As a NaNoWriMo winner last year, I received a sweet deal on a subscription to Great Courses Plus. I signed up for it because it had a series on Philosophy of Mind. My thinking was that if I couldn’t read my Philosophy of Mind texts and course work from 2012 well enough to remember, maybe I could watch a series of short video lectures and learn that way. It sort of worked. I couldn’t watch a 30-minute lecture in one go, and I didn’t remember much better. Actually, I don’t recall any of what I watched.
As regular readers know, I spent the summer relearning how to read with comprehension and began reading Philosophy of Mind again, this time being able to understand, remember, and extrapolate. Still, it’s tough. I can read only a few or two paragraphs at a time. So before my subscription ran out, I thought I’d re-watch the 30-minute lecture on Descartes and dualism to augment my reading.
Well. That was different!
I created imagery as I watched, just like I do when reading. It was kind of automatic, which is a really good sign that my brain has changed as a result of my reading rehab ie Visualizing and Verbalizing with Lindamood-Bell. I used a lot of the imagery I had created while reading Descartes’s meditations and some of the related course work.
The most astounding part: I understood the lecture at a much deeper level than I had prior to my summer of learning how to visualize and verbalize what I read. This week, I remembered bits he mentioned in his lecture that I hadn’t known or remembered from when I first watched his lecture or took the Philosophy of Mind course back in 2012 (what I’ve reread of the course so far didn’t mention the bits I learnt from the video lecture). I was able to connect the dots, almost seamlessly. I also watched the entire lecture.
I’m actually watching shows and movies with fewer stoppages, too.
As a result, it was far more enjoyable — the mental work paid off. Just like with reading. The only thing I didn’t do properly was verbalize what I’d watched: speak out loud a word summary, tell myself the main idea, ask myself higher-order thinking questions. I should do that next time.
When you can watch or read with comprehension, it’s not a chore, it’s not disheartening, it’s rewarding.
So since I was again a NaNoWriMo winner and Great Courses Plus again offered a discount and this time in Canadian dollars, too, I re-subscribed so I could start watching the lectures all over again. And this year finish the series.
