Building
The Backstory:
In my last blog, we got a chance to meet learning expert Jim Kwik and explored some of the ideas behind SuperheroYou, which is the Kwik-founded open-source community/university devoted to accelerated learning and brain optimization.
In May of this year, Kwik and SuperheroYou teamed up with Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh and the Downtown Vegas project
to host a super-learning super-summit in, of course, downtown Las
Vegas. It was a best-of-the-best gathering. Kwik sought out an assembled
a collection of extraordinary minds to share their high performance
learning hacks.
In the last post,
we covered a small example of exactly this kind of brain optimizing
hack: novelty. Our brains crave novelty. As a result, if you are trying
to remember where you put your car keys, having an image of them 60 feet
tall and dressed in drag helps. Mental exaggeration is a simple
learning hack—a way of using the brain’s fundamental attraction to
novelty as a way to optimize memory.
In this post, we’re going to examine a couple of similar tricks, one
as a way to hack speed reading; the second as a way to accelerate
problem solving, but before we can get into those details, first the
“fish story.”
Hacking Reading
The fish story goes like this: A while back, Jim Kwik bumped into one
of his old speed reading students (again, for more on Kwik and his
reading talents, see my previous post) who told him he had just reread one of his favorite books using Kwik’s techniques.
The book in question was Hemingway’s classic The Old Man and the Sea. What had surprised the student the second time through was the vividness of the experience .
“He said he could feel the hot sun beating down on his shoulders as
he read,” explains Kwik. “That he could actually hear the sound of the
waves crash. It was amazing, he loved the whole book, except what he
really couldn’t deal with was the smell of the fish.”
Where this fish smell comes from and what it has to do with
accelerated learning is where this fish story gets interesting—but
before we can get there we have to first cover a few speed reading
techniques.
Over the course of his career, Kwik has discovered a few key reasons
why most people read slowly, with back-skipping (re-reading passages
over and again) and lack of focus among the most common.
The easiest way to solve these problems? Use a visual pacer. Your
finger, a pencil, a computer mouse, whatever. This works so well because
of another fundamental neuronal process: our eyes are attracted to
motion.
We evolved in a world when a tiny rustle in the bush could have meant
predator or could have been prey, but either way it paid to pay
attention. So we do. We can’t help it. Which is why simply the use of a
visual pacer improves reading speeds by 25 percent.
But Kwik tells his students to either use their left finger for that
pacer; or hold that pacer (i.e. a pencil) with their left hand—and
that’s where this story gets interesting.
Here’s why: The left side of the body is controlled by the right side
of the brain. While brain function is not evenly lateralized, the right
side is far more creative than the left. When we control a pacer with
our left hand, we are actively engaging these same creative process. It
happens subconsciously, it happens automatically, but by engaging the
right side of the brain we’re firing up the imagination which, in turn,
fires us sense memory—which is why that student smelled fish.
But here’s the thing—the more we engage imagination to process
information, the more vivid the real time experience of that
information, and the much more likely we’re able to recall that data
later.
Simply by using our left finger as a visual pacer we are using the
brain’s own inner workings to our advantage. In a very real sense, we’re
hacking the subconscious with the subconscious—and the result is
extreme vivid and detailed recall.
