Game Changers. Dave Asprey

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      The last thing that you need to forget is everything else that’s going on around you so that you can focus on what you are learning. Jim says that we can focus on only about seven bits of information at once. So if you’re reading a book and thinking about the kids and worrying about work and wondering if you should take the garbage out, you are left with only four bits of new information that you can focus on. Set all that aside so you can focus on the book and learn as much as possible.

       A: ACTIVE

      Twentieth-century education was based on the model of rote learning and repetition. A teacher stood in front of a class and stated facts for the students to repeat over and over again. The students did learn that way, but the problem with this type of learning is that it takes a lot of time. Jim compares it to working out: You can go to the gym and lift five-pound weights for an hour every day, or you can go far less frequently but dramatically increase the weight you lift. Intense learning, like intense exercise, gives you results in less time.

      Jim says that in the twenty-first century, education should be based on creation, not consumption. That requires us to be active participants in our learning, grabbing for knowledge instead of letting it be spooned into our mouths. That means taking notes actively and sharing what you learn. These techniques not only help you learn, they enable you to remember what you’ve learned.

      Jim recommends taking notes the old-fashioned way: with pen and paper. Put a line down the middle of the page. The left side is for “capture notes,” where you write down the thoughts and ideas you are learning; and the right side is for “creating notes,” where you write your impressions, thoughts, and questions about what you are learning. This strategy engages your whole brain so that you can learn faster and remember more.

       S: STATE

      All learning is state dependent. Jim defines your state as the current condition or mood of your brain and your body. A lot of people don’t realize that this is something that’s fully within their control. Most people think that if they’re bored, it’s because of their environment. If they’re down, it’s because something bad happened to them. But Jim says that we’re not thermometers, we’re thermostats, meaning that we don’t have to merely react to the environment around us. Instead, we can set a high standard for ourselves and then create and modify our environment to meet that setting.

       T: TEACH

      If you had to watch a video or read a book and then present it to someone else the next day, would you pay a different level of attention than you would otherwise? Would you organize or capture the information differently? If you ever have to learn a new subject or a new skill really fast, put on your professor’s cap. Ask yourself, “How would I teach this to someone else?” All of a sudden you’ll find that your retention of the information is doubled because you’re taking it in with the intention of being able to explain it to someone else.

      This last point about teaching is more powerful than you might imagine. At the start of my career in Silicon Valley, I sought out a side job at the University of California teaching working engineers how to build the internet. I ended up running the Web and internet engineering program at UCSC’s Silicon Valley campus during the birth of the modern internet! That put me into a situation where I delivered a two-hour lecture several nights a week to a room of smart, experienced engineers. I had to absorb the material well enough to teach it, and I did. The result was that within two years, at the ripe age of twenty-seven, I was promoted to the head of technology-strategic planning for a billion-dollar company. There is simply no way I could have assimilated the knowledge required for that job had I not taught it first. So find an excuse to teach people what you want to learn, and you’ll master it more quickly than you think. If you’re not actually teaching something, pretend that you will be!

      A conversation about fluid intelligence wouldn’t be complete without talking with Dan Hurley, an award-winning science journalist who has developed a niche writing about the science of increasing intelligence. Dan is someone who has fundamentally changed the way we think about learning and intelligence. He says that when people talk about being smart, they’re often referring to the knowledge and information they already possess. But they fail to look at where they got that knowledge and information in the first place. If a group of people were to sit in a class for the exact same amount of time and then study the information presented there for the exact same amount of time, they wouldn’t all end up getting the same grades on a test. That’s because they don’t all learn as well—they have varying levels of fluid intelligence.

      Your IQ is different from your fluid intelligence. Most IQ tests assess all sorts of factors, including crystallized knowledge, which speaks more to a person’s experience than their abilities. As such, most intelligence studies don’t bother with IQ tests. Scientists have known about fluid intelligence for a long time, but until recently, psychologists who study intelligence all agreed that you could not increase your fluid intelligence. They had been trying for a hundred years; they had done study after study after study. Then, in 2008, a group of scientists decided to focus on boosting working memory, a part of short-term memory.

      Working memory is critical to fluid intelligence, and those scientists wanted to see if improving someone’s working memory would also boost their fluid intelligence. They asked people to practice a simple two-minute test called the Dual N-Back to improve their working memory. After five weeks of practicing for half an hour a day, the people’s fluid intelligence increased on average by 40 percent.² That was an incredible finding.

      There’s one downside, though. The Dual N-Back test is so irritating that it makes you want to throw your computer across the room. Think of it as CrossFit for your brain—you just have to keep pushing. When you take the test, you see something like a tic-tac-toe board on a screen. One square lights up, then another, then another. You are first asked to press a button every time a square that lit up two times ago lights up again. That’s a two-back. Then, if you master that skill, which is pretty easy, you move on to a three-back. Throughout the test you are also listening to a voice reciting letters in a specific order that you also have to remember. So you have to remember which squares lit up three times ago and which letter you heard. It forces you to narrow your focus and really concentrate.

      Though the test isn’t much fun, it definitely produces results. Since that groundbreaking study in 2008, dozens of other studies have confirmed that performing working memory tasks increases not only your working memory but also all kinds of other intelligence-based skills, from reading comprehension to math ability. And this is just the tip of the iceberg; the field of intelligence research is really catching fire, and I’m excited to see what the future will hold.

      I used a clunky open-source n-back training app when I started the Bulletproof blog in 2011, and when I had my IQ tested afterward, it had increased by 12 points. When I wrote about that result on my blog and shared the software I had used, it was surprising how many people insisted that my results were impossible. It’s the standard science troll argument: “That can’t be, therefore it isn’t.” All I can say is that the training worked for me then, and there is a lot more science supporting its efficacy now.

      According to Dan, even though IQ tests don’t measure fluid intelligence, IQ scores commonly increase when people improve their fluid memory. Despite my results, I found that the training was so exhausting and discouraging that many people wouldn’t complete it. In the early days of Bulletproof, I flew around the world teaching hedge fund managers how to hack their brains. Even among this highly motivated crowd, very few people completed the n-back training because it makes you feel like a failure over and over before you see results.

      If you’re interested in trying it, my suggestion is to first use the other tools in this book to help strengthen your СКАЧАТЬ