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

by Jim Kwik

the half-life of information has decreased. The half-life of information is the amount of time that passes before that information is replaced by newer or more accurate information.

Take a moment and schedule 30 minutes of white space in your calendar for this week. This is time to be spent away from technology, time dedicated to clear your mind, relax, and be creative.

Instead of relaxing into the downtime that we might experience when waiting in line, waiting for a bus or an appointment, etc., we pull out our phones and train our distraction muscles. What happens when this is our constant way of being, when every loose moment is filled with shining stimulus?

Staying connected may make us feel more secure, but it doesn’t make us happier.

“Asking the brain to shift attention from one activity to another causes the prefrontal cortex and striatum to burn up oxygenated glucose, the same fuel they need to stay on task,” notes neuroscientist Daniel J. Levitin in his book, The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload.

“And the kind of rapid, continual shifting we do with multitasking causes the brain to burn through fuel so quickly that we feel exhausted and disoriented after even a short time. We’ve literally depleted the nutrients in our brain. This leads to compromises in both cognitive and physical performance.”

term digital dementia to describe how overuse of digital technology results in the breakdown of cognitive abilities. He argues that short-term memory pathways will start to deteriorate from underuse if we overuse technology.

With tools like GPS, we don’t give our minds the chance to work. We rely on technology to do the memorization for us. This reliance may be hurting our long-term memory.

Maria Wimber of the University of Birmingham told the BBC that the trend of looking up information prevents the build-up of long-term memories.

Why is this a big deal? Because such instant information can be easily and immediately forgotten. “Our brain appears to strengthen a memory each time we recall it, and at the same time forget irrelevant memories that are distracting us,” said Dr. Wimber. Forcing yourself to recall information instead of relying on an outside source to supply it for you is a way of creating and strengthening a permanent memory. When you contrast that with the reality that most of us have a habit of constantly looking up information—maybe even the same information—without bothering to try to remember it, it seems we’re doing ourselves harm.

“In a digital-first world, where millennials obtain all their answers to problems at the click of a mouse or swipe of a finger, the reliance on technology to solve every question confuses people’s perception of their own knowledge and intelligence. And that reliance may well lead to overconfidence and poor decision-making,” says Rony Zarom,

The ubiquity of information about everything also means that there’s a ubiquity of opinion about everything.

The upshot is that deduction—an amalgam of critical thinking, problem solving, and creativity that is an essential skill for being limitless—is becoming automated.

In an ideal world, being able to get as many perspectives on a topic as possible would be enormously valuable in helping us to form our own opinions. Unfortunately, that’s rarely how it plays out in the real world. Instead, we tend to identify a handful of sources with which we align and then give those sources extreme influence over our thinking and decision-making. In the process, the “muscles” we use to think critically and reason effectively are atrophying. We’re letting technology do the deduction for us. And if technology is forming our deductions, then we are also ceding much of our problem-solving ability—

“The capacity to reflect, reason, and draw conclusions based on our experiences, knowledge, and insights. It’s what makes us human and has enabled us to communicate, create, build, advance, and become civilized.”

While these four horsemen are the ones we need to contend with most vociferously, there’s another digital danger that is worthy of our attention. I call this digital depression, a result of the comparison culture that emerges when we let the highlight reels of the social media feeds of others cause us to perceive ourselves as less than.

Think about a decision you need to make. Schedule some time to work on that decision without the use of any digital devices.

Our frontal lobes are where most of our thinking takes place: where logic and creativity derive.

Neuroplasticity is dependent on the ability of our neurons to grow and make connections with other neurons in other parts of the brain. It works by making new connections and strengthening (or weakening, as the case may be) old ties.

Our brain is malleable. We have the incredible ability to change its structure and organization over time by forming new neural pathways as we experience, learn something new, and adapt. Neuroplasticity helps explain how anything is possible. Researchers hold that all brains are flexible in that the complex webs of connected neurons can be rewired to form new connections.

If learning is making new connections, then remembering is maintaining and sustaining those connections.

When we struggle with memory or experience memory impairment, we are likely experiencing a disconnection between neurons. In learning, when you fail to remember something, view it as a failure to make a connection between what you’ve learned and what you already know, and with how you will use it in life.

For example, if you feel that something you’ve learned is valuable in the moment, but that you’ll never use it again, you are unlikely to create a memory of it. Similarly, if you learn something but have no higher reasoning as to why it’s important to you or how it applies to your lif...

It’s totally normal to have a memory lapse—we’re human, not robots. But if we respond to this lapse in memory with the attitude that “I have a bad memory,” or “I’m not smart enough to remember this,” then we negatively affect our ability to learn and grow. In other words, the belief we might develop in response to forgetting does far more damage than the lapse in memory. That kind of self-talk reinforces a limiting belief, rather than acknowledging the mistake and reacquiring the information.

An obstcle doess not mean we are limited with a fixed mindset

Plasticity means that your learning, and indeed your life, is not fixed. You can be, do, have, and share anything when you optimize and rewire your brain. There are no limitations when you align and apply the right mindset, motivation, and methods.

Hidden in the walls of the digestive system, this “brain in your gut” is revolutionizing medicine’s understanding of the links between digestion, mood, health, and even the way you think. Scientists call this little brain the enteric nervous system (ENS).

The brain that exists in out gut. It is impacted by what we eat and digest

Science is only beginning to understand the brain-gut axis and how it affects our brains, our moods, and our behavior.

The connection between the brain and the gut is still being explored, but it seems that they function in very similar ways and that they function in tandem. The little brain in conjunction with the big one partly determines our mental state.

If your brain is indeed so magnificent, why are overload, distraction, forgetfulness, and feelings of inadequacy affecting us so much?

Give a person an idea, and you enrich their day. Teach a person how to learn, and they can enrich their entire life.

School is a great place to learn. There, we’re taught what to learn, what to think, and what to remember. But there are few if any classes on how to learn, how to think, and how to remember.

In reality, though, even if I’d never had that fateful head trauma in kindergarten, I would probably have gotten much less out of my school education than was ideal. That’s because very few schools anywhere in the world have incorporated learning how to learn into their curriculums. They’ll fill us with information.

But they won’t get underneath all of this to teach us how to teach ourselves, to make enriching our minds, discovering new concepts, and truly absorbing what we learn fundamental to our everyday lives.

They = school

Education hasn’t changed enough to prepare us for the world we live in today.

We must take charge of our own learning. If schools tell us what to learn, but not how to learn, then we need to do the rest of the work ourselves. If digital overload threatens to hijack our brains, then we need to use what we know about learning to reset the ground rules. If the workplace is evolving with so much rapidity that we can never be sure of what work will mean to us tomorrow, then only by taking complete control of our learning can we truly be prepared for an unknowable future.

We’ve entered an expert economy in which brain power trumps brute strength. Where what you have between your ears is your greatest wealth-creating asset. There are those who know and those who don’t know. And that applied knowledge is not just power, it’s profit.

Your ability to think, solve problems, make the right decisions, create, innovate, and imagine is how we add value. The faster you can learn, the faster you can earn.

I’ve mentored and coached some amazing minds, and you don’t have to be a genius to see that genius leaves clues. One of those patterns is that elite mental performers filter and focus for those handful of “screws” that make all the difference and turn everything else on. This book is filled with many of the behaviors, tools, and strategies I’ve discovered to give you the maximum results and rewards for your effort.

The world is throwing more challenges at you than ever before, and there’s every indication that those challenges will continue to increase. At the same time, there is more to be gained from having a finely tuned brain than ever before, and you know now that you have more than enough potential to meet any challenge. But it’s going to require taking control of your learning.

We’ve all procrastinated before a test and then, the night before the exam, sat down to “cram” as much as possible without any breaks. Primacy and recency are just two of the (many) reasons cram sessions don’t work. But by taking breaks, you create more beginnings and endings, and you retain far more of what you’re learning.

If you sit down to read a book over the course of two hours without taking any breaks, you might remember the first 20 minutes of what you read, then maybe you’ll experience a dip around the 30-minute mark, and then you’re likely to remember the end of what you read. This means the lull in between, with no breaks for assimilation or thinking through what you just read, results in a dead space for learning.

But on another level, when you actively read it, you’ll form pictures in your mind, and you’ll make connections between what you know and what you’re learning. You will think about how this applies to your current life, and you will imagine how you can use the knowledge you’re taking in. It promotes neuroplasticity.

To get the most out of this book, here is a simple method for learning anything quickly. I call it the FASTER Method, and I want you to use this as you read, starting now. The acronym FASTER stands for: Forget, Act, State, Teach, Enter, Review.

The key to laser focus is to remove or forget that which distracts you.

Forget three tjings: 1) What I already know 2) Urgent or important distractions 3) My own limitations

As you are reading this book, when your mind inevitably wanders into something else—and that something else is important but not urgent—don’t try to not think of it. What you resist persists. Instead, keep a notebook close by to capture that thought or idea by writing it down. You can thus release it temporarily, to be addressed after the task at hand is complete.

Useful way to separat the randoom distracting thoihts that fly in

But learning is not a spectator sport. The human brain does not learn as much by consumption as it does by creation.

The more active you are, the better, faster, and more you will learn.

All learning is state-dependent. Your state is a current snapshot of your emotions. It is highly influenced by your thoughts (psychology) and the physical condition of your body (physiology). Your feelings or lack thereof about a subject in a specific situation affect the learning process and ultimately the results. In fact, when you tie a feeling to information, the information becomes more memorable.

Information times emotion helps create long-term memories.

If your emotional energy at school was low, it’s no wonder you forgot the periodic table. But, when you take control of your state of mind and body, you can shift your experience of learning from boredom to excitement, curiosity, and even fun.