What if Schools Taught Us How to Learn | Jonathan Levi | TEDxWhiteCity

The way we

learn

is broken, well it's not entirely broken because broken would imply that it was working fine to begin with, but it is inefficient and ineffective and hopelessly outdated. I mean, I'm sure it's gotten us to where we are today and with enough effort, it kind of gets the job done, but let's face it: the way we actually

learn

new information hasn't changed since the advent of writing systems. character-based. Now, at the same time, we are faced with an exponential amount of more information than any other generation. come before us according to UNESCO alone in the USA 300 thousand books will be published next year in China that figure is half a million, that is to say one book for every 2000 people, but it does not even include a large amount, possibly a greater amount of scientific publications and blog posts and magazine editorials and of course Internet memes, now on top of all this information, overload our lives and our livelihoods have become inextricably linked to rapid and lifelong learning, most Of us will change careers at least a few times throughout our lives and even if we don't, we will be forced to deal with an ever-increasing body of knowledge in our respective fields.

If you don't believe me, ask any doctor or programmer how much of their daily work revolves around innovations from just the last 10 years, so

what

if we could learn as quickly as society progresses? If we could say read a book or a new scientific publication or a lunch and remember it with the same clarity with which we remember our most vivid memories now, learning has always been interesting to me. and by interesting I mean absolutely frustrating, you see, growing up with a DD or, as I prefer to call it, the entrepreneur's disease. I struggled for most of my youth to sit still in an academic environment long enough to learn much about anything and yes, that's me running. out of the picture I'm really glad I can laugh about it today because at the time it actually sent me into a pretty bad bout of depression and I wasn't doing well in school and honestly I felt completely stupid it eventually got so bad Medication seems to be the only option, so I spent most of my high school and college career clinging to a prescription bottle just trying to get to the state of mind I thought was normal, all behind the cause of learning more effectively.

At the age of 24, medication had worked well for me. I graduated from Berkeley and sold my startup. I got accepted into a great business school and it sure wasn't easy to learn and I still struggled a lot and like most. Of you guys, I forgot everything I learned the moment I walked out of the exam room, but I was able to learn and at this point, to be honest, I thought I was pretty smart, but life has an interesting way of correcting you every time. you think. You're pretty smart and it was at this point that I met

what

I would later call a super student named Lev.

Now I realized that Lev was a little different when he and I started sharing common interests around the world. office, you see, while I was reading and perhaps sharing an article that I found interesting. Lev read and shared ten in the span of 15 minutes and did so with half a page of comments for each article after a very, very awkward and prolific conversation. use of words like BS and that is impossible. I came to understand that Lev could read 2000 words per minute and his retention was around 90%. Now that he had played with speed reading, he was reading at a respectable 450 words per minute. about twice the average college graduate, but my retention was around 10 to 20 percent.

It turns out that Lev and his wife Anna had spent the last 10 years developing, refining and teaching methods for accelerated learning for students with learning disabilities like mine, needless to say. Let's say I immediately hired them for one-on-one training and they proceeded to completely deconstruct my entire learning behavior from scratch. I should mention by the way that all this time I had decided to take a little vacation for my medication and yet somehow I was learning more effectively than ever when I took these skills into the real world during my MBA. I saw how transformative and impactful they were and so some of the first things I applied them to after graduating were how to create online courses and how to publish books how to run a podcast how to give a public lecture and today, between all those different channels, We've

taught

50,000 people how to learn more effectively, from medical and law students to people overcoming brain damage.

For people living with cerebral palsy then what is the secret? In truth, the techniques are not a secret, there are things like visualizing your memories and getting rid of that memory voice, something we all do, all of these techniques are available and can be learned. by anyone in a matter of weeks or months, the problem is that we are trying to overcome this information overload of the 21st century with learning behaviors that are thousands of years old, ironically, the big secret, if there is one, is that we need to use techniques of learning that takes advantage of the capabilities that our brains evolved hundreds of thousands of years ago, what does this mean?

Well, let me give you an example that demonstrates how amazing your brain is when you use it the way evolution intended. I'm going to show you guys, an image on the screen, but don't blink because I'm only going to show it to you for about a second. They are all ready? Now raise your hands if you think you could write a short paragraph about what you saw on the screen now keep your hands up if you think you could add maybe a line about the colors you saw, about the emotions the characters might have been feeling or about some historical context you could connect it to, well, well.

I'm really grateful that's about 90% of you and that's exactly the point you see as you say a picture is worth a thousand words and what you just did is the equivalent of entering information at a speed of 60,000 words per minute, which is six times more. world record for speed reading, so congratulations, but I know what you're going to say, it's not the same, but why not? What if I told you that you can use this innate ability that we evolved as hunter-gatherers to quickly understand and process? visual information to read faster while retaining more or if I told you that you could use another great skill from the hunter-gatherer era that allows you to remember images with vivid clarity and use it to learn anything now this image how much did you get? true, surprisingly, this image may not mean anything to you, but for someone who has been trained a little, it is a surprisingly powerful way to learn about the 14 countries that border China, certainly much more interesting than looking at a list or memorizing a map and insurance.

It's ridiculous and silly but I assure you that it is much more memorable to remember Stanley packing a suitcase or Kim Jeong-hoon next to a 14-armed emperor than to look at some map so when I put it this way and explain that these are innate abilities that we all have, why aren't we all super learners? Well, in a nutshell, there is a very big difference between the way we have to be

taught

to read and learn, which is to pronounce it, and the ideal method of sight reading, which Unfortunately, for some reason, the education of the Memory, which is the basic foundation required to accelerate learning, is never taught in

schools

and reading training stops as soon as a child can read proficiently.

This is a lot like teaching your children to walk. and then never explaining that the same basic fundamentals can be used for a much more efficient skill called running. Consider this: you certainly don't have to linguistically process your thoughts to understand them correctly. I mean, imagine what the world would be like if you walked out onto the road and saw a car approaching, but you were paralyzed until you could process your thoughts and linguistically plan what you were going to do next. Now consider how ridiculous it is that this is exactly how most people read, speeding up learning of course.

It's about much more than just speeding up your reading and eventually, if you speed up your reading, you need some way to store all these wonderful, magical new memories and this is where mnemonics or memory techniques come into play. I know many of you will say that you have a terrible memory, but nothing could be further from the truth; In fact, less than a third of your raw memory capacity is determined by hardware or genetics, the rest is determined by techniques that are used by thousands of people around the world with terrible memories. memories to do incredible feats, from memorizing 30,000 digits to memorizing a deck of cards in under a minute, you might not want to do that, but what if I told you that you and your kids could use these exact same techniques to learn anything about multiplication tables? all the way to those types of career-impacting skills we mentioned earlier, like foreign languages ​​or programming languages, or the order of points in that talk you've been emphasizing over the one where it would be really ironic if you forgot to say something Yes I have gone a little off script.

I apologize, but you have all been on a journey with me through a memory palace that is built in my childhood home and, as I say this, we are about to transition from the guest bedroom to the hallways, already that you can probably logically figure out our transition points, oh that reminds me, did I mention that learning this way takes less effort and less time than the way we are doing it now with so much time saved on the inescapable basics? that every child will have to learn a similar language, imagine how much more time we will have for creativity, divergent thinking, interpersonal skills and things that will really make a difference in our children's lives and their livelihoods, so what Is it the idea I want?

To impart to you today is very simple, what if with all the learning that future generations will have to do, we actually taught them how to learn? What if instead of the rote memorization and frustration that is so common in our educational systems we used? Fun and attractive techniques that take advantage of the innate capabilities of our brain. This does not mean that no innovation is taking place in education, far from it. In fact, right now, as we speak, there is an initiative to fund and build the

schools

we are supporting. Desks replace their seated counterparts, but these children will stand at their forward-looking desks in their forward-looking classrooms and learn vocabulary words the same way their great-grandparents did since the 1950s.

Memory Experts like Harry Lorayne and speed reading. Experts like Tony Buzan have taught tens of millions of people how to learn more effectively, and yet I don't know of any education system that has implemented a single class in learning practice, much less a series of classes that follow the children throughout their education and through their intellectual development in the same way that mathematics, history or science do not anywhere in the world, children learn to build memory palaces or to duel encode their thoughts. with visual symbols or to get rid of that voice when they lead with public school budgets constantly in jeopardy and Didi medications are among the top prescribed and abused substances in the world.

Shouldn't we find a better, less complicated way to overcome this information overload? The techniques and strategies exist and can be taught to anyone in a matter of weeks or months. let's do it, let's teach everyone, young and old, not only what they need to learn but also how they need to learn. If you ask me, our future depends on it, thank you.