Thinking like David Olusoga transforms and enriches the way you experience the world around you. Buildings, artefacts and documents literally spring into life and you can step into their story. When you begin to think like David even a task like reviewing invoices in a finance audit can become fun.
This article delves into the nature and transformative impact of adopting a mind akin to David's. Starting with history, it extends this exploration to broader life applications, illustrating how such a perspective not only enriches personal experiences and fosters genuine empathy, but also significantly improves memory and comprehension abilities. And yes, how even mundane tasks like processing invoices can be captivating. Furthermore, the piece advocates for a progressive shift in educational strategies, moving beyond the mere integration of virtual reality, to emphasise the intentional cultivation of critical and innovative ways of thinking.
I dropped history at school at the earliest opportunity. My experience of history was relentlessly copying what the teacher wrote on the blackboard. She wrote quickly, as there was a lot to cover. She wrote on a revolving blackboard, and you received a stony faced look of distain if you asked her to slow down because the bit you were copying had disappeared over the top. If you asked twice, playtime would rapidly become classroom detention.
Contrast that with the experience of children learning about World War Two using virtual reality to fly a Lancaster bomber in a bombing raid over enemy territory. Imagine how much more real it feels to be part of a large squadron, with your friends operating the guns and bomb doors or flying the aeroplanes around you. Seeing the search lights seeking you out in the night sky, with the clouds glowing orange from the fires below. You’re flying between the flashes of streaking light, the tracer fire trying to shoot you down. Not all of you will make it back.
How much more would you learn and remember?
If you were David Olusoga, you wouldn’t need a VR headset. In fact, the experience of VR would be missing much. Imagine looking at an old flight log from WWII in a museum, and from that two-dimensional document…
Starting your own imagined VR version of the flight, but with the smell, the discomfort, the cold, the vibrations, the nausea, the fear; but going much deeper, further and wider.
Imagining the walk to the plane, imagining being that age, knowing you’re unlikely to see another year, the banter suppressing your fear, the feel of the lucky charm that you hope will bring you home safe again. Imagining the experience of your plane being hit, of a journey to the ground over enemy lines, the impact…
Experiencing your journey, from leaving home to flying bombers over enemy lines, the train journey to the base, the first night in the dorms, the training, the first time you took over the controls, your first landing, the first real bombing run…. Imagine your family context, the conversation with your mother as you left for the base, the pride of your father that can only be felt from the photo on the mantel, he has already given his life for queen and country.
Imagine your social context, the school you had just left, the apprenticeship you had just started. Contrasting that with the discourse of the leaders in the austere corridors, in the war room, the contrast of their circumstances. What goes through your mind as you send millions to the front line? Something? Nothing? Numbers?
Wider still; how and why are we at war? What was the context? How were those in power thinking and feeling? What’s driving you, and why and how are you making such monumental decisions?
A full 360 degree experience of all the senses, with visceral connection each emotion.
With this way of thinking, history is personal, and you can’t help but care deeply. It’s like watching a film or a TV series. When we get to know the main characters and their backstories—their hopes, dreams and sadnesses—we associate into their narratives and feel emotion when they come to harm. By contrast, we hardly notice or register the plight of the extras in a movie.
In David’s way of thinking, every historical detail—birth or death certificate, eviction notice, court document, etc.—is a ticket to his own internal cinema, and every person on screen is a main character. There are no extras here that fall by the wayside. The authenticity that we sense when David is presenting history comes from stepping into his detailed imagining of narratives—known scientifically as embodied simulation—which create a deep sense of connection and care for the people involved. His words, in a very literal sense, are not empty rhetoric, instead they are filled with a rich embodied experience of the narratives explored.
“As a writer of history if you don't really care about these people, then I think you've got no business expecting a reader or the audience of a TV programme, to care, you have to really want to meet these people…
…we can't talk to the dead, but we can listen to them. And we can try to feel something of what they felt. So to me, it is all for me, it is about caring, I really, really want to know about these people, I visit the graves of people …because I need to in some way, transport myself and not just think about what they said and what they did. But what it meant to them emotionally…for me is all about those shiver down the spine moments…
…there are places on the Western Front where if you can't feel the presence of a generation of doomed youth, then I think there's something wrong with you…
… fields where you can see fragments of metal. And if you think for a second what that metal did, or might have done, and you can't connect with the horror of what happened in Flanders, a century ago, then maybe history is not for you…
...we think of documents and archives as boring places where boring people do boring stuff. Well, actually, if you really understand the story and the people behind the document, there's nothing like opening a document and seeing the signatures and seeing the names of people who again, were just as real as we are just as actual as we are. And those documents very often are the turning points the corner turns in their lives. Did they live or did they die? Did their child live or did their child die? Were they ruined, or did they become wealthy? That spin of the dial moment with a document can be immensely powerful.”
David Olusoga.
Enriching Life Experiences
I was recently walking on a beach in Cornwall. It was low tide, and the broken hull of a boat was exposed. I thought I had been curious. I had looked at the wreckage and in my mind's eye tried to make sense of what I was looking at by reconstructing the boat, mentally filling in the structure and missing parts of the boat.
At that time, having arrived at a plausible solution, I felt pleased with myself. Now, having some insight to the way someone like David would have experienced the same encounter, I realise I missed so much first time around. Questions left unasked and so unanswered.
Questions such as, why did the fishermen go to sea in dangerous conditions? Did the weather conditions suddenly change and catch them out? How safe was the boat? What decisions faced the captain? Did the crew lose hope? When did they know the boat was going to sink? Did they get off in time…were there multiple generations from the same family on board…was there a rescue…?
Each question affords the possibility of stepping into and experiencing enriched, informative, and memorable, albeit distressing experiences from multiple perspectives. If I had taken that opportunity in the morning, perhaps that afternoon I would have looked at the boats in the harbour, and thought about the people that were preparing them to go to sea, a little differently.
Memory & Comprehension
When you run rich mental simulations of events and experience the attending emotions, those events become memorable. If you read our article on comprehension, you'll remember that it's possible to significantly improve comprehension and retention by mentally simulating the narrative in a book, comparing the choices of the main character with those you would have made in that same situation, and/or comparing the wider life story of a character to your own.
Many memory methods work because they attach new knowledge to existing schema in the brain, e.g. imagining items on a shopping list being in strange places on a regular walk you do. The richest schema you have is your own life, so if, like David, you make comparisons to your own decision-making and life circumstances, your comprehension and retention of events will be well above the norm.
Interesting Invoices
At the beginning we said if you think like David, reviewing invoices in a finance audit can be fun, or at least interesting. This is because in the same way a flight log is a moment in a story that can be bought life, an invoice is also connected to a bigger narrative that can also be mentally simulated.
An invoice represents an input to a production process? What does that process look like? What else is needed for that process to run? Are there equivalent invoices for that? Are they in proportion? Based on the quantity on the invoice, what is the scale of production / factory you expecting to see? Is this a new or traditional material, so how innovative is the company? All these questions relate to a living process, full of people with different perspectives. They can be explored in the same way David explores a local narrative that surrounds an historic document.
Unfortunately, maths in school quickly becomes detached from what the numbers, ratios and formula represent in the world. It becomes an abstract set of rules to follow, and is rarely re-attached to what it's explaining in the real world. In the end, the only thing to know is have you got the right answer? When it should be about do the numbers literally - make sense - is the story they tell, the one that happened, or is happening?
An Invitation to be Curious
Next time you travel along a regular path, see if you can see something you have never noticed before, then consider its story. What if you looked at a bank statement as something more than a set of figures to check and balance, perhaps as a record of interesting events and times? What else can you see life through?