Change Your Brain Every Day - How to Train Your Brain to Learn Faster with Jim Kwik

Episode Date: May 7, 2019

Can you imagine what your life would be like if you were able to cut the amount of time taken to learn new things in half? It may sound far-fetched, but by refining your approach to learning, you really can drastically improve your learning speed. In this episode, Dr. Daniel Amen and Tana Amen are again joined by Jim Kwik for a discussion on strategies you need to work smart and not hard when it comes to new learning.

Welcome back. We're still here with Jim Quick, learning expert and founder of Quick Learning. So Jim, can you give us some of your practical tips to optimize your brain for faster learning in this episode? So to learn faster, there are a number of things people could do. If you have a subject or skill you want to be able to learn. By the way, the fourth, besides digital overload, digital distraction, digital dementia, is digital depression. I'm very concerned over, we've had this conversation about mental health, how we live in a society where everyone's comparing themselves to this highlight curated trailer of other people's lives. And kids are just so overwhelmed by the perfection that they see repeatedly, even though it's not, supermodels don't look like supermodels.

Right. But kids don't know that. Well, even just this morning, Sophie Turner from Game of Thrones came out and said she'd been depressed and she'd been suicidal. So even the people who you think have it all, they may have what you want, but they don't have anything they needed. Right, and so it's an epidemic. So how do you overcome these challenges? I mean, that's why I feel like

we're all on this mission together. It's about education, it's about training and resources for people. And so going back to the first challenge, which is digital overload that we've mentioned, is there's certain things you could do to learn faster to keep up with this high rate of change because we're not learned. And this is the area of meta-learning, learning how to learn. And so I use a very simple acronym called FAST, F-A-S-T. So if everyone could

think about a subject or skill that they'd like to get better at, it could be martial arts, it could be Mandarin, it could be music, it could be marketing. What keeps us, and of course we want to be able to learn it in a short period of time, because the greatest asset we have really is our time. It's the one thing we don't get back, our attention. And so four things to think about, F-A-S-T. The F is, if you want to learn something faster, is forget it. Meaning that, you're like, Jim, I thought there was a conversation about memory, but it's just a lot of people don't learn something brand new because they think they know it already and because their cup is full.

And so temporarily suspend what you know about something, keep an open mind. Your mind is like a parachute, only works when it's open. It's cliche, but it's true. But a lot of people don't learn something because they'll say they have 30 years of experience, but sometimes it's when you deconstruct it, they have one year of experience they've repeated 30 times and they're not evolving it because they feel like they know it. The other things I would temporarily forget are situational things. We know multitasking is a myth and a lot of people are trying to learn something, but their mind is thinking about other things. And a simple hack for that is just to write it down. Your mind goes to the kids or the dry cleaners, write it down so then you can release it

because if you try not to think about it, what you resist persists, right? And then so it gets worse. But it's just metaphorically, if you're thinking about three or four different things, it only leaves you 25% to be actually focused on this task at hand. We know also, obviously, there's no multitasking,

there's just task switching, which people actually have more errors. It takes more time. It can take anywhere from a few minutes to 20 minutes just to regain your focus and your flow back on the original task. So that's actually debilitating. And then the third thing I would forget temporarily are our limitations. Because we just don't know what we don't know in terms of what's possible. Because we all have this learned helplessness.

Just like that elephant. You wonder why the elephant doesn't just tear down the whole circus tent but it's since it's been a baby it's been trying and it couldn't do it the first couple days or a couple weeks and then it learned it's helpless but in actuality it's not and so in what areas you know I love what you talk about killing ants because I when people say they're too old or they're not smart enough I always tell people if you fight for your limitations, you get to keep them. And people are always arguing for their limitations. And your mind is always eavesdropping on your self-talk.

That's really good. And so your mind is always eavesdropping on that self-talk. And so if people truly knew how powerful their minds were, they wouldn't say or think things that they want to be true. It's not that having one bad thought is going to ruin your life any more than eating just that one donut, but it's the consistency of it. When we're talking about- It's the unquestioned thoughts. Exactly. You believe, and then you act out of the belief, even if it's a lie. Exactly. And that's where I mean about forgetting about temporarily what you believe is possible.

I want to repeat that one thing because it was so good. If you fight for your limitations or you fight to keep your limitations right then they're yours they're yours you get to keep them yeah so many people argue for their limits and then that they get they get to keep them and it's a challenge so we have to get out of that habit and i know you you teach so many different methods for killing automatic negative thoughts so that's it's vital so that's the f is forget. The A in FAST stands for active. I feel like a lot of us don't learn. We learn slow because we're passive learners, meaning we grew up in a 20th century education that prepares for a 20th century world, which at the turn of the century was just

following directions and working assembly lines and agriculture. But we live in such a dynamic world now. The human brain, as you know, it doesn't learn just by being lectured to. You know, the human mind, we don't learn through consumption. We learn more through creation and co-creation, social learning. And so you can't just lecture to somebody and have like positive change. Otherwise, the world would be a lot different place. And so, but 20th century education was like, sit quietly by yourself. Don't talk to your neighbors.

Very passive. But we know learning like life is not a spectator sport. So how can you make this learning endeavor of learning Mandarin martial arts and some more active, you know, active note-taking, actively asking questions, actively feeling like how you're going to share it to other people because you get to roll up your sleeves and get involved. And that's, that's where you're actually going to learn it better. Can I throw something in there? It's something that It's funny, I didn't know your acronym, but my daughter used to go to one of the very large high schools in our area and just didn't like it at all, wasn't doing very well. I mean, that's not true. She had a 3.5 GPA, but she didn't feel like she

was meeting her potential. And she just came home one day, she's like, I really want to focus on my future. Not going to know these people in 10 years, can I homeschool? So I was concerned about it at the time, but she's had this chance to travel around the world with us. And the program I picked, I noticed this instant change with her, this love of school, her GPA flew through the roof. She's got straight A's. If she has a 97% in the class, that's low. And I'm like, is it because the program is not hard? And then I realized, no, that's not what it is. Because it's an online program and it's a mastery program and she doesn't have teachers sitting in front of her telling her stuff,

she has to do it. She has to write it. She has to come up with it. She's in charge of it. And they use real-world situations. And I just instantly saw her take responsibility for her learning. That's huge. Active listening, active learning is so important. Stay with us. When we come back, we're going to finish the FAST acronym. We're also going to talk about procrastination. Stay with us.

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