Jonathan Levi

Living Room Memory Palace

Speed Reading by Jonathan Levi !

This is the life changing course that I have ever done. I have to come back to this as often as possible. Make it part of my life and you will live your dreams. Go on Naresh, its time to live your dreams!!! I am keeping some location in Memory Palace unused, if need later for some information.

We’re going to teach you a new way to create and store memories, how to triple your reading speed, and we’re going to give you the tools to do rigorous at-home training. It’s not going to be easy. Becoming a super learner is about much, much more than some of the traditional speed reading programmes out there. It’s a comprehensive shift in the way that you learn. This means that we’re going to have to retool the way you learn and remember new information first and foremost. What I’m trying to say is this. You’re going to have to work for this, and it’s not going to happen overnight. But, with the lectures and the worksheets and exercises we’ve provided, you can and you will succeed.

So we want you to limit your practice and studying to no more than 8 hours per week, to prevent fatigue, burnout, and frustration, and also to allow your brain the necessary time to adapt and build the new connections and habits we’re going to be studying

Main Door Front - Progressive Overload

Throughout the course, we’re going to be using a training methodology called progressive overload, progressive overload is a fundamental principle at the core of all strength and fitness training, and it’s applicable to your mental skills as well. The basic idea is to always be training near or just below your limits. You always lift weights that are relatively heavy or run at a pace that is relatively challenging, by doing this, you avoid the injury and the damage and the frustration that could result in training beyond your limits. But you also avoid getting stuck in a rut by not pushing yourself enough. Most importantly, every time you progress, you immediately increase the level of intensity to maintain your progress.

Main Door Peep Hole - Pomodoro technique

Pomodoro technique, which is a method used to prevent fatigue and frustration. Basically, you’ll train for twenty to twenty five minutes and then take a five minute break and then train for another twenty to twenty five minutes and then take another five minute break after four pomodoro or twenty to twenty five minute periods, you’ll take a longer break, a 15 to 30 minutes. This method has been proven to be one of the most effective ways to maintain focus and creativity. So check it out

Main Door Back - Memory

Our brains do use several different types of buffers to work with the various types of information. This basically means that words, ideas, images, and scenes, they don’t all use the same path to get to the short term memory.

Main Door Ganpati - Buffers

Well, once you’ve used your working memory to process, understand, and interact with a piece of information, your short term memory is what keeps it in your mind for about 15 to 20 seconds. This might seem like a really short amount of time, and it is, that’s why for the majority of the course, we’re going to focus on improving the connexion all the way from your working memory to your long term memory. This is because if you do a good enough job creating those short term memories that’ll stick till you get to the end of a page or an article, you’ll only need to use some simple review techniques and regular maintenance to keep things in your long term memory, where we eventually want all our new information to remain.

This means that right now, our working and short term memory are the primary bottlenecks. Without the right infrastructure and base skillset to improve these two types of memory, speed reading is pretty useless, even impossible

Main Door Magnetic Stopper - Neural Network

But basically memories are created when your brain sends neurotransmitter signals to two neurons at the same time. This strengthens the connexion between those two neurons and presto, you have a new memory. This is an important point to make because it shows that the creation of memories requires connexion between two neurons or a connexion to existing neurons in your brain. The other thing you need to know is that when this happens over and over again the cluster of neurons and their synaptic connexions become something called a neural network. From artificial intelligence research we know that neurons work better in these types of clusters. This means that when several neurons fire together the signal is actually amplified. That’s why it’s so crucial to store memories in several connected neurons and to further connect them to the memories that we often use.

Because there are so many connexions and stories and experiences around that piece of information your brain determines that it’s critical and will never erode it away. Knowing this can benefit us tremendously. The process of super learning necessitates that we create more connexions to the information we want to learn

Wall - neuroplasticity

Well first and foremost I want to dispel the myth that children’s brains are somehow better at absorbing new information or that they have a higher neuroplasticity.

Recent studies have actually shown that this is simply not true. The reason that children seem to learn with more ease is that they’re learning literally every waking hour and all information is new and exciting information for them. Furthermore, research shows that our brains do play by the use it or lose it rule. Most adults lose the ability to learn rapidly simply because they settle into their day-job and they stop learning in the volume that they used to as children, not because their brain chemistry or #neuroplasticity# have actually changed

Wall Bulb Holder - Games

Playing games with Wall Bulb Holder and getting electric shock

So, as you go along throughout the rest of the course, I want you to remember that the games are important, but that the real test of your super-learner skills is whether or not you can memorise everyday information, speed-read your daily reading assignments, and learn actual skills faster

Wall Switch Board on left - Chunking

Chunking - psychological phenomenon

The chunking system is very good because it’s an entry level mnemonic technique. It’s not only much faster and easier to learn and play with than some of the heavier visual memory techniques we’re going to learn later, but it’s also a critical element of the overall technique. This is to say that even after we teach you the methods to remember things way more easily, you’re still going to be chunking details or memories into groups of three or four so that they can better comply with the requirements of your short term memory. Sure, we could train your short term memory to hold a larger number of items, but that would only slow you down and place a larger cognitive load on you. At three to five items there is no slow down so it’s preferable to work in this range. Furthermore, by chunking groups of items into one entity, we can stack five chunks of five objects each into our working memory and effectively store 25 items in our short term or working memory without any cognitive overload. Because of this massive advantage, you’ll notice that all of the world’s top memory athletes use systems that are based on chunking combined with powerful visual and spatial memory techniques that we’ll be learning later on in the course. The other nice thing about chunking is that it works with just about everything. Take a sequence of numbers or a couple pieces of information. For example, brown dog, tall fence, lost Frisbee. You can even try to chunk information about people into neat little bundles. It might seem strange, but remembering that information in chunks is actually much easier than if it were to be put all together

Samsung TV 65 Inches - Dual Coding and Brute Force Learning

Dual Coding. Remember how we learned that the brain has different buffers for working memory depending on the type of information it’s interacting with?

A great example of this, by the way, would be to try and explain to some of your friends what you learned in the last few lectures about your memory and about chunking. By teaching this information, you force your brain to look at it from a different angle, to deconstruct it, to form it into your own words, and then to present it in a compelling way. As they say, something once taught is something twice learned, and we would absolutely love to see you get out there and share what you’ve learned with your friends so far

Samsung 11.1.4 Subwoofer - Visual Memory & Marker

Well, it means that we can not only spot an approaching predator very quickly, we can also remember visual information, or pictures, far faster and with more clarity than we can remember things like spoken words

It also has to do with the fact that pictures are more heavily encoded and they speak to different types of working memory buffers, as we mentioned before. Pictures are imbued with rich and detailed information, such as colour, context, shape, and size, and they’re more likely to have a higher number of neural connexions, as they convey emotion and depth, interaction, and so much more. As they say, a picture is worth a thousand words. Visual information is also alarmingly fast. Research has demonstrated that we can comprehend the contents of an image in just a fraction of a second

This little demonstration shows us just how effective it is to see things as pictures and symbols rather than auditory information. For this reason, in addition to all the other steps we have to take to prime our memory, it’s best that we also learn to transform concepts, ideas, and other important information into imagined visual pictures, or what we call markers, as soon as we possibly can. It won’t surprise you to learn, additionally, that the best and most memorable types of visual markers are strange, bizarre, or emotionally connected to memories. After all, adult learners need to connect information to pre-existing knowledge, and as always, our hippocampi are busy working away to determine what stuff matters and what stuff doesn’t

She explained to me that she struggled a great deal with this first memorization assignment. This is because they were simply looking at the bones in a diagram, a very undetailed image in a textbook without any emotional connexion or experiential component to it

However, the detailed, experiential images, the emotionally significant experience of interacting with a dead body, and the very concrete, minute details are what allowed her to memorise the ligaments much better than the bones

Ultimately, you have to learn to go with what images come naturally for you. Try to lean towards whatever type of image you find most conductive for you to remember, but just make sure that, number one, there’s as much detail as possible.

You’ll also probably develop fixed markers for subjects that you spend a lot of time reading about.

With time, you too will build up a visual library like this one, which will make calling up images much faster and make it much easier to link together strings of images to form complex concepts that easily convert into long term memory.

Samsung 11.1.4 Subwoofer Table - Visual Memory & Reading

How Do We Apply Visual Memory To Reading

One of those future lectures will come up when we get to speed reading, and it’ll explain in detail how you’ll use regular intervals of pauses during your reading. This is not just because speed reading is very exhausting for the eyes and for the brain, but also because these pauses allow us to optimise the process of learning

You see, just like there are at least three types of memory, there are also three stages, or processes, of memory. They are, encoding, storage, and retrieval. Where most people get into trouble is that they try to do all three at once. Have you ever read a paragraph or a page of text only to realise that you’ve been deeply immersed in thought and you haven’t actually paid attention to anything that you just read? This is what happens when you’re trying to do all three memory processes at once. On the other hand, if you’ve ever studied process operations management or economics, you know that grouping similar tasks together is an efficient way to minimise waste. I mean, you don’t wash one shirt at a time and then put it in the dryer all by itself. You wash all of your clothes together, put them all in the dryer together, and then fold them when they’re all done, right? With reading, you’ve been doing it one shirt at a time, trying to multitask the washing and drying and folding for each shirt. It’s just as inefficient as it sounds, and so we’re going to separate it out into three separate processes to reduce cognitive strain and improve overall efficiency

Now I know what you’re thinking, how exactly do we do that? Well, because of the limitations on your short term memory and the inherent difficulty in multitasking visualisation with reading, we’ll be learning how to make short pauses of about one to two seconds after each page, or even take micro pauses of just fractions of a second after reading information-dense paragraphs. You’ll also take longer pauses every 10 minutes or less to review what you’ve already hopefully put into the beginning stages of long term memory. As we’re going to discover, when we learn about space repetition software, you brain needs to periodically repeat and review information in increasingly long intervals in order to remember it and prove to the hippocampi that it’s relevant and worth remembering. This is similar to the idea that you must continue weight training to improve your strength and increase muscle mass. If your brain, like your body, thinks that the information you’re using is a one off occurrence, it won’t waste the time investing the resources to remember it.

In short, this is why we take small pauses after each page and much longer pauses of 15 to 30 seconds after each chapter, to play back and retrieve our stored markers and perform a form of spaced repetition to improve our long term retention. This also means that it’s not a bad idea to spend a few minutes a week reviewing markers and ideas from books you’ve read months or even years before, if you really wish to remember them

While we’re discussing images and visual markers, it’s worth noting that not all markers have to be visual. In fact, smell is actually a more memorable sense than vision. Of course, we can’t understand an entire book using our sense of smell alone, and so we’re focusing on images, but if you read about, say, chocolate, and you can conjure up the smell or the taste of chocolate, that’s actually a great marker for remembering that data point. And if it works for you, even better. Whatever types of markers we use, whether they’re visual or sensory or some other types that we have yet to learn about, it’ll almost certainly be a mix in the end. This mix of markers, when retrieved and reviewed, reminds us of the details that we’ve decided we need to remember. And when combined with our existing knowledge and opinions and ideas about the content, it allows us to dual code and store information into long term memory very quickly and very effectively

So, instead of reading back over the chapter, we can retrieve all of the markers we’ve created and start thinking about how they’re connected together logically. We play them back almost like a film strip in our minds, and that helps our retrieval

Samsung 11.1.4 Bar

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