ad-free
Channel / Source:
TEDx Talks
Published: 2015-11-19
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vtQzuwnyW6E
the way that we learn broken okay it's not quite broken is broken would imply that it was working well to begin with but it is inefficient it's ineffective it's really hopelessly outdated I mean sure it's gotten us to where we are today and with enough effort it does get the job done sort of but let's face it the way that we actually learn new information has
not changed since the advent of character based writing since now at the same time we're faced with exponentially more information than any generation ever to come before us according to your nasco in the U. S. alone three hundred thousand books will be published next year in China that number is half a million that's one book for every two thousand people but it doesn't even include a
huge number possibly a larger number scientific publications and blog posts and magazine editorials and of course internet memes now on top of all of this information overload our lives and our livelihoods have become inextricably linked to rapid and a lifelong learning most of us will change careers at least a few times throughout our lives and even if we don't we forced to grapple with an ever
growing body of knowledge in our respective fields if you don't believe me ask any doctor or any programmer just how much of their daily work revolves around innovations in just the last ten years so what if we could learn as rapidly as society progresses if we could say read a book or a new scientific publication over lunch and remember it with the same clarity that we
remember our most vivid memories now for me learning has always been interesting and by interesting I mean how absolutely frustrating you see growing up with a D. D. or as I prefer to call it the entrepreneurs disease I struggled for most of my youth to sit still in an academic setting long enough to learn much of anything and yes that's me running out of the photo
I'm really glad that I can laugh about it today because at the time it actually spurred on a pretty serious bout of depression and I wasn't succeeding in school and honestly I felt completely stupid it eventually got so bad that medication seem to be the only option and so I spent most of my high school and university careers clutching onto a bottle of prescription medication just
trying to bring myself into the state of mind that I thought was normal all behind the cause of learning more effectively by the age of twenty four medication had paid off pretty nicely for me I had graduated from Berkeley and I'd sold my start up I've been accepted to a great business school and sure learning was not easy hand I still struggled a lot and like
most of you I forgot everything that I learned the second I left the exam room but I've been able to learn a ton and at this point to be honest I thought that I was pretty smart but life has an interesting way of correcting you every time you think you're pretty smart and so it was at this point that I met when I would later come
to call a super learner by the name of live now I realize that love was a little bit different when he and I began sharing common interests around the office you see whereas I would read and share maybe one article that I found interesting Lev would read and share ten in the span of fifteen minutes and he would do it with half a page of commentary
for each article after very very awkward conversation and prolific use of words like PS and that's impossible I can understand that live could actually read two thousand words a minute and his attention was around ninety percent now I played around with speed reading and so I was reading at a respectable four hundred fifty words a minute that's about twice the average college graduate but my retention
was around ten to twenty percent well it turns out that laugh at his wife and I had spent the last ten years developing and refining and teaching methods for accelerated learning in students with learning disabilities just like mine needless to say I immediately hired them for one on one coaching and they proceeded to completely deconstruct my entire learning behavior sent from the ground up I should
mention by the way that all during this time I had decided to take a little vacation for my medication and yet somehow I was learning more effectively than ever before when I took the skills out into the real world during my MBA I saw just how life changing and impactful they were and so some of the first things that I apply them to after graduation where
how to create online courses and how to publish books how to manage a podcast how to give a public lecture talk and today between all those different channels we've actually taught fifty thousand people how to learn more effectively from medical and law students to individuals overcoming brain damage to people living with cerebral palsy so what's the secret right in all truth it's not a secret the
techniques they're things like visualizing your memories and getting rid of that memory voice thing that we all do these techniques are all out there and they can be learned by anybody in a matter of weeks or months the issue is that we're trying to overcome this twenty first century information overload with learning behaviors there thousands of years old ironically the big secret if there is one
is that we need to use learning techniques that harness the capabilities our brains involves to have hundreds of thousands of years ago now what does this mean well let me give you guys an example that demonstrates just how incredible your brain is when you use it the way evolution intended I'm going to show you guys an image on the screen but don't blink because I'm only
gonna show it to you for about a second is a very ready now give me a show of hands you think that you could maybe write just a short paragraph about what you saw on the screen now keep your hands up if you think that you could add maybe a line about the colors you saw about the and notions of the characters might have been feeling
or about some historical context that you could connect it to okay well I'm really thankful that it's about ninety percent of you and that's exactly the point you see as they say a picture is worth a thousand words and what you just did is the equivalent of inputting information at a rate of sixty thousand words per minute that's six times the world record in speed reading
congratulations but I know what you're gonna say is not the same thing but why not what if I told you that you could use this innate ability which we have all this hunter gathers to rapidly understand and process visual information to read faster while retaining more if I told you that you could use another great skill from the hunter gather era that allows you to remember
images with vivid clarity and use that to learn anything now image how much did you guys get right a surprising amount this image might not mean anything to you but to someone who's been trained just a little bit surprisingly powerful way to learn the fourteen countries that border China certainly much more interesting than looking at a list or memorizing a map and sure it's ridiculous and
it's silly but I assure you it's much more memorable to remember Stan Lee packing a suitcase or Kim Jong hoon next to a fourteen armed emperor than it is to look at some so when I put it this way and I explain that these are innate capabilities that we all have why are we all super learners well simply put there's a very big difference between the
way we have to be talked to read and to learn sounding it out and the ideal method of sight reading you just did unfortunately for whatever reason memory education which is the core basic fundamental that's required for accelerating learning is never taught in schools and reading training will that stops as soon as a child can read proficiently this is a lot like teaching your children how
to walk and then never explaining that the same basic fundamentals can be used for a much more efficient school called running consider this you certainly don't have to process linguistically your thoughts in order to understand them right I mean imagine what the world would look like if you stepped out into the road and you saw a car approaching but were paralyzed until you could process your
thoughts planned linguistically what you're going to do next now consider how ridiculous it is that this is exactly how most people read of course accelerating learning is about so much more than accelerating reading and eventually if you do accelerate your reading you need some way to store all these wonderful magical new memories and this is where mnemonics or memory techniques come into play now I know
too many of you will say that you have a lousy memory but nothing could be further from the truth in fact less than a third of your rom memory capability is determined by hardware or by genetics the rest is determined by techniques techniques that are used by thousands of people all over the world with lousy memories to do incredible feats from memorizing thirty thousand digits two
memorizing a deck of cards in under a minute now you might not want to do that but what if I told you that you and your children could use these exact same techniques to learn anything from multiplication tables all the way up to those types of career impacting skills we mentioned before like foreign languages or programming languages or the order of points in that talk you've
been stressing about the one where it would be really ironic if you forgot to say something if I come off a little bit scripted I do apologize but you've all been on a journey with me through and every palace which is built in my childhood home and as I make this point were about to transition from the guest bedroom into the hallway hallways as you can
probably logically figure out our transition points %HESITATION that reminds me did I mention that learning this way takes less effort and less time than the way we're doing it now with so much time saved on the inescapable basics the things that every child will have to learn like language just imagine how much more time will have for creativity and divergent thinking and people skills and things
that will actually make a difference in our children's lives and in their livelihood so what's the idea one impart to you guys today it's a simple one really what if with all the learning future generations will be required to do actually taught them how to learn what if instead of the rote memorization and the frustration there so commonplace in our educational systems we utilized fun and
engaging techniques that harness the innate capabilities of our brains now this isn't to say that there's no innovation happening in education far far from it effect right now as we speak there's an initiative to fund and build schools were standing desks a place there seated counterparts but these children will stand at their very for thinking desks and they're very forward thinking classrooms and they'll learn vocabulary
words the same way their great grandparents did since the nineteen fifties memory experts like Harry Lorraine and speed reading experts like twenty moves on have taught tens of millions of people how to learn more effectively and yet I'm not aware of a single education system that's implemented a single class and learning practicum much less series of classes that follow children through their education and through their
intellectual development the same way that math or history or science do no where in the world our children learning to build memory palaces or doing code their thoughts with visual symbols or to get rid of that voice when they read with public school budgets constantly in jeopardy and ADD medications among the top prescribed an abuse substances in the world should we find a better less broken
way to overcome information overload the techniques and strategies are out there and they can be taught to anybody in a matter of weeks or months so let's do it let's teach everybody young and old not just what they need to learn but also how they need to learn if you ask me future depends on it thank you
