“Imagine If” Mindset; It Can Change Your Life

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The “Imagine If” Mindset

Imagine if you had the ability to remember anything. Imagine if your brain was like a computer and all you needed to do was hit “save” to store information. Imagine if your success depended on your ability to pay attention, use your imagination, and activate both sides of your brain. You would be unstoppable in succeeding at school and work because you would know, without a doubt, that you have a great memory, a powerful memory, and a creative memory.

• Imagine if first graders were trained to recall all 50 states or 45 Presidents and they could repeat those facts consistently. 
• Imagine if every high schooler had the opportunity, to stand side-by-side with health professionals and biomedical scientists as part of his or her curriculum. 
• Imagine if high school freshman excelled in AP courses. 
• Imagine if all college students were encouraged to do a second major. 

All these things would give a person the competitive edge. It would improve their offerings to clients, customers, or patients! Imagine if the grading scale was A+, A, A-, B+, B, and B- and the typical A, B, C, D, and F became obsolete. 

Memory & Medicine

As a physician and a mentor to many future health professional students, I am in the business of improving the quality of one’s life, whether it is one’s health or educational pursuits. I believe that prevention and education are key to keeping our communities healthy and productive. Imagine if we could prevent educational failure by doing supportive interventions early. The key to improving education is to teach people HOW to learn…and to teach them early. 

Education has a direct link to the health of our citizens in the United States. This fact should motivate our government, our educational systems, our health care centers, our health science facilities, and all health-conscious citizens to be motivated agents of change. If we do not intervene, the Institute of Medicine acknowledges, we will face a health care workforce that is too small and critically unprepared to meet their health needs. 

Life expectancy is increasing exponentially. In the very near future, the United States will be home to 131 million individuals age 65 years or older, and 5.3 million individuals that are 100 years or older. Imagine if we planned for this population growth by preparing a new generation of students and teachers excelled in science and math. Instructors of this new generation would provide outreach activities that focus on stimulating, experiential, and cooperative learning, all outside the classroom.  If we modify our educational system, we can change the lives of future generations. We can prepare a workforce that is academically prepared and confident in their delivery of health services. 

Memory experts like Dave Farrow and Sergio Gonzales understand the powerful concept of memory training. They have proposed the idea of democratizing memory training to every student in the United States and the world. This would change the “Imagine If!” to “Yes I Can!” I was fortunate to partner with Dave Farrow, the current Guinness World Record holder for GREATEST MEMORY, to hold the first memory tournament in Tampa, Florida. At that event, students pushed their imaginations to the limit, and they saw for themselves how powerful their memories were as they tried to memorize long lists of numbers, objects, and medical facts.

The concept of democratizing memory training and making it available to as many people as possible is not unique to me but also is advocated by many of the world’s memory experts. 

The Steve Jobs Analogy

I came across a great analogy by Steve Jobs that really makes a lot of sense. In this analogy, Jobs compares a bicycle (which improves the efficiency of the legs) to Apple computers (which increase the effectiveness and accuracy of the brain.) Embracing the imagery of the bicycle and the computer, I thought about how I could prepare students emotionally and academically for the incoming tidal wave of change in health care policy, health care delivery, and demographics. Our future health professionals and health care systems will face a demographic challenge that should motivate us to make the “Imagine-Ifs” become a reality. 

Making brain train accessible to the public is very similar to what Steve Jobs imagined in the early 1980s. I think if Steve Jobs had the same “imagine if” conversation with himself 20 years ago it would have looked something like this:

Imagine if I could have a computer fit in the palm of my hand. Imagine if I could talk on the phone, listen to music, surf the net, and read an email all at the same time! Imagine if I could simultaneously use a calendar, calculator, and camera! Imagine if every phone was a ‘picture phone!’ Imagine if I had a map that told me turn-by-turn directions. Imagine if I could use my fingers to journey from one screen to the other without the aid of a mouse or a stylus. 

Fast-forward 20 years; the bewildering digital concepts proposed by Steve Jobs now become an affirmative statement.  To conceive and imagine the impossible, Steve Jobs had an underlying philosophy about the computer. It was the idea that computers were like bicycles for our minds. It was a remarkable tool that allowed one to go from place to place, using a machine that would enable one to be efficient and very accurate. I think being effective and precise are what students everywhere wish they could experience every day with the volume of information that is thrown at them on their academic journey.

Without a doubt, I could imagine a day when the political will of our administrators would be so determined that students will finally get what they need to ultimately succeed. The results would be students who would be motivated and excited about their course of study because learning had become relevant to their present passions and their future aspirations. Furthermore, their knowledge would be applied immediately, giving them some immediate gratification, which is a staple characteristic of our new generation of students. The concept of “imagine if” is not a fairy tale idea. This concept is a necessity as we live in a world where every professional and corporate environment expects its employees to master skills and knowledge at astronomical rates, and the person who can do that will be the most employable person and the person most likely to be more upwardly mobile. 

The analogy Steve Jobs makes between the bicycle and the computer as it relates to improved efficiency of movement is the same correlation I make between memory training and education. Memory training can ignite and amplify the inherent ability of every person on the face of this earth to learn and remember anything in a very efficient and accurate manner. That is what I can imagine!

From D- to Doctor

Let me share with you my journey as a student and how it embodies the phenomenon of “Imagine If.” As a high school student, I enjoyed studying science and was fascinated by the human body. By 9th grade, I had already learned the names for most of the bones in the human body. I started to dream of becoming a doctor. I began collecting pictures of famous physicians. I read about the path that I would need to take to become a doctor. I spoke with any doctor who would give me the time of day. I even volunteered in a hospital, so I could see and hear the decisions that the doctors had to make.

By the time I got to college, some of my professors, college career counselors told me that I should probably consider another field of study because my GPA wasn’t good enough, and my medical college admission test scores was not high enough to get me into medical school. I was discouraged but not completely deterred. I kept on dreaming and fighting through my course work, and I was able to improve my GPA and my test scores. My determination paid off, and I was finally able to get interviews at a few medical schools, but I was denied admission. Despite these rejections, I vividly remembered a good friend telling me that if I wanted something badly enough and long enough and could imagine it, then I would be willing to do whatever it took to be successful. Well, this young man kept on watching his dream every day on a paper he glued to the wall, where he wrote “Future Doctor.” I also would observe a nameplate on my study desk showing “Dr. Frederick.” To bring the realization of my future, I decided to start working for a very famous hospital in Washington, D.C. as a respiratory therapist. This environment allowed me to talk to more physicians in training and also see what the real world of medicine was like at one of the busiest hospitals in the United States. The more I enveloped myself in every aspect of this medical environment, the more I saw myself as being a physician one day. After better preparation and an improved GPA, I was finally accepted into medical school, but my journey had just begun.

As a first-year medical student sitting in the large lecture hall in my first semester at Loma Linda University, I was both excited and scared at the same time. After all, I had never been in class with more than 30 people, and suddenly, I was thrust into a class with 170 students. I was overwhelmed, not only by the number of students, but also by the sheer volume of information that my professors in threw at me. My confidence began to wane. After getting a few bad test scores back, I toyed with the idea of giving up. I realized that there was an inverse relationship between how much time I studied and how high my grades were on the tests. Yours truly would go to his apartment feeling like a failure who should quit. I would do negative self-talk, which sounded like this: “If this is first year and you are flunking, what do you think the second semester and the second year will bring? You need to quit now, buddy.” 

I would continue to say to myself, “you only have 24 hours in a day; you think you could honestly get all this studying done in 24 hours? Think again, Doctor-to-be.” Day in and day out, I contemplated quitting, but I remembered a saying that my dad would repeat almost on a weekly basis, which was “Winners never quit, and quitters never win.” Well, I was not a quitter. I had always imagined being a doctor, and my imagination had taken me from working in a hospital as a high school student to the halls of one of Southern California’s finest medical schools, and this dream of becoming a doctor was 3 years away. 

After weeks of frustration and emotional fatigue, I had 2 choices to make. I had to decide whether I was going to study the same way, using mnemonics and repetition of facts and reading the same passages three to four times over, or whether I was going to figure out what in the world was needed to memorize and understand everything. Day in and day out, to and from class, I would repeat to myself, “Dexter, you need to find a different way by doing something else.” I imagined how my academic life could be transformed if I could find a magic formula to make my memory perfect. 

Little did I know my wish would soon come true and it would change everything! My “imagine-ifs” made me understand that there had to be a better way to study, and that better way was revealed to me in a 45-minute infomercial late one night. The topic was “how to have a better memory.” After sacrificing 45 precious minutes of study time that medical students never have to spare, I shouted at the top of my lungs, “Yes, yes, yes!” From that moment, my mindset changed. I realized if I placed a little effort into retraining my brain and learning habits, things would be different. My “Imagine- If” mindset had taught me how my memory works. I was motivated to enhance my memory and improve my low-test scores. Although I had little time and money, I bought every book and video sold by the infomercial. I applied the memory techniques with such ferocity that one would think I had to prepare a report to the President of the United States or teach a class related to memory.

Let me share with you my journey of discovery of how my fear of failing changed to amazing confidence. Let me have you imagine something with me. Imagine we visit a large cancer research center together, and we are standing in front of a large file cabinet that is filled with microscopic slides of every human body tissue, such as slides from pancreas, brain, bones, etc. Furthermore, there is a designated age group for each slide. Now imagine if I asked you to locate the slide that has the cardiac muscles of a 50-year-old. Do you think you would be able to find those slides quickly? I absolutely think so! Why?

I think so because more than likely the drawers and files carrying those slides are systematically, organized by body systems and the specific organ system that goes along with the age group of the cardiac muscles tissue. You see, our brains need that same process of organization for our memories to be most effective in storing and recalling information. 

So, this is what I did. After learning all the proven concepts in memory development, I developed a medical anatomical file folder system which I, myself, created. I call it the L.I.V.E.R. System.

L.I.V.E.R. is an acronym that represent 5 major tools I needed to develop an instant recall of my anatomy concepts, the biochemical pathway taught in biochemistry, or details of diseases taught in pathophysiology. Consistently, using this system made my brain more efficient like the bicycle I spoke of earlier. 

So, what is my L.I.V.E.R. System?

L stands for Location

I stands for Imagery

V stands for Visualization

E stands for Exaggeration

R stands for Review, Rehearse, and Repetition 

One of the ways you can remember the impact of my file system is to remember one of the amazing functions of the liver. The liver has the amazing ability to regenerate itself which makes surgeries like liver transplants possible. When people donate half their livers to someone who needs it, the remaining part of the liver regenerates the donated part. This concept of redevelopment of a body organ is what I did with my brain, and that is what you can do with yours.

The first thing on the list is location or a place to put my ideas or subject matter. Part of the organization is placing these ideas and subjects in a location that is very familiar to me, such as my apartment or college campus or place of employment. If I place pieces of information in places I know well, then the information will have a location that will not be lost. Furthermore, if I attach or connect what I want to learn using crazy imagery with unique images that include strange colors, unimaginable heights, shapes, and textures, then I could create a memorable, unforgettable movie scene. The addition of descriptive terms and displays of color allows me to visualize in 3-D what I want to retain and remember. The next letter in my acronym is “E” for exaggeration. This concept pushes me to stretch my imagination by using loud noises, making weird body motions, creating a highly unreal story that is inappropriate for the context of what I want to remember. Now with each concept, I would then review, rehearse and repeat what I just developed in my mind to make the concept stick, simply giving me a photographic memory that I developed. This was an awe-inspiring revelation for me and you too can develop these skills and experience these skills that will make you unstoppable. Imagine, if you can do that, how your life would change. 

I have used the L.I.V.E.R. Principle throughout my medical school and residency training. An example I can share with you has to do with my memorization of a very common biochemical pathway called the Krebs Cycle or the Citric Acid Cycle. This was a phenomenal Nobel Prize winning discovery in the 1950’s on how cells produce and use energy and, therefore, is a very favorite and important lecture for all biochemistry professors. If you look below, this is what I had to know forward and backward.

If you see this for the first time as a biochemistry student or a first-year medical student, it can look very intimating, but remember about using a brain file to organize it. How did I do it? Well, I first used the power of pictures, and I then linked my pictures with a weird, ridiculous story that corresponded to the sequential order of the cycle. Here is what it looks like. On the right below, there are pictures, and on the left, there is a story of how I am going to use those pictures.