiveness will increase over time, as the brain gets used to establishing certain types of “bridges” between compartments of information.
Mnemonics: What are they?
The idea behind using mnemonics is to encode difficult-to-remember information in a way that is much easier to recall. Consider that the human mind has evolved over hundreds of thousands of years to be what it is today. The development of the written word is quite recent in comparison to our brain evolution.
Adapted to the nature that surrounds it, our brain is specially programmed to decode and understand the information contained in images, sounds, colors, sensations, flavors, touch, shapes, and structures. That is why we remember so vividly specific landscapes or flavors of our childhood, while it is more difficult for us to memorize a simple direction.
Of course, we can develop sophisticated memories and get licensed in natural science, go to space, and calculate the structure of a building. But it is much easier to remember the rhythm of a song than arithmetic formulas.
Knowing these shortcuts helps the brain remember using the senses rather than through rationality. We can rely on the instinct to code and evoke memories easily.
In this sense, try to remember the Arcane #0 The Fool. Remembering what we have read in a book will be faster if, at the time of reading it, we try to remember a person or experience in our own life that brings us closer to the nature of this symbolical cluster.
In the same way, the knowledge we already have of the symbols around us can help us to interpret what is before our eyes. Make personal connections and find what each card means to you.
Presenting a letter to a patient with dementia or Alzheimer’s can open the way to know their interpretation of reality. It could work as a method not only of learning and improve memory, but to heal discomforts that are hidden in their psychic world and the impairment in brain communication worsens.
Using Your Whole Mind to Remember is the key to strengthening memory through mnemonics. If you see the Moon tarot card, what song comes to your mind? What colors do you associate with the characteristics of The Tower? Regarding the V of coins, I would invite you to remember if you ever have been in a blizzard? That feeling can help you understand the concept that particular card wants to convey.
Vivid images such as those that compose the deck of cards are ideal for creating associations between all brain memory compartments because they represent situations common to the experience of any human life, coded with symbols that are easily interpretable and simple to remember.
Tricks to learn tarot and encourage memory:
When you are studying any discipline, in this case, Tarot, and want to combat the degenerative processes of memory stimulating brain regeneration, use the following tricks:
- Use positive, pleasant images to related contents. The brain tends to block information that we dislike, which is why some cards, lessons, and assignments are more difficult for us to understand.
- The more colorful and attractive you find the designs the easier it will be to remember the content, in the same way, dressing to your liking to do sports or practice dance, will make you feel comfortable and provide the basis for the learning process to be more natural.
- Try humor as a tool for learning and teaching. Songs, funny memories and verbal associations improve the ability to remember.
