Exams are looming, and you’re starting to sweat. Your neatly choreographed revision schedule has disintegrated into a frenzied nightmare of last minute cramming. Your room is awash in a deluge of scrawled post it notes and the meagre residues of shattered dreams. The situation is dire. Attempts to bolster your ability to study with cute things like Classic FM and breaks for fresh air are starting to look increasingly futile in the face of imminent Tripos assessment.

Beleaguered students, step away from those hacksaws. Help is most definitely at hand. An unlikely formula for exam success, a strategy to capitalise on the power of your imagination so that you can sit down fresh, supremely confident and without the weighty blight of unnecessary bloodshed on your magnificently agile mind. There’s nothing shady involved. No magic pills. No dark alley organ donations. All you have to do, to boost the effectiveness of your revision a hundredfold, is to spend a few minutes every day looking at some pictures.

"How so?" you cry. Well, according to colour theorists, if you can bring yourself to suspend your cynicism and stick up some nice skies courtesy of Constable and a few poppy fields à la Jean Marc, you’ll be laughing. Apparently blue, with its traditional association with the sea and sky, encourages unlimited creativity. Red, on the other hand, is the colour of danger, warning and correction. It plunges us into a heightened state of vigilance and awareness, boosting memory and recall as a result. Or so the story goes.

As ever, please be cautious with your googling. A search for a nice horizon or seascape can take a hideous turn, and you’ll end up staring at page upon page of violent, crashing waves and tumultuous skies. In your fragile and caffeine-addled state, a nicely timed glimpse of a Hokusai or the wildly roiling 'Starry Night' will most definitely send you over the edge. Search for red and you’ll no doubt run into Dali’s elephants, teetering against a bloody sunset. It might come to your jaded attention that the prospect of those brittle pachyderms actually crossing the desert is a lot like your chances of passing your exams – i.e incredibly slim.

If you’re still on the fence about colour theory actually providing any sort of improvement to your study sessions (and really, who could blame you?) you could adopt an alternative but no less artsy revision strategy, and look for inspiration in images of intellectual greats. Check out Rodin’s 'The Thinker' or Baishi’s study of a hardworking apprentice. Try not to succumb to the creeping unease that they were working a lot harder than you are now, and that human civilisation is basically going to hell in a handcart.

The subject of Michael Sweerts' 'An Old Man Studying Shells' provides a perfect example of an enthusiast involved in intensive study. By God does that old man love shells. If only you’d put half as much effort into learning the fundamentals of aerodynamics as he did into looking intently at flotsam, you’d be approaching your exams with a steady confidence instead of crying under your desk at 3am and cramming your face with Lotus spread. As Leonardo Da Vinci once said: "Slackers, you reap what you sow."

To make your pictorial inspirations more personal, why not put up a photo of your favourite subject related hero? History students could stick up a nice snap of Churchill, all plump and jowly. You’ll look up in desperation, and if you’ve taken enough Pro Plus, he’ll smile benevolently and utter a nice sound bite about killing things on beaches, which should spur you on to read a couple of hundred more words, because actually, in the grand scheme of things, you’ve got it pretty easy. If science is your thing, don’t be a sheep and stick up one of those trashy pictures of Einstein with his tongue out. Everybody who's anybody knows the ticket to success lies in a lavish pin up of Carl Sagan.

Life imitates art, they say. In a perfect world, you’d surround yourself with beautiful, vibrant images and photographs, a dazzling coterie of the best and the brightest, the great and the good. Through a kind of visual osmosis they’d enter your consciousness and coax you towards a formidable and untraversed plane of intellectual excellence. You’d enter the exam hall in a state of zen like calm, open your paper with reverence, and achieve.