Change Your Brain Every Day - Is Information Overload Making Us Less Smart? with Jim Kwik

Episode Date: May 6, 2019

Memory and speed-reading expert Jim Kwik was forced to change his approach to learning after suffering a traumatic brain injury as a child. However, this change helped Jim to develop a revolutionary approach to help educate people how to optimize their brains for learning. In this episode of the podcast, Dr. Daniel Amen and Tana Amen are joined by Jim Kwik for a discussion on how we process information, and why life in the new digital age is making things more difficult for all of us. 

Welcome, everybody. We have a very special treat for you. Our friend, Jim Quick, is going to talk to us about learning and procrastination. Jim is the founder of Quick Learning and widely recognized as a world expert in speed reading, memory improvement, brain performance, and accelerated learning. He's spoken all over the world to huge companies, but we have called him a friend for many years. And just really grateful to have you on the Brain Warriors Way podcast. Yeah, thank you. I love you two so much. And the work that you're doing is so, so important. I don't know what's more important than really understanding

and optimizing this incredible gift that we have between our ears called our brain. So I'm excited about this conversation. So how did you get involved in wanting to know about the brain and get involved in teaching people about reading and memory? Yeah. I mean, a lot of times, and the three of us have shared stages all different places around the world. I do these demonstrations, and I'll have maybe 100 people stand up, introduce themselves,

and I'll remember their name. Or they'll give me 100 words or 100 numbers and I'll memorize them forwards and backwards. But I always tell people, I don't do this to impress you. I really do this to express to you what's possible. Because the truth is, we all have the potential to do this.

We just weren't taught. If anything, we were taught somehow like a lie that somehow our intelligence or memory potential focus is somehow fixed like our shoe size. But we've learned, as you've pioneered this, we've learned more about the human brain in the past 20 years than the previous maybe 2000 years combined. And we found is we're also grossly underestimating our own capabilities. And school didn't necessarily prepare us for this digital world that we live in. We live in a world of electric cars and spaceships that are going to Mars by our vehicle of choice when it comes to learning and education. It's akin to a horse and buggy, and it hasn't been updated. And I know this is possible because I grew up with learning

difficulties. And you know this because you've scanned me. At the age of five, I had a traumatic brain injury. I had a very bad accident. And I had learning challenges. I didn't understand things as well as everybody else did. Teachers repeat themselves three, four times. Poor focus, poor memory. Took me an extra few years to learn how to read even. And I didn't know.

And I just didn't know what I didn't know. I suffered and I struggled all through school. And then around 18, I had a breakthrough where I just't know. And I just didn't know what I didn't know. I suffered and I struggled all through school. And then around 18, I had a breakthrough where I just started studying. I ended up in the hospital because I was just not eating, not sleeping, working all. And I felt actually, I passed out in the library one night. I fell down a flight of stairs. I hit my head again. And I woke up in the hospital a couple of days later and I was wasting away, lost all this weight, but it made me think there has to be a better way. And I started, I wanted to understand this idea of how does my brain work so I could work my brain better? How does my memory work so I could work my memory? So I

started studying everything from the latest adult learning theory, multiple intelligence, to mnemonics, to ancient, like what did the ancient Greeks do back when there was no printing press and there was no smartphones? You know, what did Native Americans do? How did they pass on history around campfires back then? And everything in between. And then I just really turned my brain back on. You know, the light switch flipped on and my grades improved.

And with that, my life improved. And one of my very first students, though, the reason why I'm doing this even to this day, over a quarter century later, is one of my students, she was a freshman in college. She read 30 books in 30 days. And I wanted to find out not how. I know how she did it, but why. And I found out her mother was dying of terminal cancer, was only given a couple months to live. And the books she was reading were books like the two of you write, books to save her mom's life. And she ended up doing so. And I realized that if knowledge is power, learning really is our superpower. It's just not a superpower we're taught. School teaches us what to learn and what to think, but very few classes on how to learn and how to think. And my goal is no brain left behind. I want to show people the power that they have within

themselves. So how can people, what are some of the big things you've learned that our audience can take away? Well, I've learned a lot from the two of you over the years, you know, in terms of, I found a lot of the research suggests that maybe one third of it, of our potential when it comes to, for example, our memory is predetermined by maybe genetics and biology, but two thirds is in our control. So I've learned a lot from the two of you in terms of a good brain diet, in terms of killing automatic negative thoughts, in terms of the power of movement and exercise, and the power of supplementation, positive peer group, clean environments, sleep, brain protection, wear that helmet, avoid those extreme sports, stress management, new learnings, everything. So that's like the hardware part of it, right? You know, because I could teach somebody how to read faster and improve their reading rate three times,

or remember names or learn languages fast, but if their hardware is not in place, you know, those techniques, exactly. So that's so, so what I teach is once the hardware is in place, when people through your teachings, then I could teach them the software. And so, for example, for learning, if somebody has, I think, in this digital world, there's these supervillains. There's digital overload. Too much information, too little time. We're drowning in it. It's like taking a sip of water out of a fire hose.

And it's creating a health challenge called information anxiety. Higher blood pressure. I love supervillains. Right. In my new book, The End of Mental Illness, I actually close it with the evil ruler okay versus the good ruler and i think of darth vader versus yoda and i see myself like yoda you know bald big ears um want to be that voice in your head that helps you do the right thing

but we live in a society of super villains and evil rulers stealing our attention it does so yeah digital overload is too much information. It creates information that's higher, higher blood pressure and compression, leisure time, more sleeplessness. It's just, and it's getting worse because the amount of information is doubling at dizzying speeds.

So that's one super villain, digital overload. Another one is digital distraction. You know, we have these smart devices and every app notification, social media alert, it's training our distraction muscles. And people are picking up their phone the first time, you know, when they wake up, it's the last thing they see when they go to sleep. And, you know, when you wake up first thing in the morning and I have a video, it has

over 20 million views. It's just talking about, don't touch your phone the first hour of the day and see what happens because it's training us to be number one, distracted. You know, every like, share, comment, cat video with dopamine flood on, you know, it's just, you know, we wonder why we can't have a conversation and remember what we just read or something simple like that because our distraction. But also it's training us to be reactive. You know, our friend Brendan Burchard says, your inbox is nothing but a convenient organizational system for other people's agenda for your life. And we're just on defense.

So we get a text message, a voice message first thing in the morning where we're extremely suggestible. We just woke up and it's just training us to just react to things as opposed to proactively do something. But the third thing is something I've learned from the two of you is not only digital overload, digital distraction, but digital dementia. This idea where we're so dependent on our smart devices and they're making us stupid. They're doing these cognitive tests, our to-dos, our schedule, all those things, and we're getting, we're not, we haven't lost the ability. Yeah, remember it when it's on your phone. Exactly. And so in terms of learning faster-

And did you know that dementia is actually being diagnosed later because of our smartphones? So it used to be 30 years ago when we first started Amen Clinics, I would get these calls from family members saying, mom couldn't find her way home. She's crying. I had to go find her and we need to work this up. And now because her phone will tell her- GPS. Step-by-step how to get home. She's actually not diagnosed two years later when she's less likely to respond to the treatment. Because if you have a third-party device telling you when and where to turn,

you're not realizing when you would have memory lapses. Right, and many people don't even know their own phone number because of their wife's phone number. And not that I want to memorize 500 phone numbers. I certainly can, but I, well, we lost the ability to remember just one number or a conversation or what we just read or what hotel room we're in. And those kinds of memory lapses,

you know, they're debilitating, you know, it impairs every area of our life. Stay tuned. In the next episode, we're going to talk about Jim's strategies to optimize your brain for faster, better learning. So stay with us. If you're enjoying the Brain Warriors Way podcast,

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