Become a SuperLearner® 2. 0: Learn Speed Reading & Advanced Memory Techniques (New & Improved!)

1. About Us & This Course: Greetings and welcome to become a super learner. My name is Jonathan Levy and I'm a serial entrepreneur, a best-selling author and podcaster known all over the world for my accelerated learning and personal development programs. In fact, the program you're about to embark on, super learner is actually the one that put me on the map back in 2015. And it's been enjoyed by literally hundreds of thousands of people in all 205 countries and territories worldwide. In this course, you're going to learn everything you need to know to become what we call a super learner. You'll learn to exponentially improve your memory to superhuman levels. You'll learn to double or even triple your reading speed and to learn anything and everything faster and more easily, whether you're a student or professional, or even a pensioner, you'll discover a comprehensive methodology made up of scientifically proven techniques and strategies for improving how you learn. And best of all, there is no prior knowledge required, just a willingness to learn and try new things. Why take a course about learning? You ask? Because ultimately, learning is the single fundamental gateway skill towards whatever it is you want to achieve in life. If you can learn faster, There's no skill that you cannot acquire faster, and therefore, there's virtually no challenge that you can't overcome. Learning is the path to all of it. My friends. This course is broken down into short, easy to consume lectures and sections. And it's meant to take about eight to 10 weeks to complete, assuming you devote 30 to 40 minutes a day, five to six times a week. But not to worry, a lot of the work that you'll be doing will actually be applying what you learn to your everyday life, such as reading or memorizing things at work. Additionally, as with all Skillshare courses, you'll be asked to complete a project as you go through the program. That project is to pick something challenging that you want to learn. Be it programming a new language school subject or a musical instrument, and apply everything that you are learning in this course to that learning challenge. After all, the point of this course isn't just to teach you to learn faster for learning sake. It's to empower you to take that skill and apply it to new challenges and achievements in your life. One quick thing before we get started though, we've gone ahead and created a friendly PDF syllabus as a companion to this course. And it's important that you downloaded the PDF syllabus will give you all the links you need to complete the exercises, homework, and more. So please pause the video now and visit the course project description for a link to download this all important document. All right, I know you're excited to get started, so let's go ahead and dive right in. 22. Memory Palaces: Another very effective tool for storing and remembering information that we've super learned is called the memory palace. Memory palaces are basically buildings or structures that you create in your mind, either imagined or remembered to fill and populate with detailed memories. Each story or piece of information is represented by an imaginary physical object, a marker, if you will, which is then placed in a specific area, whether it be on the ground, on a bookshelf, on the counter, on the cupboard or dangling from the chandelier. These areas where memories can be stored are called lossy and they become anchor points. The core of the technique involves using your imagination to walk through this familiar area in a linear fashion, making sure not to cross your own path. As you go through the memory journey, you place objects and memorable areas. Now, I used to be very ambivalent about memory palaces, and I originally shied away from teaching too much about them. In truth, I was too lazy to invest the time in creating my own memory palaces. And so I would store my visual markers haphazardly without any order or organization. However, the more I researched and interacted with experts on memory palaces, the more I realized that this technique is actually used by each and every memory athlete without exception. This is for a couple of reasons. Number 1, our brains are extremely effective at remembering where things are and visualizing them. This is related to those evolutionary skills we talked about earlier. If you remember exactly where the berry tree is in a massive field, or exactly where you buried your winter food supply. That can be a huge survival advantage. This effect is so powerful that I bet if you close your eyes right now, you can tell me exactly where the shampoo and conditioner bottles are in your shower or whether they were in your childhood home from 20 years ago? You probably remember exactly what was in the various rooms and on the various shelves of all of the houses you've ever lived in. You've probably also had that feeling where you listen to a radio program or had a conversation while passing by specific intersection or area. Then the next time you pass by that area, your brain jumps back to the conversation or concept that you were thinking about the last time you were there. All of this is pretty amazing, right? But your brain does it completely naturally. So why not use all of that location information, which is just taking up storage space in your brain to link up to new things you want to learn and to make those new memories strongly linked to existing knowledge. Reason number 2, memory palaces are extremely effective at helping us index events. We can remember events in chronological order, which is really important for things like memorizing. I don't know. Speeches. We can even remember things in reverse order if we go through our memory journey backwards. Today, I use memory palaces for all kinds of things. In fact, I even used it to memorize the order of points in my TED Talk. And I recently figured out a way to store the Russian grammatical cases using the technique memory palaces are so effective that they've been used for thousands of years, ever since the fifth century BC. The legend goes that the Greek poet Simonides was at a banquet hall crowded with people. And he left for a few minutes only to find that the whole banquet hall had collapsed. There were no other survivors. There was no way to identify the crushed casualties or even to know where they were. In this moment, the memory palace was born and for thousands of years after that, until the popularity of the printing press, memory palaces were used to memorize huge volumes of information. In fact, researchers have determined that the entire works of Homer, Plato, and Socrates, were probably committed to memory using memory palaces. They were only later written down. So how do you take advantage of this powerful technique? The first step is to create at least one, but probably a few more empty palaces. The palace can be your childhood home, a building once seen, or any building you make up. In fact, most people who use this technique have many different memory palaces for different types of memories. For example, one for your Spanish vocabulary, one for personal information such as birthdays and credit card numbers and so on. Once you create the palace, you need to clear off the shelves and make space for new objects. Then it's time to start practicing placing your markers in strategic areas. Now, I wanted to take a quick second to say that memory palaces are not used for everything. For example, it would be extremely difficult to use the memory palace or lossy method to walk through an imaginary house while we're speed reading. And so we can't use this technique while we read. We just have to link the markers as we go. Memory palaces are great though for memorizing stories, order of events, lists of items and things like that. But only when we have the time to carefully populate and memorize the palace. So if you read something, for example, and want to store the content into a memory palace, that's something you should do at the end of the chapter, Not while you're reading. There are a lot of amazing, amazing resources involving memory palaces, and they go into much more detail than I can. And just one short lecture. First, I'm going to refer you to a TED talk by the former US memorization champion, Joshua Foer, where he explains how people are able to memorize 34 decks of playing cards back-to-back using memory palaces. Next, I'm going to link you to followers book Moonwalking with Einstein, which I strongly recommend as homework for this course. Finally, I'm going to link you to a horse, a blog, a book, and a podcast by my friend Dr. Anthony much TVA. Anthony's a good friend and a fellow instructor, and he's made an entire career out of teaching the magnetic memory method, a system based on creating and adapting memory palaces. He's written a number of books, he's released a number of courses, and he's a very active blogger and podcaster on the subject. It was actually Anthony who convinced me to invest in my own memory palaces. And he continues to help me develop this amazing skill. As time goes on. These days, I use the technique for even the simplest of things. One little hack that I really like is to adopt the technique to my daily meditation. As a beginner in meditation, my brain immediately calls up the things that I need to remember to do and has some of its best ideas when I'm trying to concentrate on meditation, the standard practice is to observe the thoughts and to let them pass, which I do. But before I let these strokes of inspiration pass, I make a quick mental marker. For example, if I wanted to remember to post a poll on the Super Learner Facebook group, I created a mental marker of a Facebook voting poll screenshot, and I place it on an imagined bookshelf. This allows me to move on and let's the thought go with ease. By the time I finished my meditation, I may have four or five reminders. I've been amazed by just how well this all works. Even a month later, I remember all of these markers where they are on the bookshelf, even without using the correct technique of walking through the building. And what they mean, even though I've already completed most of the tasks, I recently was interviewed by someone who read Joshua Foer is book and had done the practice exercise of memorizing a grocery list. Five years later, he was able to remember over half of the list. Totally amazing. So your homework is to check out the supplementary materials and memorize your entire to-do list or grocery shopping list using lossy and visual markers. Get funky and outrageous with them. You can turn e-mail boss into a picture of browser, the big boss from Mario Brothers sitting at the computer. Or you can turn wash the car into the picture of two bikini clad beauties sponging your car. Because you've become so skilled at creating detailed and creative markers. It really should be no problem. Don't make the mistake I made for years and stubbornly neglect the memory palace technique. It can make a massive difference in your memory capacity, so please do check it out. 38. Managing Pauses To Create Markers While Speed Reading: By now, we've mentioned a few times that you will need to pause at different intervals to create and review your markers during reading. Unlike when we're in a conversation or listening to a lecture, we should not create markers while we're reading simultaneously. This shouldn't come as a surprise given that our visual processing is focused on making sense of the written symbols on the text. However, there has been a lot of confusion in the past as to how exactly we can integrate this habit into speed reading. Furthermore, we've just finished telling you that in the short term, you should focus on speed over comprehension. It's probably a good idea to explain how you'll use marker pauses in the long-term to make sure that your attention is restored once you're able to get comprehension up to speed. So how do we apply the concept of markers to speed reading, given the rapid pace? Won't these pauses just slowest down to normal reading speeds on average? No way. First of all, we usually end up with only one or two markers per paragraph. Even if those markers each have some nested details. With time, you may notice that markers automatically pop into your head as your eyes are moving from one paragraph to the next. Either way, we pause for a second or so after each paragraph to try to remember what we've read. That's usually enough time to create markers and even to link them up. The general ideas of the paragraph make the markers in the beginning while we're still practicing, we start with very simple markers that are not very lively and have limited detail. Then we try to remember everything in the paragraph that adds up information to the main idea and visualize it as a detail of the marker. One technique that Lev likes to use is assigning an emotional color to the paragraph as a marker. Red can represent anger, for example, and blue can represent com or resolution. Those are the types of simple markers we make in the beginning. The markers should eventually start to become more and more detailed with practice. Like I mentioned earlier, with time, you'll become faster and faster at creating the markers, and it will become second nature. At that point, your brain will most likely create markers on the fly as you read. Or at the very least, it will become second nature to assign markers when you reach the end of a paragraph. But this takes a lot of time and a lot of practice. And even when it happens, you still should make a conscious effort to review your markers. So for now, it's okay to take a few seconds after each paragraph to create and link your markers. You're still reading much faster and with more attention than you would if you were sub vocalizing. Sometimes it makes sense to vocalize your markers only like important phrases and names and things like that. This way you'll enjoy the benefits of dual coding while retaining a high reading speed. Remember what we learned in the previous section? When you pre-read several paragraphs in a section, your brain has some time to come up with possible markers before you actually need to use them. Although this may sound counter-intuitive, pre-reading speeds up marker generation and makes basic markers available for detailed collection. Occasionally, you may feel that you cannot finish a paragraph because you vocalize a word and your attention drifts off. This means that you need to stop and review your markers because you're overloading your short-term memory. This may happen every few pages or it may only happen in between chapters. But taking pauses and looking up not only gives your brain a chance to clear out your short-term memory and review your markers. It's also a great way to prevent eye strain and so make sure to look at something far away and do so when you make longer pauses. That's a good segue into discussing more macro-level marker review. Just like a text is broken up into paragraphs and then chapters and then sections, and finally the entire volume. So too should be your marker review. Whereas you'll spend only around a second reviewing markers from within a paragraph almost automatically, you should look up and recall those markers for two to three seconds in-between pages or at least every few pages to make sure that you're connecting it all together going forward. Beyond that, you should always take a long pause between chapters and look up from your book for as long as 15 to 30 seconds, depending on the density and length. And review all of the markers you created and how they tie together. This is a crucial step in tricking the hippocampus into thinking the information is relevant. After all, you've just learned it and you've already reviewed it three times and connected it to a dozen other new concepts. It must be something really important, right? The next step probably doesn't surprise you at all. When you finish a book in its entirety, it's a good idea to flip through it quickly or look at the table of contents and try to recall as many of the markers is possible. If you utilize some of the highlighting or note-taking tips will be teaching in the coming lectures. It's a great idea to flip through your highlights or notes and try to vividly imagine the visual or sensory markers you created for each highlighted point. In fact, doing this every few months is a great idea if you wish to maintain a high retention of the material. Personally, I like to spend an hour every now and again when I'm in between books, flipping through a few of my favorite books of all time, reviewing my highlights and thinking about the markers that represent them. Doing all of this will dramatically improve your long-term memory of the information and ensure that despite your speed, you are not sacrificing the quality of comprehension. So to review, makes small pauses of around 1 second in-between paragraphs, make medium pauses of two to three seconds between pages. Make larger pauses of 15 to 30 seconds between chapters, and add in any additional pauses anytime you feel distracted, overwhelmed, or frustrated, and need to review. Now, don't neglect this step or you'll be just like every other speed reader out there who can read at blazing speeds and remember nothing of what they've read even an hour later. 42. Training Going Forward & What To Do If You Backslide: So that's just about it for speed reading itself. Like we said, speed reading itself isn't that complicated at all to teach or to learn, but doing it with high comprehension and retention will be pretty challenging the rest of the course, especially if you're enrolled in our masterclass, we'll deal largely with techniques to adapt your skills to other disciplines and strategies and tools to improve your long-term retention. On top of all that, we're gonna give a lot of lifestyle and environmental adjustments that you should consider to ensure that your brain is functioning at its absolute best. This is really important and impactful stuff. And so you should continue to watch all of these lectures even as you practice your speed reading. Just remember that you are responsible for being a self-directed learner and for your success or failure going forward. So don't neglect speed reading or marker training just because you've learned about a shiny new technique for learning foreign language words. In order to ensure that you succeed in your self-directed training, we want to set out some guidelines for you. First and foremost, remember to practice as many days a week as possible with at least four practice sessions a week. We're pretty sure that you read something every day, even if it's just blog posts. And so you should be speed reading as much of the material as possible. If you're doing something very important for school or for work, you may need to speed read it a few times to get the level of comprehension necessary, but don't let that be an excuse to fall back on sub vocalization. Simply utilize the techniques we've taught you, such as the self-testing protocol and the card trick. And make sure that your required reading is a great opportunity to practice while killing two birds with one stone. You should practice these skills for a few weeks or even a few months in order to really start seeing these dramatic improvements. Sometime in the next couple of weeks, if you're practicing diligently, it's all going to click. And all of a sudden you're going to feel like Bradley Cooper in the movie limitless. You'll be moving your eyes and choppy movements across the page. And somehow you'll be understanding everything that is written, turning pages and a comically fast rate and causing curious onlookers to watch in amazement. When people tell you stories or you listen to the radio, you'll be generating markers instantly without even knowing it. And you'll be linking them to existing knowledge in your densely interconnected neural networks. From my experience in time, you'll feel that all of your cognitive faculties are dramatically improved and that you have a seemingly endless body of information from which you can draw upon or connect new memories too. And these effects will only continue to develop and they'll become more dramatic and more effortless as your brain becomes more skilled, more interconnected, and more densely packed with incredible knowledge. I can honestly admit that after years of using these techniques every day, I feel like a completely different person, almost as if I have superpowers. But sometimes you'll slip back into old habits. You'll start sub vocalizing and not even realize it. You'll forget people's names and be embarrassed when they remember yours. Hey, I do these things as well. Sometimes it's perfectly understandable and it's perfectly normal. It takes a very long time to overcome years and years of slow reading and some vocalization. And quite honestly, I don't know if it ever truly becomes fully second nature. After all, I've been speed reading for only four years at the time of this recording, but before that, I saw vocalized for almost 20 years. I'll let you know in another 20 years if it ever becomes truly natural to speed read. But until then, I just have to remind myself every time I look at a text to use my good speed reading habits. This is kind of like reminding myself to sit up straight instead of slouching into my chair every time I sit down? Yeah. It takes a little bit of effort and discipline, but it's well worth it. Most importantly, don't lose focus or get frustrated. If you need, you can always return back to the lessons and the exercise and really review the fundamentals. In fact, I strongly recommend you do so. No matter what issue you're struggling with, there's almost certainly someone else out there who's gone through it in the super learner community. And oftentimes they have a unique way to overcome it that will work well for you. So keep up the practice and get excited for the next lectures where we learn how to create and maintain high-quality memories long-term. How to design our learning environment and optimize our minds and so much water. 49. How To Completely Automate Spaced Repetition From Your Books: Greetings super learners, you know, one of the biggest questions, most common questions that I am asks is, how do you apply super learning to reading books? I mean, after all, we all know that all the best knowledge in the world is contained in books. How do we go through them? Well, if you're like me and you read a lot as you probably do it once you become a speed reader, you're probably going to want to wind up reading a lot of your books digitally. And that can actually be, although a little bit slower, really advantageous. And I'm going to show you why in this video. And then I'm also going to explain to you my method for abiding by super learner principles like spaced repetition. Even when I speed read through my Kindle or any other kind of digital book. Now there is another lecture right here in the course that shows how i do pre-reading. So I'm not going to be covering that here. What I want to show you is the way that I highlight and then performed space repetition. So here we have a book that I recently read called The willpower instinct. Pretty good book. But in any case, that's not what we're talking about today, as you'll see here. I've taken some different highlights and not a whole lot. We see. I'm highlighting really the key takeaway ideas that I've created markers for. So in this particular book, I'm trying to get the action items. I read this book with a specific purpose like we talked about in pre-reading. I determined what my purpose was in advance and that was to improve my willpower. So I've highlighted things that are going to serve the purpose that I've read this book four, I am not highlighting interesting side stories. I'm not highlighting statistics here like 370 households. I'm highlighting the things that are getting me to where I wanna go. And this has a lot to do with the Zak evans. We did the Zak Evans interview. We did. Where he recommends outline, you know, what is it that you're trying to learn and then make a plan? So you'll see here, I'm only highlighting and admittedly, I'm usually highlight more in a book than I did here. But I'm highlighting things that are really usable for me. And I've created markers to go along with the things that I've highlighted. Now you might ask yourself, okay, that's fine. But we all know that even with our super learner markers and techniques, it's not enough. So we need to perform that spaced repetition. We need to go through and periodically, not every day, not even every week, but over an increasingly long timeline. To avoid that curve of forgetting, we need to review the things that we've learned. That's what we call spaced repetition. So how do we do that in a book without having to do what I'm doing right now and flip through. And this is where we get to that massive benefit of reading digitally that I talked about before. Now, if you read with a Kindle and I'm sure there are other ways to do this on other devices as well. You actually have a really great advantage. All you need to do is go to read dot amazon.com slash notebook. And Amazon is automatically taking note and synchronizing all these highlights that you have. Now, here's the thing. As you can see, I have a lot of highlights and if you go to some of my other books like deep work, I have a ton of highlights. A 121 highlights here. Is it realistic for me to do this space repetition of all of these everytime I perform spaced repetition, No. I want to make this easy for myself to review this book and reinforce it in my knowledge, to push out that curve of forgetting. Here is how I like to do it. I will install the Evernote clip widget in my browser. It's available for every browser. And then I will just take this article and I will put the willpower instinct by Kelly mic gone a goal. I will decide where I want it to go and save it as an article. Simple as that. Now, when I go in to my Evernote, which is a program that I have highly recommended at various points throughout the course. You will see once I refresh that my notes come right in here. And they come in in a beautiful format, right? Like that. All I need to do is clear out this little sidebar. And there you go. There in my notes. Now, here's all I need to do. I go through and I determine what are my most relevant things. For example, if I have some action items, I can go in here and I can set a to-do list to make that happen. And I'll just read through these and I will figure out what are the things I need to review. Here we go, this one, his homework. And I'll just scan through. Of course, I'm not really focused right now on this. I'm focused on speaking to you. But here we go. This is something I want to review. I didn't know that breathing exercises and slowing your breathing increase your willpower. I will highlight that and I want to review that periodically so I never forget it. Okay, exercise another one. What I will do is I will highlight my highlights taking the ten to 20%. Remember that Pareto rule, the 2080 rule, I will figure out what are the things that I want to remember here. So once I've done one of these, the finished product is a lot more manageable. You can just scroll through it and if I have time, I'll review all of the nodes. But if I don't, I'll just review the things that I've pointed out to myself that I want to remember. And of course, I don't always have time to go back and review these books. Sometimes it's only when I need the lessons from a book that I'll go back and scroll. For example, if I want to write some great copy, I will go back and I will find the boron letters. As you guys can see, I have done a lot of reading in Evernote. I'll find the boron letters and I'll just review my highlights or review my highlights of my highlights before writing a letter. Now, you can do this differently. If you want to remember everything in a book, you can take these highlights and you can set yourself a schedule once a week to go through the last ten books you've read. You could even copy paste these things into a space repetition such as Anki. And beyond that, there is actually a flashcard system built right in to the Kindle and the Kindle app. Now, I have never personally used it because I really, really like my system. And because the flashcard app here doesn't have any form of spaced repetition. It's going to show you each flashcard every time whether or not you got it right. But this is a great system and just remember to keep perspective of what it is you need. You don't need to be memorizing books word for word. You want to take away the key messages. And as you review them here, you're going to remember your markers that you created, your visual markers. You're going to reinforce them using a space repetition system. It's up to you to determine just what level of clarity you want on each book you read. But with this system, you can go very deep or very broad. Hope you enjoy it. 50. Thank You & Congratulations: You've made it to the end of the course, but this is just the beginning of your journey. As you continue to practice and tailor your new skill set, you will surely find an endless range of possibilities and opportunities upon which you can apply it to learn faster and more effectively. In any case, we truly hope that this journey has been productive and a transformational one. And if it has, we invite you to tell your friends everything that you've learned and to share a link to the course, to our books or even to our blogs and podcasts. The more people we can inspire with this message, the better. And that's it. It's been such a pleasure to have you as our students and we thank you for your time and your attention and all of your hard work. As a closing note, we want to inspire you with a quote from Albert Einstein who said, once you stop learning, you start dying. So get up there and never stop learning.