How to Use AI to Level Up Your Learning | Jim Kwik

How do you navigate, and what are your thoughts on AI and welcoming the technology as it's for so much of its usefulness, but not allowing it to really atrophy different parts of our brain where we would have to use that? We would have to use our brain and cognitive capacities in that aspect. So any thoughts there?

Yes. You know, one of the things I talk about in Limitless are these 4— I call them the Horsemen of the Mental Apocalypse— and it's kind of amplified by technology. And there are health consequences. I talk about one of the horsemen is digital deluge. It's just where it feels like you have to— it's taking a sip of water out of a fire hose nowadays just to keep up. And people buy books and they, they sit on your shelf unread and become shelf help, not self-help, right? And, um, you know, it's, it's a challenge and, and it's, it's a health crisis too because the amount of information, if it's doubling at Disney speed, but how we learn it and absorb and understand it, focus on it, retain it, it's This hasn't changed. If anything, it's decreased. That growing gap creates stress, right? They call it information anxiety, higher blood pressure, compression of leisure time, more sleeplessness. Another one that will be applicable to the conversation is digital distraction, right? It's just not just the overload. It's just we can't focus. There's so many shiny objects and every ring, ping, ding, app notification, social media alert, it's just driving us to distraction. And I think distraction and, like, focus their muscles. And if we're flexing those distraction muscles, we wonder why we can't be present with our friends or family or at work, and our minds go different places. And so, you know, it's definitely a challenge. The other 2 relates to this a lot. One is digital dementia. Digital dementia is the high reliance on technology to remember things for you. So, you know, like, like our phones, they're like external hard drives. You don't have to remember your to-dos. It's in your phone. You don't have to remember your schedule. It's in your calendar phone. You don't have to remember phone numbers. I mean, how many phone numbers did you know growing up compared to how many phone numbers we know now?

Right.

That's something called digital dementia. It's a term in healthcare that says the high reliance on technology to remember things. Your brain is like a muscle. It's use it or lose it. And again, technology— I don't want to memorize 500 phone numbers. But it should be concerning. We've lost the ability to remember one phone number or a PIN number or a passcode or a seed phrase or something we just read or something we just heard, something we're going to do or a meeting we're going to have or someone's name. Right. I believe 2 of the most costly words in life sometimes are, I forgot. I forgot to do it. I forgot to bring it. I forgot what I was going to say. I forgot what was said to me. I forgot to go there. Forgot that person's name, whatever. On the other side, your memory could be a big multiplier when you could easily remember facts and figures, client information, product information, speeches without notes, foreign language. Life just gets easier.

Right.

So that's the third one. And the fourth one, horseman, besides digital distraction, digital delusion, digital dementia, is digital— what I term digital deduction, where technology is, through algorithms, is doing the thinking for us. And again, technology is wonderful. It's just how it's applied, right? Fire is an early form of technology. Fire could cook your food, or fire could burn down your home, right? It's just how it's used. And so I love technology. It allows this to happen.

Right.

But the challenge is, if we're too dependent on it, it's like if your office is on the 4th floor, your apartment's on the 4th floor, and you take the elevator each time, then you don't get the workout to do the stairs, right? Or if you're going to the bank and it's 8 blocks away and you take an Uber or you drive when you could have got your steps in, it's convenient. Technology is convenient. That's a form of technology, an elevator or an automobile. But then we don't get the balance of being physically active. And if you put your arm in a cast for a year, some kind of sling or whatever, it wouldn't grow stronger. It wouldn't even stay the same. It would atrophy. And that's what's going on with our brain. I mean, think about even something simple, and we'll get into AI, like getting from here to there. There was a study done in Oxford with London taxi drivers. They would have to memorize all the roads, right? And that part of their brain was very highly connected and dense. But with technology now telling you where to go, you don't have to think. So we're not building our visual spatial intelligence as we once had, right? And so I'm all for technology, and I feel like we have to make a decision on how much we're gonna, you know, be active, uh, like our bodies. Going to AI, we did a whole chapter in Limitless on the— what I wanted to do is answer this question: how can AI enhance HI? Human intelligence, and I don't look at it as artificial intelligence as much as I do augmented intelligence. I feel like technology is there to to support us, to be a potential tool. And just remember, technology is a tool for us to use. But if the technology is using us, then we become the tool, right? If we're just like addicted to our phones and picking up after boredom, you know, just because we're bored, then it's using us, and that's not probably the most effective way of using it. But we have a choice. Like, who am I to say, like, don't do this? But it's. just, you know, is it getting you closer to what you value and lights you up? So different ways I use AI and our team uses AI to learn faster. Things like I mentioned neuroplasticity. People could go into an AI, ChatGPT or something, and say, explain to me neuroplasticity as if I am 9 years old, right? That would be a fun way to learn and build some kind of foundation. Every principle I talk about in Limitless, from spaced repetition to retrieval practice, mind mapping, memory palaces, AI could help support you in that, right? So memory palaces is a way— because I was really curious, not only modern ways of learning based on neuroscience, but ancient cultures. And I wrote the chapter on memory, is the largest chapter in Limitless, and I wrote that in Greece. And because I found out there's a goddess of memory, and her children are the 9 Muses of arts, science, and literature. And I was like, wow, art, science, literature, the mother is memory, right? So I wrote—

We talked about the Muses too on Steven Pressfield podcast.

Beautiful. Yeah, I'm a big fan and follower of his work. And so when I was there in that spirit, I found out that there was a 2,500-year-old memory technique attributed to Simonides, who was a poet and orator in Greece. And he would give this reading, and when he left, something tragic happened. The building collapsed and no one survived. And because he was the only survivor, he had the responsibility of helping family members identify their loved ones. And he was able to do that because he remembered where they were all sitting. And I bet a lot of people listening, if they think about a recent dinner party or conference, they remember who was to the left and right. And we store things in our environment, right? Because as hunter-gatherers, we didn't need to remember facts and figures. We need to remember where things were, are. Like, where's the fertile soil? Where's the clean water? Where's the enemy tribe? That was our survival. So we store information consciously and unconsciously in our environment. So Memory Palace is a technique we talk about in Limitless and in our podcast about taking areas you're familiar with, maybe your office, your school, your home, your body, and storing the information you want to remember in those places, right? And you just kind of walk through your palace in your mind and it reminds you. And, you know, if you've seen Sherlock Holmes use the memory palace, and it's used a lot in different places, um, that's a wonderful way to store an immense amount of information in a short period of time. Now, you could use AI to say, hey, this is what I'm learning, can you build me a memory palace to learn this? Or if you learn about mind mapping, which is a very creative whole brain note-taking way, you could say, hey, I want to mind map this, and it'll create a structure for you. If you want to use spaced repetition, it could create personalized learning AI. Like, we have a Kwik bot in our program where we fed it all of our training, and so it's there to be able to answer your questions. So the future belongs to, like, personalized learning, right? Being based around their brain type, their animal, and so much more. The frequency of how, how much they want to learn over what period of time— frequency, duration, intensity. So we build it out like that. And Like, we have a podcast, and sometimes if I'm interviewing an expert and they are an author, I like to read books physically, um, as opposed to on screen. I don't need another excuse to be on a screen, so I'm kind of like, um, created these kind of scaffolding for me to get through. But, um, but if I don't get the book in time, and like, I could go in and go into AIPRM and say, can you summarize this book? Or can you ask 10— what are 10— can you suggest 10 thoughtful questions that this expert hasn't been asked before, specifically for this kind of audience, right? And not that I use anything verbatim, but it would be a nice creative partner, you know, for you.

I've used that too for this podcast a couple times when I'm crunching on time, just to see if anything's inspiring off it, you know?

Yeah, and you can, and you could build on it. So it's, it's a wonderful— so AI is a wonderful way to improve your HI by, you know, using the Feynman technique where he explained this to me as if I'm 8 years old, building memory palaces, mind mapping, um, quizzing yourself. You know, I think that that's the retrieval practice. There's 3 parts of your memory: you encode, You store and then you retrieve. And just train yourself to retrieve information, pull it out to see if it's really there. Helps you to retain information better. But they could provide questions for you from a specific topic to quiz to see how much comprehension you actually have about a subject matter. So it could do personalized learning and schedules and really kind of tailor it around your outcomes. So I'm very optimistic about technology.

I'm glad you are. I too am. But I also see— I think it's— is it WALL-E where there's just like all those super fat people in like floating wheelchairs that just are plugged into the matrix essentially. Like that's the dystopic route, you know, where—

And that's why I stress like, you know, us taking care of ourselves, you know, like, so yeah, physically and mentally, Wally painted a picture where we're so dependent and some would say we're heading there, right? And I think it comes back to personal agency, realizing that technology can make your life more convenient, but it could also cripple us. And so I feel like we always have responsibility and onuses on us to be healthy and fit.