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December 16, 2019

Upgrade Your Brain: LSAT Test Mentality and You

Upgrade Your Brain: LSAT Test Mentality and You

Stressing about the LSAT? Dreading practice tests? Everyone suffers from some degree of test anxiety. It’s completely natural and having a healthy recognition of the gravity of the test can be a helpful motivator. But, did you know you have an LSAT prep superpower?

Your Hidden Superpower

There’s an excellent TEDx Talk by Dr. Rock Hanson titled Hardwiring Happiness. Dr. Hanson is a neuroscientist who focuses on issues relating to neuroplasticity. Unfortunately, there’s not pseudo-science elixir for instant intelligence and memory boosts. But, you can hack your brain and use the practice of purposeful attention to change how you perceive events and feel about your circumstance.

Dr. Hanson believes we can use the concept of neuroplasticity to help us deal with stressful situations more effectively. The thought is that less stress will generally lead to happier lives. The human brain retains the structure of the brains our earliest hunter-gatherer ancestors had. When we experience stress, our body releases the hormone cortisol. This hormone stimulates the amygdala, which Dr. Hanson refers to as the “alarm bell of the brain.” As we continue to encounter stressful situations, we become more sensitive to stress. Apparently, the brain is “very good at learning from bad experiences, but bad at learning from good ones.” This is because our ancestors had to learn from bad experiences that were life-or-death. They needed their brains to be like Velcro for the bad. The problem today is that our brains also tend to be like a Teflon non-stick pan for the good.

Through research, we know that cortisol eats away at the hippocampus. In some people, the loos is as great as 25%! This means that people under chronic stress lose some ability to tap into their visual/spatial memory. But here’s the good part. Not only does the brain change, but you can change your brain. Just like chronic exposure to stress can eat away at your capabilities, chronic exposure to good experiences gives you great resilience when you face negative events. This ultimately helps you cope with stress and avoid the damage it can cause.

How to Hack Your Brain

Remember when I said that our brains are like Velcro for bad experiences and like Teflon for good experiences? We can change this property by being intentional about the way we fix our attention on good experiences. Instead of letting a good experience simply pass you by without consideration, stop and savor the experience!

Dr. Hanson believes that if we hold the positive experience in our thoughts for 15 to 20 seconds, we can move our consciousness of that experience from our short term memory buffers to long term storage. Doing this forces neurons associated with pleasant experiences to fire more frequently. And, “as neurons fire together in particularly patterned ways, it changes the structure of the brain.” The neural pathways start creating new connections with each other and they become stronger and more receptive. Little by little, we change our brains from Teflon to Velcro when it comes to positive emotions.

How This Can Relate to the LSAT

How can this help you with the LSAT? Think for a moment about how you feel when you start a practice test or begin a Logic Game. When you turn the page in the Logical Reasoning section, do you experience a positive or a negative emotion? Perhaps you’ve never consciously considered how you feel while you’re taking the test. Our guess is that, for most people and possibly you, the feeling is not good.

Thoughts of doubt, inadequacy, shame, and pressure rage to the surface. Am I smart enough? Will I ever be a lawyer, or should I leave that dream behind? These are all thoughts that hound us as we take a test like the LSAT. It triggers anxiety and releases cortisol into our brains. Some level of short-term stress can be extremely helpful, but those are the feelings you don’t control and can’t harness. Negative emotions decrease your performance and distract you from the game/passage/stimulus in front of you.

You can change the ones that affect you in the moment. Don’t let yourself succumb to them and try to do more than cope with them! Train your brain to respond positively to the LSAT. Instead of focusing your energy on your failures while studying, pay attention to your successes. Savor the feeling of success when you get a question right. Hold on to that satisfaction for fifteen or twenty seconds and truly experience it. Do this every time you do drills or take practice tests. If not for every question you get right, at least some of them, perhaps the more difficult ones. Even when you miss a question, give yourself some credit for the things you did right, even if you ultimately got the question wrong.

Over time, little by little, this process will reprogram your brain for the better, creating neural pathways that improve the way you experience the test. You can replace your seemingly instantaneous and unconscious negative responses to the LSAT with positive ones. This doesn’t mean that you ignore your problem areas or simply pass over the questions you got wrong. Just don’t let them bog you down. Don’t view them as failures, but rather as opportunities to learn more about the test and to improve your next performance. Much of how we experience the events of our lives is a choice. For the LSAT, and all things, choose to be positive.

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Posted by PowerScore Test Prep / Studying / LSAT Prep, Mentality Leave a Comment

  • Michael Sellis
    November 19, 2015 at 2:59am

    Wow. I have been battling this for months now. I must say after reading this I feel ready and able to conquer this LSAT. Thank you for this great post

  • Jon Denning
    November 24, 2015 at 5:26pm

    Really glad to hear you found this post helpful! Mentality plays a huge role in test day success, so stay positive and keep up the hard work!

  • jackie campbell
    December 03, 2015 at 3:49pm

    2 more days until the test….been studying hard for 3 months now…..really is my only opportunity to prepare (husband has totally taken over the childrearing duties to help me prepare….now he goes back to work)..anyway….I have been doing fairly well up until a few days ago. Yesterday I totally flopped the practice test…I cannot seem to see the big picture of any problems….anxiety for sure. Any suggestions. thanks

  • Henry Mabee
    December 03, 2015 at 7:28pm

    Jackie, I’m right there with you. I’ve taken less hours at work for the last 6 weeks and I started out with great improvement and as of the last two tests I’ve taken I’ve just flopped them. I think perhaps focusing on the individual questions and treating them as separate 1min sections can help. I tired this approach on a times section (not an entire test) and it worked out great. Just translating on to a test can be daunting because of all that we think we should get right. I wish you luck!

  • Jon Denning
    December 03, 2015 at 10:39pm

    Hey Jackie – thanks for the message, and I’m sorry to hear you had a rough time with a test yesterday. Fortunately, my colleagues and I are all too familiar with this scenario (“fortunately” for us in that we know it well, not “fortunately it happens”), and have actually written a fair amount about this exact issue.

    For instance, Dave Killoran wrote an excellent article on the, admittedly counterintuitive, benefits of failure, where he outlines how setbacks can be used as valuable experiences.

    Additionally, Nikki has talked at length about the utility in a “bombed” practice test.

    And finally, to hopefully keep your spirits up and your mind right, Dave put together a great list of resources/links on test mentality that I think anyone a few days out from the LSAT would be well-served to consider: http://blog.powerscore.com/lsat/5-days-to-the-lsat-the-ultimate-test-men…

    So please take some time to go over those articles and lists and let the advice there lift your spirits, and your confidence, before test day!

  • Makenzie Strottner
    January 29, 2016 at 7:07pm

    Interesting post! Mentally preparing yourself for a large test is just as important as actually studying. Obviously studying for the LSAT can be extremely stressful, but putting unnecessary stress on yourself might actually cause you to do worse. Stress can activate the body’s Fight-or-Flight response. Because the brain is interpreting your anxiety over the test as a danger, your body is automatically responding by diverting blood flow from your brain and fine motor functions (like writing) and sending it instead to your heart, lungs, and major muscle groups so that you can either fight or escape the perceived danger. The good news is that with proper conditioning, you can overcome the body’s Fight-or-Flight Response in a testing environment. Programs that use mental conditioning get the brain used to functioning properly in high-stress situations. An excellent mental conditioning tool is eyeQ by Infinite Mind. The program uses neuroplasticity training to change the way your brain reads and processes information. It gets more of your brain active so that as you read you are recording the information quicker, storing it into memory, and processing it so that it’s ready to use. EyeQ has also been known to increase performance on tests by up to 20%. The seven minute, daily eyeQ training exercises will not only help you overcome test anxiety, but can help increase your LSAT score!

  • Emily
    November 20, 2016 at 10:42pm

    Jackie, it’s a year later and I am in the exact same boat! How did you do on the test and are you a law student now???

  • Shalev Netanel
    June 09, 2018 at 6:18am

    This post transcends LSAT prep. I can’t wait to apply this to my life. Thanks!

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