Limitless: Upgrade Your Brain, Learn Anything Faster, and Unlock Your Exceptional Life

by Jim Kwik

Habit 6: Listen with Your Whole Brain

H is for Halt: In all likelihood, as you’re listening to someone else speak, there will be other things going on in the same space. Maybe there are people milling about. Maybe your phone is chirping, telling you that you’ve just received a text. Maybe there’s music playing in the room or a television in the background. Meanwhile, you’re thinking about your to-do list, your next meeting, or what you’re going to have for dinner that night. Do everything you can to tune all of this out and to be completely present with whomever you’re listening to. Remember that listening involves more than just the words a person is saying; vocal inflection, body language, facial expressions, and more create additional context and provide additional information. You can absorb all of this only if you halt everything else. E is for Empathy: If you can imagine yourself in the speaker’s shoes, you’re likely to learn more from this listening experience than if you do it dispassionately. Trying to understand where the speaker is coming from and why brings additional substance to what they might be saying and allows you to feel it from their perspective. A is for Anticipate: Engage in the experience with a sense of anticipation. Remember that learning is state-dependent and that what you can learn from this speaker will become a long-term memory if you attach emotion to it. Your enthusiasm for what you’re hearing will greatly increase your potential of truly hearing it. R is for Review: If you hav...

T is for Think: Before you begin any session where you’re going to be taking notes, think about what you’re hoping to retain most from this session. This will help you filter the high-value information from the information that is less relevant to your goal. I is for Identify: Listen carefully to the information being presented and identify what is most important in the context of your goal. Remember that attempting to write down everything is going to make it impossible to process the information at the time and will probably make studying harder. Identify what you need the most and write that down. P is for Prioritize: As you review your notes after the presentation, prioritize the information that is most valuable to you, perhaps adding additional notes as necessary to make the priority information clearer or making an outline to highlight key points.

Try out your new note-taking tools. Maybe go through this chapter again and take notes about it. Or watch a TED talk and take notes on that instead. Use the skills you’ve learned here to upgrade this experience.

If someone says to you, “Hey, remember our call tomorrow,” you may or may not remember that you’ve scheduled a call with that person. If instead he says, “Hey, if you remember our call tomorrow, I’ll give you $5,000,” you will definitely remember that you’ve scheduled the call. You are overwhelmingly more likely to remember something when you have a strong motivation to do so.

Now, take a minute and, without looking back, try to recall the list in the order it was presented. Write down as much as you can remember. Take a minute and do this now.

1. Fire hydrant 2. Balloons. 3. Battery’s 4. Barrels 5. Board 6 Diamond. 7. Knight 9. Ox 10. Sign. Jag lyckades komma ihåg allting, men detta är bara för att jag visste denna tekniken som han kommer berätta om innan. Jag gjorde en action historia där diamanterna och oxen fightades mot riddarna m.m. På detta sättet så kunde jag komma ihåg allting utan problem, jag bara berättade om historian.

KWIK START Without looking back, write the story down.

By taking a more active approach to learning, you will have greater results and the satisfaction that comes from involvement and personal awareness. Learning passively is weak; active learning is strong.

Som Jim visar i detta kapitel så är hjärnan dålig på att komma ihåg randomiserad hängande information som dem 10 random orden. Men när informationen hamnade i en historia så var det inga problem för hjärnan att komma ihåg orden. Jag kunde komma ihåg vart ända ord på hela listan, första gången jag gjorde detta utan tekniken kom jag ihåg 2. Detta förstärker bara teorin som boken framför. Att vara ett geni är inte medfött, det är lärt. Försök att igenom boken istället för att bara ta anteckningar, gör en historia av vad du lär dig.

Visualization

Your visual memory is very powerful. By seeing the pictures a story paints and not just the words that represent those pictures, you create a stronger means by which to remember. Thinking is done through the use of pictures.

This is how your mind thinks. If you doubt this, then ask yourself, do you frequently find yourself dreaming in words? Probably not. Remember a picture is worth a thousand words!

Association This is the key to memory and all of learning: In order to learn any new piece of information, it must be associated with something you already know.

To remember any new piece of information, you must associate it with some...

Your mind is constantly making countless associations every minute, most of them without your conscious awareness. This is how you learn.

Do you have a song that reminds you of a special person? That memory is an association.

Emotion

Adding emotion makes something memorable. Information by itself is forgettable, but information combined with emotion becomes a long-term memory.

Location

We are really good at recalling places because as hunter-gatherers, we didn’t need to remember numbers and words, but we needed to remember where things were.