Limitless - Jim Kwik Page 0,17
via the bloodstream.
TEAM EFFORT
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. When you have a gut feeling that something isn’t right, or conversely that you should follow a hunch, it’s not just superstition—your gut has its own way of interpreting events and giving your brain signals. Furthermore, when you feed your gut with subpar food, you’re also feeding your brain with subpar fuel.
Right now, your gut is digesting the food you just ate and sending that fuel to your brain. At the same time, a part of your brain is taking in the feel of the pages under your fingertips (or your e-reader, if that’s your preference), sensing the comfort of the chair supporting you, and monitoring the environment around you to make sure you’re safe. Another part of your brain is taking in the smells of the environment, maybe coffee, or perfume, or the scent of the book’s pages. Another part of your brain is absorbing the word-symbols on the page of this book and turning them into meaning, which is then processed and stored in short-term memory, where it will then be sent to long-term memory (under the right conditions, which we’ll get to in a moment).
All of this is to say that you have the ultimate superpower between your ears. You also have the ability to hone that superpower and make it greater—or to let it falter and decay. You get to decide what kind of environment your superpower lives in: one that supports your mission in life, or one that distracts you from your greatest dreams.
THE ELUSIVE OBVIOUS
Given that we have this tremendous power of our minds available to us, why are we struggling? If your brain is indeed so magnificent, why are overload, distraction, forgetfulness, and feelings of inadequacy affecting us so much? How do we reconcile the fact that we have so much potential but have days where we can’t remember a simple name or think our way out of a paper bag? The answer is so simple, it’s almost the elusive obvious: We were not taught how.
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 his seminal book on education, Creative Schools, Sir Ken Robinson says, “One of my deepest concerns is that while education systems around the world are being reformed, many of these reforms are being driven by political and commercial interests that misunderstand how real people learn and how great schools actually work. As a result, they are damaging the prospects of countless young people. Sooner or later, for better or for worse, they will affect you or someone you know.”7
My guess is that they have already affected you and everyone close to you. As you already know, my own experience with the education system was a complicated one, and I acknowledge that my circumstances were unusual. 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. They’ll expose us to great works of literature and to figures who changed the course of civilization. They will test us—sometimes endlessly—to determine whether we can repeat back what they’ve taught us. 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.
This is not about placing the blame on the teachers who work hard to teach our children. In my opinion, teachers are some of the most caring, compassionate, and capable human beings in our society. In fact, my mother became a teacher after my brain injury because I was struggling so much and she wanted to help me and others like me. The problem lies in the outdated system in which teachers work. If Rip Van Winkle woke up from decades