Hack Your Learning To Make Information Stick – Jonathan Levi – #642

The joke I give in the book is, you know, you had 18 years of classes on how to supposedly how to use your body. They were called physical education. You didn't really learn how to use your body. You had six months to a year of very awkward classes about how to use one specific part of your body. But no one ever taught you how to use your brain. And as you know, the brain is the most complex object in the known universe. So a simple hey, here's how it works, here's how it likes to process information, here's what makes information more memorable to it, and here's how to retain and maintain your knowledge. You know, it's, it's life changing for people. Bulletproof radio.

A state of high performance. You're listening to Bulletproof Radio with Dave Asprey. Today's cool fact of the day. Spotlight imaging scans that can show now where symbols turn into letters in your brain. Do you know how legit that is? The fact that we didn't know any of this stuff five years ago, 10 years ago, 20 years ago. So our knowledge about every aspect of being human is skyrocketing right now. And it turns out what we figured out is that there's a pecking order of brain areas that process information. And this comes from three English researchers who figured out how we tie visual cues with language. And they looked at a region on the back and bottom of the brain called the ventral occipitotemporal cortex that we associate with reading. And over a two week time period, scientists taught made up words written in unfamiliar archaic scripts to 24 people who already spoke Eng. And they just gave the words meanings, like lemon or truck. And then they used functional MRI scans to track which tiny chunks of the brain in that region became active when those participants were shown the words they learned in training. And it turns out the way the letters look, whether they have curves or staunch lines, it takes hold in the back of that part of the brain. And that's where we thought we process visual information. So we confirm that. But when the sounds and meanings come into play, an area further forward in that brain region that handles those abstract concepts kicks into gear. And what this means for you is that if you're one of those font obsessed millennials, maybe you were right, because apparently fonts matter. Right? Okay. There's other things going on in here as well. But the idea that when you see a word, you immediately get its sound and meaning without any effort. This is actually how your brain does it, which is pretty cool. And it's Also, really, seriously, fonts actually matter.

This is why.

And to me, just saying, look, you react to the environment around you all the time and you don't know it, you don't know how, you don't know why, but part of the world around you, that definition of biohacking that I put out there in that crusty looking infographic years ago, the art and science of changing the environment around you and inside of you so they have full control of your own biology. Well, the fonts you choose around you are part of your environment. They're a little part, but they change your brain. And that's kind of legit. And let me just say, if you're a fan of San Serif, you're right. And if you like serifs, you're a bad person. Okay, enough of that. And if you don't know what a serif is, you're probably someone who actually has been on a date, which is also a very good thing. There. Now I've offended everyone except vegans. Sorry, guys. Have some collagen, you'll feel better. There. I have completed the trifecta of offense and I just want to say I love you guys and thank you for the support on my book. Even if you're vegan, still love you. Today's guest is an accelerated learning expert who is the founder of Superhuman Academy. He tutors online students on 13 Udemy courses and hosts weekly podcasts. I'm talking about Jonathan Levy, a serial entrepreneur, published author, keynote speaker, born and raised in Silicon Valley. Now, I got this from your bio, Jonathan, and I mean, you teach people all sorts of cool stuff and I just want to know the published author. Anyone who's written a word. Well, it pretty much isn't everyone who writes words an author. So isn't published author like saying, I'm a trained physician? I suppose that's like, oh, I'm an untrained physician. In other words, you're not a trained. So publishing is the definition of author. So I'm just wondering. Sorry, the fonts were talking to my brain and got me all confused.

I suppose in that time period between when you start the book and publish the book, which according to our mutual friend Tucker Max, there are a lot of people who start a book and don't finish it. So I guess not everyone is a published author who is an author.

It's like if you're a waiter or waitress in la, you're an actor, except you're not really an actor because you never acted.

Right?

Okay, I'm getting your Logic.

I'm going to give it to them. You know, what if they started the book but didn't finish it? I'm still going to give it to them. They're an author now. If they didn't finish med school, they're not a doctor.

Oh, that's a fair point. Now you have your become a super learner thing. Did you use your super learning skills to let you write your book faster or better?

I did, but I will admit that I worked with Tucker and his team to download all their knowledge about what makes a book incredible. Because the first two books I wrote came out as courses in text form. And I was like, you know, they didn't have the impact that I wanted. There was a lot of information, but not enough engagement and entertainment. So I went down to Austin and I learned from the best. I figured not many people have sold 40 million books, so definitely there's something to learn. And yeah, I mean, at every point in my business, five, six years ago, I didn't know how to podcast, how to do online courses, how to write books, how to lead a distributed team, and in every single turn, I've applied these exact skills of learning faster to figure out, okay, what the hell do I need to know in order to climb this mountain?

Well, it is a very hard mountain to climb to become a good author. So I'm glad you decided to do that, which is worth doing, because your book is worth reading.

Thank you.

Now, I can say that because here's the deal. I rarely have people on the show whose books aren't worth reading. Plus, look, my new book, Superhuman. You actually have the Superhuman Academy podcast. Sorry, man, I didn't plan it that way. It just kind of worked that way. But the anti aging longevity field, we got enough name for that. Enough room for both names in there. So you've definitely got the right angle going on here. So I want to share with people the stuff you've learned about learning learning faster. And that's really the whole point of having the podcast today, is to just download some information into people. So, number one thing that people do wrong when they're looking to learn.

Yeah. So the biggest thing. How many times have you met someone and they go, oh, I have a lousy memory. I probably won't remember X. People think they have a lousy.

How many times.

Exactly. Exactly.

That was funny. You didn't even laugh.

The fact of the matter is, give me some love. Totally. Totally. Well, it's funny, and in a tragic sort of way. Right. Because the reality is an extremely Small part of your memory is actually determined by genetics. And I always like to tell people if you haven't been banged on the head, you don't have a lousy memory. You just don't know how to use it in the same way that most people. I would argue, looking at the body of your work, you've proved that people don't know how to use their physiology or biology either. Like, they live off Diet Coke.

Oh God, that'll screw up your memory. But how serious?

They're like, I'm so dehydrated.

How serious are you about not having been banged on the head?

Moderate banging. I mean, you'd actually have to have tm, like traumatic brain injury, to have it affect your memory.

The reason I'm asking is 90%. This is a plus or minus, some standard deviation of people who come through 40 years of Zen. This is my Neuroscience Institute five day program, but we do a clinical grade quantitative brain map. On the first day, 90% of people have evidence electrically that they got hit in the head. And you're like, were you hitting the head? They're like, no, no. And then you ask them three times, like, well, there was that time I was unconscious for three days when I was two, but that didn't count.

Geez.

But it's not usually that big of a deal. But everyone who's young falls and hits their head. But it seems like it's an endemic thing. And between that and Daniel Amen's work, I think there's more traumatic brain injuries out there affecting memory. And so a lot of people are like, I'm a bad person because I forget things and maybe because I don't care enough. And you're like, no, you have a hardware problem. And then the Diet Coke is another hardware problem. So just my question, there was in your learning.

Yeah, you're right. I probably should stop saying that facetiously because there are probably a lot of people who got banged it. Then I always see babies and I'm like, they're so slippery. How do they not get dropped?

They're made of rubber. I'm just saying that the hardware problems are part of memory problems. And I totally derailed your point, which was, okay, you're saying assuming you don't have a hardware problem from Diet Coke, or you're saying maybe it was Diet Coke. Your answer, not that we're picking on Coke specifically any artificial sweetener, but we.

Don'T want to get that kind of a lawsuit. Well, even if you do have a hardware problem, the truth of the Matter is it's less about the hardware and more about how you use it. You know, like an old 1990s MacBook Pro can still browse the Internet if you know how to close things down and use it properly. And most people don't know how to use their brain. I mean, at the most fundamental level, the joke I give in the book is, you know, you had 18 years of classes on how to supposedly how to use your body. They were called physical education. You didn't really learn how to use your body. You had six months to a year of very awkward classes about how to use one specific part of your body. But no one ever taught you how to use your brain. And as you know, the brain is the most complex object in the known universe. So a simple, hey, here's how it works. Here's how it likes to process information, here's what makes information more memorable to it, and here's how to retain and maintain your knowledge. You know, it's, it's life changing for people just to learn these simple things that they can do to make information stick. And you've been around the block, Dave, so you, and I assume your audience knows a lot about this. Things like visual mnemonics, spaced repetition, structuring your study in a specific way, and not just sitting down with the textbook and banging your head against it.

You called your book the only skill that matters, which is basically how to use your brain. And I'm not sure that I agree with you entirely that it's about knowing how to use your brain versus just having a brain that functions. And as someone who had a brain that really, okay, I was using artificial sweeteners, I had metal poisoning, I had massive toxic mold poisoning. I had holes in metabolic activity in my brain. Wow, that Daniel Amen's like you have the brain of someone who lives under a bridge using street drugs, direct quote, years ago. And that's all been repaired. And so my brain works reasonably well. But I look at that experience plus being fat at the same time and sort of saying, look, I, at the time I knew what a memory palace was because I've been into this hacking stuff for a long time and I'm like, I'm going to use a memory palace and I'm going to grit my teeth and I'm going to organize all these things. And you know what? It still didn't stick. So let's assume that everyone who listens to this, they've read Headstrong, my book about how to turn your brain back on. I kind of had to do that myself. And once you have a basic hardware level of functioning. And so I'm just going to say there's some amount of that that matters, because otherwise what happens, Jonathan, is your. It's like when you're fat, and it was like, oh, you're actually fat because you're lazy and you have no willpower. And you're like, I will kill you, and then I will eat your bones. Because here's the deal. I have practiced my willpower every single day. I'm actually a willpower athlete. I'm just fat. But when your brain doesn't work, you develop shame and guilt.

Absolutely right.

And it becomes like, I am unworthy. And I had this in business school at Wharton. I'm like, what's wrong with me? Like, I'm dumber than all of my friends, and, like, it's a big deal.

So if you got a harder thing, I can relate.

Okay. Anyway, I'll get off my soapbox.

No, I had the same problem.

Okay.

And I would say the only skill that matters to me is the ability to learn. And a big part of that is brain health.

Okay.

And unfortunately, I only. Well, because there's folks like you writing amazing books about brain health. I didn't even. I steered clear of that. But I assume that people are taking care of their brains because this is the only skill that matters. The ability to learn, unlearn and relearn. And if you don't have basic brain health. And by the way, basic brain health is. When I say basic, I'm talking stuff like, are you sleeping enough? Which, not your audience, but a lot of people out there are not. They're not sleeping well enough, and then they're wondering, why don't my memories stick? So I completely agree with you, by the way. That's foundational.

Thank you. And I just wanted to have the people who are struggling with their brains who are listening. I don't want them to feel guilt about that. All I'm saying is, if you don't have the skills that are in your book, the only skill that matters book, you're not going to perform very well. And if you are totally struggling and you add these skills and you're eating the fried stuff and you're drinking the artificial sweeteners and corn syrup and all that stuff, and you don't get the results, it's not your book's fault. It's like the person who's eating the fried stuff and the artificial sweeteners and whatever else they're doing, it's the combo.

Well, it's like Tim Ferriss always says. I've heard him say this numerous times. People love to come up and ask me what stimulants I'm taking. Am I drinking bulletproof? Am I taking Modafinil? And they ask me this over a Diet Coke and fries.

Oh, God, that's so annoying.

Get your basics in order and then we can talk about. You know what I mean? You can be drinking the best organic bulletproof coffee. If you're washing it down with a bunch of sucralose and then it goes alongside a Big Mac, you're not going to feel at your peak.

Well said. So let's assume that you're at least a 5 out of 10 for basic brain health function. So you're average, right? You're not broken.

Then you're exercising, you're sleeping, and you're eating a reasonable diet.

Okay? So then we get into the only skill that matters is learning. And now you've got the basic hardware. We're not talking of being a Ferrari brain. We're talking about just being like a Honda brain, right? Okay. All right. And then you.

Neuroplasticity, though, you can turn that Honda into a Ferrari. It's a kit car brain, man.

Was that a.

Your work, if anything, has really proven that you can change your brain, you can.

So let's just assume for the purpose of this conversation that people are a little bit on that path, that they've done enough to be like, maybe they want to be a Ferrari, but maybe they're just okay with being a Honda. And everything in your book, having gone through it, is applicable to a baseline brain, not an upgraded brain is the main point I'm trying to get here and not shaming people whose brains are struggling. Because that sucked. I didn't like shaming myself then.

All right, absolutely. And I want to be clear. You and I, I think, respect each other's work so much because we go on the research, Right. And so when I make the claim, you can actually rewire your brain and change the way it works. I'm citing a study that was done at a university in the Netherlands, and the headline when they published it in Neuron magazine was, brain training can rewire your brain circuitry. I'm not using marketing speak literally. I'm saying we can rewire the way your brain works.

It does. If you look at brain structuring, neuron connections and multiple layers of the pfc, there's all these. In fact, I bet that there's a very high Correspondence between people say what you eat doesn't matter. Only calories count, and your brain can't rewire itself. And these are like the people who are super overweight and have white lab coats and got their medical degrees online in the 1960s. I don't understand. They didn't have online in the 1960s. Get the joke. But something's not right in that mindset. So let's just assume everyone listening believes that their brain can change, which you have to believe for it to change you do. Let's talk about getting into this thing. You say learn like a caveman in your book, which ties in. That's why I chose the cool fact of the day. Talk to me about how cavemen learn.

Yeah. So I want you to imagine everyone in the audience that you are a Paleolithic caveman or cave woman. You're roaming the savanna about half a million years ago. What kind of information is relevant and valuable to you? You have so much knowledge you can identify, and we know this from tribal peoples today. You can identify thousands of plant species. You know, when they grow, where they grow, what they're used for, what are medicinal ones, what are plants, poisonous ones. You know, the animal migrations. You have tons and tons and tons of knowledge. You can navigate using the stars, but you can't read and write. This doesn't bother you at all, by the way, because you know the entire oral history of your tribe dating back 10 generations. So we're meant to have all of this knowledge, but that knowledge is meant to be visual, experiential, engaging knowledge, not boring stuff from a textbook. And so the way cavemen learned is through engaging visual experiences. And if you look at the top memory athletes, world record holders, people who do what you would call superhuman feats of memory, all they're doing is learning like a caveman. They're turning every piece of information they need into visual symbols, and then they're putting it into things like the memory palace. To harness this evolutionary advantage, we have to remember pictures and remember location. It's part of our survival circuitry. And so that's how cavemen learn. If you can turn reading about World War II or reading about the Japanese Russian War in the 1800s, and turn that into a visual experience where you're imagining actual scenes, creating these vivid connections in your brain, it's going to be much more engaging and much more memorable.

Now, I came across a study that was actually a cool fact of the day. If I remember right, see what I did there? I'm not remembering, but it Actually said that hearing a story like an oral story is activating the same parts of the brain that reading a story does. So the people who are saying we're going to bag on audiobooks, that we're activating that visual system the same way, at least if it's a well written audiobook or visual book. Do you agree with that? You talked about oral, oral traditions that were handed down for these cavemen. But in your book, you're kind of more visual in the way you describe it. So auditory versus visual, does it matter?

I haven't checked the research there. But what's interesting to me is what happens once it goes either in your ears or in your eyes.

Okay, so it works.

Are you actually imagining? Exactly. And one of the skills that I teach people, because it takes quite some time to learn how to speed read proficiently. So one of the things that we'll teach people is as you're learning this technique of, we call it visual markers, creating these visualizations. So to give people in a concrete example, let's say that I meet someone named David, okay. And I want to remember their name at a conference. I might picture them as David and Goliath. And I'll picture them with the sling and I'll picture them fighting Goliath so that I have a visual marker and I have an association to existing knowledge. So it's pictures and connections. And that way if I don't remember the person's name, I just go back, what was the visualization that I came up with? And it's connected to something that I remember from my childhood, learning about David and Goliath. So you can do that with conversations, you can do that with any information that's coming in. But the key idea is, do you convert it to visual information? There was actually a really interesting study in 2017 where they're starting to realize that it may not be possible to have memory without visual stimulation, that all memory may be connected to visual stimulus, which is crazy.

I'm just thinking there are some people who were born blind. Like Stevie Wonder. On Instagram, there's a picture of me of Stevie Wonder. I actually got to spend some quality time with him, which was a highlight of my experience in this life. And he's never been able to see yet. My God, that was a special person.

Isn't that incredible?

With what you're saying, though, how can we have blind people who don't have sight, who never had sight?

Yeah. I would argue. And again, this is something I haven't researched in depth because it's a fringe case for us. I would argue that. So, first off, the vast majority of blind people have some sight. So I learned about this when I went to Dining in the Dark and I discovered something like 70% of people who are legally blind, they can see color or they can see light, or they can see shapes, but not well. So that's, I think, part of it, and I don't know, I. Part of me wants to believe I need to ask a blind person, but part of me wants to believe that they can still imagine things. Because right when you show, when you hand a blind person a statue of an elephant, they're able to identify it and go, oh, yeah, I've felt this before. This is an elephant.

There's a representation in the brain that's usually visual or there's some maybe made out of fairy dust if you've never seen an actual one. But it's a concept that's going to have that. Okay, I'll go with that.

But I need to research that. I love that question.

And I also. I'm going to be a little bit skeptical here, Jonathan. I've read books. I've sucked. So I used to have Asperger's syndrome because my brain was so dysfunctional. I actually tested higher on that. My whole family engineers on that spectrum. I don't think I mostly have it anymore, but especially when I was younger, I would have said I was face blind. I mean, people that I worked with, I wouldn't recognize them at the mall. I just had no idea who they were. Without context, I couldn't categorize anybody.

That's a real thing.

It was a real problem. I felt horrible about it. I'm much better now, but I'm probably below average still. But I trained it, so I tried. I read books about this as a teenager and as a young adult, I tried this. Oh, I'm in a. Their name is Birdie. I'm in a picture of Canary. That shit doesn't work. I am so sorry. Like, every memory expert says that. And it has never worked one time for me, no matter how hard I try. So do you really do that?

Might be face blind? I do. I do. I do that. Or for foreign language names. Like, you know, if I meet someone named Sanjana.

Yeah.

Sanjayana is an Indian name. I'll just picture Jenna Marbles, this, like, funny YouTube comedian sitting in the sun with this person. So I really do.

Your brain really doesn't. And it actually works.

I've trained it to do it. Harry Lorain went on The Johnny Carson show many times without memory palaces, which is amazing to me. I interviewed him, I was like, he really never used memory palaces. He would memorize 1500 audience members names doing this. But you actually might be face blind. That's a real thing. And the problem there with face blindness is you can't even call up that you've seen that face. Right. So you don't even know how to get to that visualization because you're like, I don't know if this is a new face or if I have a visualization. And that's. That's a totally different thing that's actually happening in the pfc where you literally. Because the human brain can recognize a familiar face in.0150 seconds and assess the emotion of it. It's like, it's like a hack. Right? You can identify a picture in something like 0.13 seconds.

Yep.

But you can identify a face faster. Why? Again, because evolutionary advantage, what's important is this person a friend or a foe and are they angry or are they really happy to see?

Have you ever done those tests, like how fast you recognize an angry face versus a happy face? Did you score normally or how were you?

I scored pretty high.

I was like three times better.

Micro expressions they call it.

I was three times faster recognizing angry people than happy people.

That's interesting.

That's what bullying is.

But you might actually have face blindness. I mean, that's a real legitimate thing.

I feel like I don't have it as much as I did. I've improved, put it that way. But just the other day, guy, I actually know him pretty well.

Like.

He'S a friend, but he's a friend that I've spent quality time with only three or four times. And the rest of it's all on the phone and it's kind of ephemeral. But someone I've really helped him a lot. And someone I really value who's helped me. But out of context, I run into on the street and I'm like, who the hell is this? And it takes me a minute. I hear their voice, like the sound of their voice. So maybe my brain is just weird.

And you get a free pass. You might actually have some level. And it is a spectrum, like Asperger's. It's a spectrum of face blinds. But you can still use memory techniques. Crazy.

So you're saying for me, maybe this name thing, I might be able to remember the name, but I might not match it to the face because my brain is weird. All right, so if you're listening to this and you're like, there's that one time Dave didn't recognize me. It wasn't personal, trust me. You could just walk up and be like, hey, remember me? And I'll be like, dude, of course I remember you. And the odds are I'm just so.

Honored that every time I've bumped into you, you've recognized me.

No, I'm just pretending. I had no idea who you were. No, I'm kidding.

This guy's got orange glasses and he's talking about memory. It's a match.

I'm totally messing with you. But I do. So I'm going to just say my experience must be so many standard deviations away. So for most people who have even semi normal brains, the associating David and Goliath or a picture with someone will permanently, or at least for a couple hours, let you remember someone's name.

So that's a great question. It will last a lot longer. A lot longer. But here's the catch, right? There's no magic pill. Although I heard that Bulletproof is developing the magic pill. But there's no magic pill for memory. And every memory expert that I've interviewed talked to had on the show, they all say, look, you have to do this spaced repetition. And we know, right? Our memory is subject to exponential loss. Our brains are 2% of our body's mass, 20% of the energy. And in order to maintain that ratio and not go even further, they have to forget things. They have to do regular maintenance. So we have the hippocampi.

There's two things that you've talked about that listeners, we haven't defined for listeners yet. And they're going to get confused on this. You talked about memory palaces and I did too. But we didn't define what they are. And there's a lot of people don't know what that is. So we got to talk about that. And then spaced repetition is another technique. So in terms of adding the most value, tell us about memory palaces first. And then space repetition, if that's the right order to go in, yes, perfect.

So the memory palace is this 2,500 year old technique and essentially it's such a simple thing. It was used by the ancient Greeks. In fact, they think that the Iliad and the Odyssey, because the Greeks were very against writing, actually Socrates was quoted as saying writing weakens the mind and softens the memory. So the Greeks used this technique to transmit stories. And it was lost, most likely because the Catholic Church is like, you're doing what in your head? So the memory palace technique is basically this. You take those visual markers, right? So we just met David, and we have an image, just a little figurine, if you will, of David fighting Goliath. We take that and we put it in a location. So if it were a person, I might do. You know, I'm in this conference hall, where did I meet David? And you actually put that visualization in the physical space. We met Sanjana. We might put Jenna marbles, this famous YouTuber, tanning with this Sanjana in the sun. We'll put that in another location. Now, you can do this for anything.

These locations you're talking about, is it the location you met them, or do you have this storage warehouse and you put them on shelves?

Yeah, great question for people. If I meet them at a conference, I'll just put them where I met them. If I'm memorizing a speech, what I'll do is I'll go around the perimeter of the house, apartment, whatever it may be. And when I say location, anything that you can anchor to. So you've got your desk, chair, put one there, the computer monitor, put one there. The keyboard, put one there. The corner of the desk, the desk drawer, the bookshelf. And I just advise people not to get too condensed. You know, don't put three on one bookshelf because you're going to start to confuse them. And just like Dave, you can tell me, I mean, you were just traveling a whole bunch. We both were. You can tell me the layout of your last hotel room. You don't know why it wasn't important to you, but you know exactly where the restroom was, you know exactly where the shower was, you know what corner of the shower the soap was on. Your brain just does this. And it's very simple. Why? That's survival advantage. There was an amazing story where they took a Brazilian Amazonian tribesperson down to a university in, I believe it was Sao Paulo, because they wanted to study him, an ethnographer. And the entire time he's, like, frantically looking out the window of the jeep, just like looking for the moon and looking at all the trees that he was passing. And they realized they get him down into the basement where they stuff all the ethnographers and anthropologists because they're underfunded. And they realized after talking to him, they're like, well, he kept pointing back in my tribe. And he was pointing in one specific direction. And, like, why do you point in that direction? He's like, because my tribe is exactly in that direction. They're like, okay, first off, they had to check Google Maps. And they realized he was right. And they go, how far? And he goes, if I walked for five nights and four days, in the middle of the third day, I would get there, or whatever it is, right? And he was right. And they realized this is a huge survival advantage for people who are hunter gatherers. It's like, where is the winter food supply? How do I get home? Where are the tribesmen who have a habit of eating us? And where are the tribes of men that we trade with? So it's this huge survival advantage that our brains do naturally, which is why you'll never forget every home you've ever lived in. You know the layout. And so I always tell people, it's like you can't remember silly little things that you learn in a textbook, but you have all this. Just think of it as RAW storage, like a USB that you would plug in. You have all these empty memory palaces, and all you need to do is start putting your memories in there. So this works. And we teach systems. If you need to memorize numbers, if you're a trader or whatever, symbols, numbers, there's a way to convert those into pictures. And we can talk about that if it interests your audience. There's ways to convert names, foreign language words. I've developed systems to convert grammatical systems. So I learned Russian years ago, and I was struggling so much to learn the grammar until I converted it into a memory palace. And it's like, all right, this is the dative case. So therefore, words must end with this. And I put an emu in here because actually is a word in Russian in the dative case. And you create these fun visual symbols, and then you can just go into your memory palace. It's actually. If people have seen Sherlock Holmes with Benedict Cumberpatch, it's almost exactly like that. It's. You go into your memory palace and you have all these different symbols of whatever it is. I have one for the NATO phonetic Alphabet. I have one for Russian grammatical case system, circle of fifths. In music theory, you just create these fun symbols and then you place them in places, and all of a sudden it's like reading off a cheat code. I mean, you just have it.

You talk about this in not this much detail in your book. The only skill that matters. But I think there's enough of this, that. And you have whole courses on how to do it. It's not that straightforward, but at least the idea that your brain can do this and why and how is covered in. In the only skill that matters. So my experience on this, and I haven't. I've talked a lot about brain hacking, but it's usually like electrical and feedback and biochemical. I really got into memory palaces probably when I was. Jeez, had to be 23, 24 maybe. So this was 20 years ago, and I, I got to where I could do it and I had this kind of layout. I'd always put stuff in the same, same place. Even as I'm talking, I'm like, I'm gesturing with my left hand and I can still go there, but I.

You still know where it is, but after.

After a while I stopped using it. But people who have talked to me in person or people have seen me be interviewed. I know stuff. Like, I know a lot of stuff. And I think what happened is that after using a memory palace consciously, I do know that all of the things that I know about the brain and mitochondria and all that stuff, it's all visual and it's all in a big picture in my head. But it's not in a palace anymore. The palace dissolved.

But it's in a mind map.

It's a mind map.

It's in a. Yeah. I've seen you, and I've actually seen you talk a lot with your hands as well when you're talking about mitochondria and stuff. And I've seen you work through these maps in your head when we talked about Lyme disease, which of course I. Here's a fun experiment. I'm taking a risk here, but do you remember when we were talking with Tanya Rising about Lyme disease and mold? Do you remember where we were, where we were sitting?

I have no clue.

Really?

Not at all.

I remember exactly where we were. We were outside at Genius Network on a roundtable. The first round table closest to the cement, and we were the three furthest away from the cement. You remember this? You gotta remember this.

No, I remember a conversation there. But I'm like, I'm very. Just keep in mind I grew up with an Asperger's brain, so I'm very fact based. I remember the conversation. But the other thing is, if you have adhd, which I certainly do, you and me both, you only pay attention to the stuff that you really, really care about, right?

Totally.

So I find that my brain, it'll store the nuggets, but where we have the conversation, it's not useful. So maybe it's in there somewhere, but I totally don't have like a picture of it anymore. Or maybe I do and I just don't know how to access that. That's probably more likely, right?

To your point, though, it is interesting that all of your knowledge is these pictures, right? So when you're talking about mitochondria or Lyme disease, you have pictures, which I think probably does come from using memory palaces, because the research shows us that once you've learned how to do this. There was another study, the title of which was Brain Supersized Memory is Trainable and Long Lasting is the title of the study. And it's true. They tested people six weeks later and they still were naturally doing this. They were just creating images. And that's why I like to say, like it's just rediscovering your natural way of learning. People love to say, I'm an auditory learner, kinesthetic. My answer is you just haven't tried unlocking your real photographic memory because we all are naturally wired to be photographic.

When you were writing your book, did you draw pictures and then write your book?

We have a lot of diagrams in the book. For me, it's all up here.

It's all in your head.

I've got all these pictures up here and all the examples that I give and all the stories, there's pictures. That Sanjanai example, that's an image in my head from a real person that I met at insead who was from India and her name was Sanjay. I mean, that's a real example. Another example I love to give people is caber, the Spanish word for to fit. Cab bear. Picture a taxi cab. And you're trying to stuff a grizzly bear in there, right? Cab bear. What's beautiful about that? It's an outrageous image. So you've got the outrageous. I don't know if I mentioned, but violent sexual, absurd imagery works better. Our brains love novelty. So it's violent, it's an image. It's connected to the actual meaning of the word. And people won't forget that for quite some time. And then we still need to talk about spaced repetition as well.

We're going to get to spaced repetition, I swear.

But okay.

Violent sexual imagery. Okay. I've kind of written a few things about the effect of porn on the brain. And I tried the violent sexual imagery. So I'm like, oh, you know, everyone I meet at this party, like, let me just imagine violent sexual things. I don't think that's good for your soul.

I don't think it is. And like I said, this stuff miraculously Disappeared. The Greeks used it for a thousand years. And then roughly about the time of the Catholic Church's rise, they burned a guy at the stake who wrote a couple of books about this. That did not help the popularity of the memory palace technique. And it just disappeared. It disappeared until about the 1950s, when guys like Tony Bouzan and Harry Lorain repopularized it.

Wow. So. But you're not telling people to walk around, you know, the. I guess, you know, violently stuffing a bear into a cab. It just, it seems.

Yeah. It's absurd. It's bizarre. It's, you know, Sanjana, there's two women in a bikini. And that's pretty. At least to my brain. Entertaining. So I always tell people these images are for you only. And, you know, I'm not talking about horrific mass murders.

Okay.

I'm talking, you know, Gabriel Weiner has some really good stuff. He's a language learning expert and we see eye to eye on this visual stuff. His one is if it's mask, if it's a masculine verb. You know, languages which have masculine, feminine. If it's a masculine verb, it's lightning striking, whatever it is. Right. So like. And if it's a feminine verb, it's on fire. So that's like pretty violent imagery. And that'll. That'll get the job.

But it's visceral and. But it's not. It's not violent, like, you know, heads getting cut off kind of stuff. It's. Okay.

Exactly.

All right.

Exactly.

I don't want to share information on the show that's going to make people walk around imagining porn and violence all the time. But I do get it. Unusual, noteworthy, and titillating, basically is what we're talking about.

Bingo.

Okay.

Bingo.

And that's a word that I can remember easily.

Right, right. And do you remember the word for to fit in Spanish?

It was caber, but there you go. It also helps the net of all the languages that I know something about. I'm quasi literate in Spanish when I spend time in the Spanish speaking country. So that helps. All right, so we've got a good idea of what a memory palace is. And when you put stuff there, you can have one location where you always put things you can sort of remember in the room. And so you're just visually placing these unusual images to help you remember stuff. And you have more advanced stuff in some of your courses.

And I would encourage people build a lot of them. Like, I think where you might have gotten into trouble is you were reusing one they're free, they don't cost anything, and they're already in there. So I have a separate one for the NATO phonetic Alphabet. I spend a lot of time on the phone, as I'm sure you do, so I learned it, and it's so much easier. I have a different one for the circle of fifths. We're actually in my memory palace now for the circle of fifths. Just create new ones. They're free.

Okay. We may have different words for it, but I have a bunch of different images that I use. Oh, this is my Mitochondria 1. This is my stack of brain hacking. So these are analogous, I think, to them, but for me, they're more 3D blobby structure things. But for people listening to this.

Oh, yeah. No, I'm saying create new palaces, but same images.

Okay, got it. Now, when you go from this memory palace technique to spaced repetition, first tell us about spaced repetition and then tell me whether I should be using that with my memory palaces, because I'm probably not.

So we know from a guy named Herman Ebbinghaus who did the worst possible study you could do, which is for years and years, he memorized BS syllables like z phi, and he memorized sequences of them and tested himself and what he figured out which became seminal. He was one of the first people ever to publish. He was actually the first person ever to publish research on memory because people thought it wasn't real science. Like so many things, he discovered that we have what's called exponential loss in our memory. The first time you learn something, it drops off almost immediately. The second time, it lasts a little longer. The third time, it lasts a little longer still. And with time, you can get to a point where the drop off or decay of the memory longer than your lifetime. So, for example, if today you stopped speaking English, you would remember it for the rest of your lifetime, even though you're gonna live to. What is your number? 200.

At least 180.

At least 180. You and Dan Sullivan. So you can get to a point where you'll remember something effectively indefinitely. It takes a long time. So spaced repetition is essentially a way of doing that, but doing it intelligently, because there's nothing worse than work you don't need to do. Spaced repetition is either using a system of flashcards and organizing them in a very intelligent way or using a software algorithm. There's an awesome free app out there called Anki A N K I, which will ask you every time you review something that you're learning, whether that's foreign language words, names and faces of people. Whatever it is you're out there learning, it'll ask you, how hard was this? One to four? And it'll time how quickly you answered it. Then it will build a prediction algorithm that says you are likely to forget this in eight days. So let's review it on day seven and not before. So what you're doing is you're spending 20 to 30 minutes a day reviewing your body of knowledge and basically you're doing the absolute minimum you need to do to maintain it. Now when is this useful? When you're learning a new language, you need about 2/3 thousand words to be competent in that language. That's a lot of words. And if you're reviewing all of your flashcards every day, that's a lot of time. Or if you're learning it once and then going time to move on to the next hundred words, you never come back. That's how you get into situations where you're like, no, I swear I speak Spanish, I just don't remember the word for fork. So really, really cool technique to do that maintenance. Because talk to any memory expert, any world champion, any, anything, and they'll tell you the techniques will get it in, but you have to do the maintenance. Okay, now in your regard, I know you, Dave, and I know you are always talking about this stuff and you're always learning about this stuff. So you're always calling those memories up and you're using them. People who are doing that. If you're using your knowledge, you're getting a free pass. If you are learning Russian and you go out every day and you have a 20 minute conversation in Russian, you get a free pass. You don't need to review it because you're doing something better than that, which is actual application.

Check this out. Almost 700 episodes of Bulletproof Radio talking about this kind of cool stuff. I do get twice a week spaced repetition. Not always the same stuff, but general vein, right? Totally, totally. And plus, you know, because you just wrote a book, you want a space spaced repetition, write a book, man, you will beat it into yourself. If there's a book you love, try reading it aloud. And I think there's something to that. Is there any science that you've come across as an expert on learning that says reading a book aloud is different than actually drawing pictures in your head?

I gotta be honest, I've never looked into it.

Someone's gonna do a study.

Speed reading. Someone's gonna do a study and it's.

The opposite of speed.

Reading, we're focused about how to do it faster.

And reading out loud and sub vocalizing is terrible for learning. It's the worst thing you could do to be a speed reader. I learned to read at 18 months. I scan whole pages and all that stuff like it's, it's each word is a picture, all that stuff. But there was something weird happened in my brain from that. So I'm just wondering, someone out there, if you have a study, post it on my Instagram, DM me or whatever I want to see.

You know what's interesting though, about what you're saying is there, there have been studies that being in a new and novel location. Again, there's been multiple studies on this about memory and location. But when we go into a new location, what happens? Our brains go, oh, crap, I'm in a new environment. I don't know if this is safe or not. You crank up, I believe it's norepinephrine. Cranks up. And when we're in new locations, the CA3 region of the brain lights up with dopamine, which is weird. They didn't know until 2017 that dopamine had much to do with long term memory, but now they do. So all this is to say, when you are in a new and novel location, your brain chemistry goes boom. I need to pay attention, focus hormones and neurotransmitters so that I can get myself a meal.

That is a very, very good point. All right, what else? So now we've got memory palaces. We've got spaced repetition. You talk about in chapter six, talk about why and how to 10x your memory. So how do you 10x your memory? What does that mean?

It's transitioning from the auditory, not imagining pictures to imagining pictures. And then really at the highest levels, it's building those memory palaces. It's doing. I mean, every single person I know, this happened to me in second grade. I met a kid who was like, yeah, I have a photographic memory. And that person naturally has discovered how to tap into exactly what we've been talking about, Dave. And they can just see things and visualize them and remember it. And so many people come up to me and they're like, oh man, you know, they see what I can do, they've seen me speak. Like, I wish I could do what I do. I wish I had a photographic memory. And my answer is always, congratulations, you do. You just haven't dusted it off and used it yet. And once you do, the joke I like to make, it's like Going from a beat up 1960s diesel to a new electric motor. It's faster, it's more efficient. Once you make that transition, your brain runs on electric and it's just fast. It's pictures, like you said about your reading.

What is the single fastest or the first way that a person listening to the show could dust off their photographic memory?

Yeah, perfect. So I want them to go out and when they meet a new person, first off, the example I always give people, like give an example, people can try. People are always surprised. My thing is go learn names and faces because it's cool to learn numbers and everything, but the world would be a better place if we all looked each other in the eye and met people and smiled at them. And I don't care if it's the waiter, waitress or it's the Uber driver, learn other human beings names and use their names and smile at them and treat them with kindness. I think that's the best possible use of this gift. Go out today. And I don't care if it's the grocery, what do they call it? Bag boy? The Uber driver. Whoever it is that you encounter today, go out and learn their name. And if their name is Chris, imagine them on a cross like Christ. Again, that's absurd imagery, a little bit dark. It's a little dark, but you'll remember Chris's name. If their name is, you know, Muhammad, I want you to imagine them at Mecca, you know, so create these associations. Go out and I would love if everyone in your audience would just create a visual association for the next five people they meet. And then the next day, tell Siri or Google or whatever, remind me in two days to recall all the names and you may never see that Uber driver again. But test yourself and you will be very surprised that you'll remember Mohammed, you'll remember Chris, all those names that you learned.

It's interesting because there's two people I know who are really top notch memory experts and both you guys do this. It's you and Jim Kwik, right? Jim's a good friend and I've seen both of you at restaurants and you're like waitresses or waiter's name. And it's like you just build it into your life, which is very unusual. Almost the reason that this stands out to me is I don't know anyone else who actually does it that much. And you'll see like Joe Polish is another guy who's been on the show who's a friend of all of the people I just mentioned here. And Dan Sullivan, who you mentioned earlier, but Joe, he's pretty good at that. He knows more people's names than most people. And he goes out of his way, but not to the extent that you and Jim. And now are you doing that because you want to make people feel good or doing that because you're like, haha, look at what my brain can do. Like, I'm going to make it stronger.

Few reasons. One, if I'm honest, I don't like waiting for the bill. And when everyone's saying, check, please, check please. And then I go, kristen, I don't even have to shout it. I just go, kristen. And she. Obviously, we hear our own name in a crowd, but that's not the actual reason.

So you're cutting in line. I got it now. Yeah, okay.

Exactly. Yeah. I have not had to wait for a check in many years because even in Japan I'm like, and you know, this is your table. What's your name? Yakuoko. All right, how are we gonna remember that? But then when I hit the bill, Yakuoko is there. But. But the real reason to do it is Dale Carnegie. This book, how to Win Friends and Influence People, was the first book, Dave, that was given to me when I was 13 years old by my late Uncle Ernie, who's like a grandfather to me. It was the first time I ever realized that words on a page could make me a better human being and could change the way I show up in the world. And that opened this journey that led and is still leading to podcasting and writing my own books. But it was this revolutionary idea that books were not just this boring thing that taught me about people I didn't care about in history or math, that I was never going to use in trigonometry, that books could actually be used to make me a better human being. And Dale Carnegie says, remember that a person's name is to that person, the sweetest sound in any language.

It's a very good point. We're both authors, and I got to say, if you were to just pick a couple books to read, how to Win Friends and Influence People, it's probably going to be on the list. Think and Grow Rich ought to be on your list. The original personal development thing, what Think and Grow Rich actually had in it, that did something for me is like a memory palace. And the idea was he would say, who are the people I'd like to get advice from? He's like, you close your eyes, you go into this space, you imagine this table, and sitting at the table is Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson and Jesus Christ or whoever else you want to meet with and get good advice from and then have this conversation with him. But I can't say that I practice this regularly. I did when I was 16, I'm sure. But the act of thinking about these people, imagining them and giving form to them, because you're not just thinking about them, you're seeing them at a table. There's a lot going on with that memory thing because then you remember what happened there. What do you think about that technique for brainstorming or anything else? Is that part of your teachings?

Well, I think in order to learn something, we need to actually use it and implement it and have this experience. I think the genius of that how many people have read Benjamin Franklin's autobiography, but how much are you? There is so much gold in there. Or better yet, the Walter Isaacson biography of Benjamin Franklin, which if people haven't read some of Isaacson stuff, Steve Jobs, da Vinci, I mean he's a great biographer and I personally love studying great people's lives. But how many people read that book and then implement nothing from it? And what I love about that idea is you're actually going in and you're having an experiential learning process of Benjamin Franklin or of Thomas Jefferson. And the second it goes from information to implementation, that's when it creates transformation. Right? So this idea of can I go in? Can I actually have an experience talking to that person? That's what's then. Because it's not the knowledge alone, right? I can know that Benjamin Franklin started a printing press when he was like 16 years old. That's information transformation is actually having an experience around it. So I love it, I love that. And I'm big on visualization. Hal Elrod, actually another mutual friend of ours, really changed my mind about visualization. I kind of thought it was BS and I thought affirmations were bs. And then I interviewed Hal a couple times and I was like, yep, no, this is the real deal.

There's power in that. And I mean Hal is as superhuman as it gets. I mean he was just real public about hey, you know, I just had cancer and I just recovered.

He cheated death twice and may he live to 280 or whatever it is the number that we're going for.

Now I have two more questions for you and they're both number related questions. The first one is talk to me about how many words per minute most people read at and how many words per minute you can read without starting to lose Information. You have the numbers in your book.

This is a great question because there have been a lot of snake oil salesmen throughout the years teaching speed reading. Two of them actually were fined half a million dollars for making false claims. So there's been a lot of misinformation out there. I learned how to speed read and didn't succeed. And then I read books about speed reading and didn't succeed. And finally I found some tutors who taught me and I succeeded, but only to a certain speed, which I'll get to in a moment. So I dug deep into the research. In fact, we hired a neuroscientist, Oxford trained who worked on a Nobel Prize winning team or Nobel laureate winning team. And we actually hired him to audit all our materials and look at the research and tell us, like, are we based in science? What the science says is this. There is science quote, unquote disproving speed reading. Those very same studies come to the conclusion that reading at 5,000 words per minute, it's not possible. And the study found that unfortunately, the fastest you can read without losing any comprehension is about 600 words per minute. Not coincidentally, we've been teaching for six years how to get to 600 words per minute with 100% comprehension, or 750, sometimes 800 with 80 to 90% comprehension. So if you're willing to make that sacrifice, that's what the scientific literature supports. I've met people who can read faster. There are gifted people out there who can read 1200 words per minute. I've never seen convincing evidence of people reading above 800 words per minute on things that they aren't intimately familiar with and retaining it.

At a certain point, you're getting into the Ferrari level performance. You're saying for the average person with the average brain, 600 words a minute is possible. And they're probably at 250 now. So you can double.

Yes, the average college educated person reads at 250 words per minute. In English, I don't have the statistics for, you know, kanji or whatever other language, but in English, people read about 250 words per minute. We can get you 600. And people come up to me, what about photo reading? What about Kim Peek? There are edge cases, but that's what scientifically I can claim and I have the research to back it up. And that's still three times faster. Yeah, for God's sake, people want the world. But three times. Can you imagine if you could read at that speed at 750 words of minute? And I will give the caveat? I can't speed read for three hours straight. I need. I need naps because it's so mentally taxing for me.

Okay. I got a hack for that.

Okay. Yeah, you do. It's called bulletproof coffee, right?

It's part of it. Do you want the whole hack? Like, if you want to be able to sustain that. Tell me the reason I know this. Okay. 40 years of Zen, the neuroscience institute. I'm measuring people's brain waves. And that kind of really intense meditation with a computer, keeping honest is as taxing as really high speed, speed reading. It is a workout for my life.

Yeah, I know. I know people who've done it. Many people got it.

So that's a testing laboratory because we can also measure voltage. And brain. We know when it drops, so we can push you to two and a half times longer than normal. And yes, brain octane is part of it. We don't actually use the coffee. We use decaf coffee because there's good stuff in coffee that helps. But. But it's not the caffeine. So brain octane ketoprime, another bulletproof supplement. Unfair advantage. And something called Mito Sweet, which is another thing that allows you to make more energy. And this is gonna really. I don't normally do this at 40 years, but if you were to just do what I just said there, those things, and you were to about an hour in, have maybe 4 or 5 grams of. Are you ready for this glucose? But the reason is that all you're doing there is you're saying, all right, I'm going to make it so easy for my brain to keep making electricity beyond what it's supposed to. It's the same thing. Someone who's running a marathon. Do you want to have a gel pack at mile 20? You probably do. Even if you're one of those people who's running in ketosis, which is probably not a good call anyway. Maybe starting in ketosis, but ending not in ketosis. So you could do this with your brain. I think you can go for more than three hours, or you can go for three hours straight.

I'll tell you what my concern is, but you might have an answer for it. During meditation and stuff like that, you're not creating as much metabolic waste in the brain. In fact, during meditation, you can actually clear. Some studies show. I haven't seen convincing evidence. The only time the brain can clear metabolic waste, unlike your muscles, is when you sleep. You have to be physically unconscious to move because your brain creates waste. Many people don't realize similar to child, your muscles create lactic acid, the glymphatic system. Yeah, right. And I wonder if speed reading, because I can. I know right when I have this pressure feeling right up here, audio listeners can't hear. But right up in the sides of my brain. I know that's metabolic waste buildup and a 20 minute nap can clear some of that out. I wonder, I wonder if supplementation could get rid of that.

It will. Because the reason you're getting metabolic waste is that your metabolism is inefficient. So if you take things that allow you to get more electrons per Krebs cycle spin, that would be ketones or things that repair holes in the Krebs cycle. I absolutely know you can do it because in meditation I'm just going to quiet the brain and just be quiet. That's not what we're doing. At 40 years in, you're going to go in and edit your physical responsiveness. So it is hardcore personal development. Work with a lie detector. Very different than this is like the Buddhist open heart compassion where you learn to feel compassion for everything that ever was an inhibitor for you. So that compassion cancels things out. So I'm just saying it's a similar amount of cognitive and visceral load. So just try listening to everyone listening. That will increase speed reading. I know this. And that's where your work and my work comes together. On metabolic activation to increase speed reading.

The only caveat I will give people, you can only consolidate memories.

Ah, that's totally true.

So don't use this to not sleep because if you want to remember what you speed read at some point, go to sleep.

Amen. All right, so there was our first numbers question. The next numbers question is also a very fun one. How long are you going to live?

I want to live to 180.

Copycat.

Well, but here's. So here's my thing.

Why 180?

I did the whole lifetime extender with Dan Sullivan.

Yeah.

And I came up with 127. But here's my thing. I see it as one of two ways. I see one, we, we figure out a way to transfer consciousness and then it's, I don't know, 250 indefinite, whatever. We're not limited by this biology. So I figure it's somewhere between the 127 that I got in the Dan Sullivan workshop. Lifetime extender people can check it out. It's an average between somewhere in the 250 and 127, which I think this format of body can handle.

Nice.

Always.

All right, your new book is definitely worth reading. If anyone listening. If you just. You want to make your memory work better. You want to make your brain work better at the software level, not the hardware level. It's called the Only Skill that Matters by Jonathan Levy. And what's the best URL to find the book? Do you have, like a landing page or something that you go to?

Yeah. Superhumanacademy.com book I keep it easy because the people who come to me are the ones with the memory problems.

All right. Superhumanacademy.com book yes, sir. All right, you guys got that? You know how to go get the book. And hopefully you picked up some cool tricks here. At least you know some stuff is possible that wasn't before. Because you want to be a better, faster, smarter human being. Reading does it for you. And you want to be a happy human being showing gratitude does it. And you show gratitude to authors by leaving reviews. So just click, take 5 seconds. Just review the books you've read. Everybody wins when you do that. Other readers win, authors win. And by the way, give me a bad review if my book sucked. I totally want that, but I think my book is worth your time. Then give it a good review if it was. And I'm sure Jonathan would say the same thing, wouldn't you, Jonathan?

I would. And make sure to leave a review on Bulletproof radio, because I don't know about Dave, but I'm pretty confident that it makes his day. It certainly makes our day at Superhuman Academy. So leave a review. It is not easy to do a podcast, especially with Dave's busy schedule. So please leave a review.

That's so nice. We're, like, begging people to leave reviews. On that note, if you guys decide not to do it, you're like, screw it. I just want free content. Enjoy the free content and learn something cool. And that's good enough. So have a beautiful day.