The Only Skill that Matters: The Proven Methodology to Read Faster, Remember More, and Become a SuperLearner

by Jonathan A. Levi

When you buy something as simple as a refrigerator—something that was designed by a team of engineers to be as easy to use as possible—it still comes with a fifty-page user’s manual! That manual gives you helpful information about every single feature plus exact instructions to follow in case you experience difficulties. And yet, when it comes to the single most complex object in the known universe (your brain), you’re lucky if you get even a hint as to how to actually use it.

If you want to build up the motivation to learn something, dive deep into your why. Why do you want to learn it? How will you use it? Why will your life be better once you have? Do this simple focusing exercise before and during your most challenging periods of learning. You’ll find that it’s a useful way to motivate yourself, even when no amount of coffee will.

Deconstruction: How small can I break things down into their basic units of learning, such as individual vocabulary words or grammatical rules? Selection: What are the 20 percent of those units that will give me 80 percent of the benefits (Pareto’s Principle)? Sequencing: What is the best order in which to learn these units? Stakes: How can I use psychology or social pressure to condense my timelines and push myself to learn faster?

Through years of teaching, he has developed a system for breaking things down into individual skills or sections and then tackling them in the right order. Zach also pointed out that unless we plan out our learning in a methodical and deliberate way, we fall prey to bad habits, wasted time, or complacency.

Here are some questions I encourage you to spend time considering before diving into any learning project. Why am I learning this information, and how and when will I actually use it? You probably noticed that this first question immediately checks off a few of Dr. Knowles’s requirements. But beyond that, it also helps us determine just what we’re going to focus on in the first place. Chances are, you’re not learning Russian to communicate with construction workers, right? In that case, learning words like трубка (tube) is probably not worth your time. If, however, you’re learning Russian to travel in the former USSR, then you should probably prioritize basic grammar. (Heads up: I also suggest learning practical words like “exit” and “entrance.”) What level of understanding or knowledge do you need? One question that I’ve long felt is missing from the preparation conversation is that of depth. After all, there are many levels of understanding and knowledge. The ability to remember a list of facts is very different from the ability to think originally on the subject. So ask yourself: To what level do you need to know the information you are learning? Do you need to be able to recite other people’s works word-for-word and challenge them for your PhD thesis? Or, do you simply need to know where to look something up the next time a patient presents those symptoms? The depth to which you need to know something dramatically changes the way you should approach learning it—and how...

one memory games competitor, Joshua Foer, went from skeptical observer to world champion in just one year of training. Then, he documented his entire journey in the bestselling book, Moonwalking with Einstein.

If you want to improve your memory tenfold, create novel visualizations, called “markers,” for everything you wish to remember.

Create Highly Detailed Visualizations First, picture as much detail as possible. By creating a high level of detail, you ensure that you are adequately visualizing a vivid, memorable image in your mind’s eye. Fuzzy, nonspecific images are much easier to forget.

At the highest level of memory competition, the difference between winning and losing comes down to how many cards or numbers the competitor can chunk into one visual marker. Every year, competitors engineer newer, more complex ways to fit more detail into fewer markers for this very reason.

Opt for the “Out There” Next, wherever possible, your visualizations should include absurd, bizarre, violent, or sexual imagery. Though it might make you blush, the truth is, our brains crave the novel. Our hippocampi are very attuned to picking up and remembering things that seem strange to us.

Leverage Your Existing Knowledge The next important principle in developing our visual markers comes from our dear old friend Dr. Knowles. Wherever possible, you should make use of images, ideas, or memories you already have. Research has determined that our brains pay special attention to information that’s related to stuff we already know and care about. This is the basic idea behind Hebb’s Law, which is often summarized as “neurons that fire together, wire together.”

Ask what does this remind me of?

Connect It Back Finally, it’s important that as you create visualizations, you also create logical connections to what you’re trying to remember. Obviously, a visual marker is no good if you can’t remember what it stands for.

Another way to achieve this is by using people we already know as pre-existing knowledge. Imagine picturing a new person named Jenna fighting it out to the death with a Jenna we know from childhood.

And most challenging of all, how do you turn something so auditory—like a word in a foreign language—into a visual marker? Simple: break it down until you can find visualizations. For example: instead of trying to memorize the word caber, or “to fit” in Spanish, we can come up with a visualization of a taxi cab trying to fit a bear inside.

Once you know that system, you can create words out of the numbers and use visualizations to memorize those words with ease. Using the Major Method, for example, the phone number 740-927-1415 transforms into Crazy Pink Turtle. Even if you’re new at this, that’s really easy to visualize, and therefore, easy to remember.

Finally, the memory palace leverages yet another one of our brain’s deeply embedded evolutionary skills: spatial memory. As we learned in Chapter 3, our Paleolithic ancestors survived thanks to their ability to navigate their environment. This is why, unbeknownst to you, your brain automatically remembers the layout of your surroundings. It doesn’t matter if it’s a house you’ve lived in for years, a hotel room you’ve stayed in for days, or a store you step into for a few minutes. While you might struggle to remember names, numbers, or other important information every day, your brain is constantly creating strong, lasting memories of everywhere you’ve ever been. It knows every apartment you’ve ever lived in, every office you’ve ever worked in, and even many places you’ve briefly passed through.

Even if you try, you can’t help but memorize these new locations. In a 2017 study conducted on mice, researchers found that when we enter a new place with novel sensory stimuli, a small region of the brainstem known as the locus coeruleus is activated in response.7 This, in turn, triggers a flood of dopamine into the CA3 region of the hippocampus, causing it to store a memory of the location and its details. Researchers now believe that this influx of dopamine boosts the CA3 region’s ability to strengthen the synapses and form a memory of the new location. Perhaps most interestingly of all, researchers found that this response was not triggered for other types of memories. Instead, it actually appears to be specific to the memorization of new environments. In other words, research has finally figured out why the memory palace works so well. It all boils down to neurochemical changes that occur when we activate the parts of our brains concerned with location.

To build a memory palace, you first need a few things. Most important, of course, is a suitable location. In reality, any location will do: past homes, office buildings, even stores you’ve casually strolled through. With that said, I encourage you to remember what we learned in our chapter on preparation. Start by carefully thinking ahead and determining what information you need to know, in what order, and how you need to access it. This step alone can save you the hassle of memorizing something in the wrong way—and being stuck with it indefinitely. Ironically, the biggest “side effect” of the memory palace technique is how obnoxiously effective it is. If you memorize a speech, only to change the order of the points later on, you’re likely to deliver it as memorized—for better or worse. When, for example, I memorized my TEDx talk using a memory palace, I spent a few minutes thinking about how to logically lay it out. How many paragraphs were there? Where were the transition points? This is something you can do “in your head,” by walking around the space physically, or even by drawing a quick floor plan on a piece of paper. This type of preparation beforehand helped me determine what size memory palace I would use. It also helped me create a logical template. I chose to assign each paragraph or key idea to a specific room and memorize the important “transitions” in the walkways between rooms. When I needed to memorize the circle of fifths, a concept in music theory, I was ...

In other cases, you may need to access the information by some other grouping. This might be area of expertise (names and bios), parts of speech (vocabulary), or parts of the body (anatomy). In those situations, it’s best to create these logical groupings in advance. One trick I like to use is to leverage the existing logic of the location itself. I might memorize the anatomy of the reproductive system in the bedroom, the upper gastrointestinal tract in the kitchen, the lower gastrointestinal tract in the bathroom, and the brain in the office. This helps create more synaptic connections and makes it easy to find the information you’re looking for.

When choosing locations for these markers, it’s best if you “anchor” your visualizations to specific areas. This could mean the corners of a room, specific pieces of furniture, drawers, or even windows. If needed, you can create very dense memory palaces by using every anchor available. If you do, though, avoid placing multiple markers in the same exact location, such as on the same shelf or pinned up to the same wall. It’s far better to expand your memory palaces outwards than to overstuff them.

Create a visualization, place it in a location, be amazed.

Survey Question Read Recall Review SQ3R is different from the way you likely read today because it breaks the process of “reading” down into a handful of distinct steps. In doing so, it primes your brain for the knowledge it’s about to receive in a few different and ingenious ways. During the Survey step, we quickly skim or scan the content before we read it to prepare our minds for new information. If you’re a trained SuperLearner, this is also where you’ll begin creating visual mnemonics to be filled in with more detail later. Next is the Question phase, which happens simultaneously alongside the Survey phase. In this phase, we ask ourselves questions to improve our motivation, such as “For what reason am I reading this?” “What’s in it for me?” or “What do I expect to see here?” Doing this helps create curiosity, which in turn generates motivation and enthusiasm for reading. More on that in a bit. Next, we Read, either by speed-reading or in the normal fashion. When reading, you reap the benefit of the previous S and Q steps, so you do not reread or dwell on irrelevant details. With reading done, we Recall. We attempt to remember what we’ve read, and along the way, we create and improve detailed, visual mnemonics. This happens after reading each paragraph, page, or chapter, depending on the density of the material. This is our way to ensure that we actually recall the content we’re reading. Finally, we Review. We analyze the content from multiple perspectives. We assess ...

Surveying the Situation When we pre-read a text, we’re essentially skimming. But not your normal type of skimming. Instead, we’re spending a couple of seconds per page, skimming at a speed of about five to eight times our current reading speed. We are not reading the text—or even trying to. Instead, we’re looking for titles, subheadings, proper nouns, numbers, words, or anything that doesn’t seem to fit in. When we pre-read, we gain an understanding of the structure of the text, and we build a sort of mental map. If there are “cutaways,” or terms that jump out at us as unfamiliar, we stop our pre-reading and gain a better understanding before resuming.

Keep in mind that even though you don’t register the text at this speed, you are building a map and becoming more familiar with it subconsciously. This is like getting a feel for the layout of a neighborhood by driving through it at forty miles an hour. Don’t get frustrated, and don’t get hung up on understanding the text. Just understand the flow, and take note of any interesting points that might jump out at you.

Question Everything The next step in the SQ3R framework is no less important in pre-reading: questioning.

By asking ourselves certain types of questions, which compare new knowledge to our own, we supercharge our focus towards finding out one all-important thing: Are we right, or not?

Another effective class of questions is to ask yourself: How will I use this information? As you pre-read the text and begin to get a feel for its contents, try to envision scenarios in which it could affect your life.

What viewpoint do I anticipate the author taking? What viewpoint do I have going into reading this article? Where might the author be wrong? Where am I open to being persuaded on this topic? How could this material be improved? What would critics of this article likely say? Who might agree or disagree with what this article likely says?

I often feel that pre-reading is one of the most valuable “Easter eggs” in the SuperLearner method. People rarely anticipate it making as big of a difference as it does, and best of all, it’s something you can implement today, with little to no practice.

learning anything helps you learn everything. First off, learning unique new subjects exposes you to all different types of knowledge. This, in turn, expands your mind’s ability to take in new information.

Cross-pollination states that learning one subject will have significant, unforeseen benefits when learning another.

Brute force learning, on the other hand, means learning something from as many different perspectives as possible to try and gain complete understanding.

Doing this has a number of powerful benefits. First off, the more you approach something from different perspectives, the better, more holistic understanding you’ll have of it.

Next up on the taxonomy is “analyze.” Can we look critically at this piece of information, comparing and contrasting it to other information or ideas? Can we examine it in enough depth to break it down to its essential parts and come up with unique ways of thinking about it?

One study at Purdue University found that tests requiring inference and high-level comprehension were even more effective than continued study!15 In fact, in 2008, another group of researchers compared two different strategies for learning new vocabulary. One group was instructed to quiz themselves, while the other was told to continue studying and reviewing. The results were pretty astonishing: the students who quizzed themselves remembered up to 80 percent more words!

If you’re hoping to learn a subject, another great way to “test” yourself is to write—and publish—a blog post about it. For that matter, there’s one form of self-testing that goes above and beyond the benefits of any other: teaching others.

This illustrates one of the greatest benefits of teaching: the people we teach unknowingly test us. They give us insights into what we don’t even know we don’t know.

Pick a topic you want to understand, and start studying it. Write down everything you know about the topic on a notebook page. Use illustrations wherever possible to simplify your understanding and portrayal of the subject. Add to that page every time you learn something new about it. Pretend to teach your topic to a classroom. Make sure you’re able to explain the topic in simple terms. Go back to the books when you get stuck. The gaps in your knowledge should be obvious. Revisit problem areas until you can explain the topic fully. Simplify and use analogies. Repeat the process, continually simplifying your language and connecting facts with analogies. Do this as many times as needed to strengthen your understanding.

What’s more, research has proven that our brains can only clean up after themselves during sleep. When we use our brains intensively, metabolic waste builds up—just like it does in our muscles. In our brains, however, this waste causes those feelings of fogginess, pressure, and irritability that we all know too well. What most of us don’t know is that our brains, unlike our muscles, are completely unable to clear this metabolic waste while we’re awake.

But another possible reason that breaks are so beneficial is what psychologists call the “Zeigarnik effect.” This effect states that our brains can better remember and retain things that are unfinished or incomplete. The effect was first described by psychologist Bluma Zeigarnik. As the story goes, Zeigarnik’s professor noticed that a waiter seemed to have an easier time remembering unpaid orders. After the order had been paid and closed out, the knowledge seemed to disappear. Fortunately, as she and her colleagues discovered, this has practical uses too. By leaving things “unfinished,” even if temporarily, we can enhance our own memory of them. Studies have shown that students who suspend their learning to do something unrelated actually remember better than those who don’t.